Corinthians’ original rebels: the women who founded women’s football | OneFootball

Corinthians Ladies FC were not a side operating at the edges of women’s football history. They were central to it. Formed in Manchester in 1949, in the middle of the FA’s ban on the women’s game, they built a football life in a system designed to deny them one.

That matters because modern women’s football did not simply arrive once institutions decided to take it seriously. It survived because players, organisers and communities kept it alive anyway – and the Corinthians are one of the clearest examples of that in England.

The Corinthians were built in defiance and became one of the women’s game’s great touring sides

The club was founded on 5 January 1949 by Percy Ashley, a Bolton Wanderers scout whose daughter Doris was one of the team’s early stars. According to documented research by Manchester football historian Gary James, Ashley set the side up specifically in the context of the FA’s hostility to women’s football and then spent years creating opportunities the official game would not provide.

Those opportunities were not minor ones. The Corinthians played charity fixtures, exhibition matches and overseas tours across Europe and South America, building a reputation far beyond what the English establishment was willing to grant them. They were not waiting politely for admission; they were creating their own stage.

A new documentary, The Corinthians: We Were The Champions, directed by Helen Tither and reported on by The Telegraph, centres on 10 surviving players now aged between 70 and 90. It traces how a team that trained at Fog Lane in south Manchester ended up playing in front of 50,000 at Sporting Lisbon in 1958 and later undertook a three-month South American tour involving 29 flights.

On that tour, they won an international tournament in Venezuela and lifted what was described as a women’s “world cup”. For a side operating during a ban, that is an extraordinary record. It is also a reminder that women’s football history is full of achievement that was never properly archived by the people running the sport.

The Corinthians faced a game whose institutions had already decided women did not belong

To understand why the Corinthians were rebels, it is worth being blunt about the structure they were up against. The FA’s 1921 ban barred women from playing on affiliated grounds, claiming football was unsuitable for females, and the effects of that decision lasted for decades. It did not kill the game, but it deliberately weakened it.

That is significant because suppression is not the same thing as absence. Clubs such as Dick, Kerr Ladies had already shown there was a huge audience for women’s football before the ban, drawing crowds of 53,000 in 1920. What followed was not a natural fading away but an enforced pushing of the women’s game to the margins.

The Corinthians existed inside that margin. They had to travel, improvise and rely on individual goodwill because official football would not open its doors. Tither told The Telegraph that “the ordinary man on the street was really supportive” and that it was “the establishment who didn’t want them to play”.

That distinction matters. The resistance was institutional, not cultural in some vague, all-purpose sense. Employers saved wages for players while they toured abroad. Families found ways to fund passports. Fans turned up. The hostility came from the people with power over pitches, legitimacy and the historical record.

The recent FA apology, prompted in part by renewed attention on the Corinthians’ story, is important on those terms. But an apology also tells us something uncomfortable – these women had to wait decades for the governing body to admit what it had done.

That is the real editorial spine of this history. The women’s game was not neglected by accident. It was shut out by design.

The players carried the story in ordinary lives and extraordinary acts of persistence

One of the strengths of the documentary is that it does not treat the players as symbols first and footballers second. Tither chose to film them in changing rooms at West Didsbury FC because, as she put it, she wanted viewers to see former players rather than “old ladies on their sofa with a cup of tea”. That decision is more political than it sounds.

Anne Grimes, the former goalkeeper whose Mancunian humour reportedly anchors the film, recalls the jump from local conditions to major European stages with perfect clarity: after months at Fog Lane “with six men and a dog”, she said, there were 50,000 people roaring in Lisbon. The scale of that contrast tells its own story.

Freda Ashton’s father pawned his electric razor to buy her passport for the South American tour. Marlene Cook met her future husband through the team. Myra Lypnyckyj played while pregnant and returned after having a baby, with her husband pushing their son along the sideline in a pram while she played.

Those are vivid details, but they are more than charming anecdotes. They show what participation demanded from women footballers of that era – family sacrifice, travel, stigma, and a constant need to justify something that should never have needed justifying.

There is sadness in the timing too. Pauline Hulme, one of the players featured, died before seeing the finished film. Some of the women, Tither said, had barely spoken about their footballing past because shame had been imposed on them so effectively.

The Corinthians’ story still speaks directly to the modern women’s game

The neat version of this story would say the pioneers suffered, the modern game arrived, and now things are fixed. That would be far too tidy. What the Corinthians’ history really shows is a longer pattern: women’s football advances, institutions catch up late, and parts of the game still behave as if women’s presence requires special permission.

We can see that in how often women’s football history has to be rediscovered rather than simply known. We can also see it in current arguments over who gets pathways, resources and authority inside the sport. The questions have changed shape, but not entirely substance.

That is why heritage matters beyond nostalgia. It gives the modern game a truer account of itself. Pieces like our look at Marie-Louise Eta’s groundbreaking role at Union Berlin make more sense when placed alongside women who were already breaking barriers generations earlier, often with far less protection and far less visibility.

It also sharpens how we read contemporary reform. FIFA’s moves around new coaching regulation on female staffing and projects designed to expand access, such as grassroots girls’ football initiatives backed by major clubs and players, matter precisely because the game’s older structures were so exclusionary for so long.

Recognition has started to come. The Corinthians have had a city-wide billboard in Manchester, and when members of the team attended the women’s derby at Old Trafford last month they were reportedly mobbed for photos and autographs. Per BBC Sport coverage of the FA’s broader reckoning with the ban era, these acts of public remembrance are becoming harder for the game to avoid.

That is welcome. It is also overdue.

The modern game should know the Corinthians as part of its foundation, not its footnote

The point of revisiting the Corinthians is not to turn them into a sepia-toned prelude before the “real” history begins. They are part of the real history. They kept playing when the game’s authorities preferred women not to exist within it.

There will be more documentaries, more heritage projects and, one hopes, more formal recognition. The harder task is making sure these women are treated not as an uplifting aside, but as evidence of what women’s football has always been capable of when left to breathe.

The modern game stands on work the establishment once tried to erase.