Lionesses gave us a world of joy – try to block it out and we'll sing louder

Metro

3 days ago

A sea of fans turned out to celebrate England's European champions in London (Picture: PA)
I managed not to cry when the little boy in a Leah Williamson England shirt toddled smilingly towards me on Tuesday lunchtime, but it was close.
The Lionesses trophy parade had just wrapped outside Buckingham Palace with ecstatic dancing from England manager Sarina Wiegman to a Burna Boy set. Crowds were filtering out in search of sustenance.
Streams of England, Arsenal, Manchester United, Sunderland and even Tottenham strips thronged all the way down to Victoria station.
Williamson shirts were big on the Mall, Russo and Kelly popular, a Beever-Jones sat behind me at the station. But actually it was the widely represented Lineker and Kane shirts that made me catch my breath. Fans of men's football who had come – some as families, many just with mates – to recognise England's back-to-back European champions in the heart of the capital.
The collective giddiness in central London felt like Marathon day or even the 2012 Olympics. Strangers chatting, exulting, politely moving aside to enable better CHAMPIONS BUS photos.
Kate enjoying the parade (Picture: Kate Mason)
The fascinating thing about fandoms in 2025 is how they are increasingly intense and increasingly siloed. Lioness lore is made mainstream as the women win on bigger and better-broadcast stages but in corners of the internet it is obsessed over year-round. Equally, it is still possible to exist and be almost completely unaware of the devotion these players inspire. Assuming you weren't trying to walk to work in Mayfair on Tuesday, that is.
All of which means we may think of Lioness fans as being exclusively girls and young women. And it is true that the Sweet Carolines sung up and down the Mall were less bassy than I'm accustomed to. Young fans are core to the women's football movement and that's smart, because they are crucial when you are building community.
But at the parade I counted every age, creed and colour of person. The enthusiastic men were more than represented.
And yet it is not the many voices of those supportive male members of the public we usually hear in the conversation around the women's game. Which does us all a disservice.
We know the feelings of the men we tend to hear from when it comes to women's football. Their theory is: football is definitely a man thing, we must act when women claim a right to it.
A delighted Sarina Wiegman sings with Burna Boy at the parade (Picture: Getty Images)
Watching the final in the pub on Sunday, one guy nearby overcame the threat with the comfortable, decades-old expedient of advising the girls on screen of how they should play, in a tone varying from patronage to incredulity, with rolled-eyed glances towards likely allies.
The LBC caller who went viral demanding the world stop 'shoving women's football down our throats' asserted that his 'wife' agreed with him that women were unwatchable, their voices unlistenable.
Hearing these men it was clear they feel they speak for the majority. Disrespecting women is still safe ground. But as Tuesday shows, they do not.
Chloe Kelly and Michelle Agyemang enjoy the taste of success (Picture: Getty Images)
And gazing around, surrounded by fans, eyes brimming yet again, I could not help compare it with the disdain I've seen heaped on women's football – not just this week but in my 30 years of loving it.
And I couldn't think of a stronger counter to those voices who must even now know they have wasted their time. The joy in that space was a solid thing. It was passed around, shared – and magnified. Sure the audio didn't really work, meaning Heather Small's rendition of Proud was largely lost. But some at the front could hear it and picked up the melody and passed it back in one joyful wave.
That's what the Lionesses bring: joy, self-confidence and, yes, the aura of success. If you want to shut yourself out from that, that's okay, how much happiness you'd like in your life is up to you. If you want to stand in its way? Well, we will just sing louder.
Seven thousand in 2022's parade, 65,000 strong in 2025. In future? Who can dare to imagine.
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