‘I could wipe the floor with you, man’: the exhibition on female football fans’ experiences

Prof Stacey Pope’s showcase highlights how women have always been required to defend and justify their fandom

“Y

ou can be the thickest bloke and you still think you know more about football than a woman,” reads a line from Newcastle fan named Jo around halfway into a new exhibition on women in football culture. “[They] say, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Oh, I could wipe the floor with you, man, with my knowledge and how much I’ve been, how much I’ve seen.”

“I love that quote,” smiles Prof Stacey Pope, a leading women’s football sociologist and creator of the Away From Home: The Untold Stories of Women Football Fans exhibition, alongside David Wright of Durham University’s museums, galleries and exhibitions Team.

The recently-opened pop-up exhibition, The Beacon of Light, next to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, portrays the experiences of women on the terraces of the north-east since the 1950s. “If you’re a man going to a match, it is automatically assumed you know everything about football,” Pope continues. “Women are undermined while the status of male fans is enhanced.”