On June 17, 2012, England Women had a friendly against the Netherlands.
It did not take place on a football pitch — the only suitable ground the FA could secure was the AJ Bell Stadium, home to rugby union side Sale Sharks.
The men’s side were playing in the European Championship in Poland and Ukraine at the same time. All eyes were on them.
Back then, a small group of employees working on women’s football were deeply frustrated at the sense England Women were somehow less important. Their surroundings that Sunday did little to dispel that notion.
One FA staffer grabbed his phone and tweeted out a phrase. At the time, every step towards developing the game felt small, but those decisions taken on June 17 would leave lasting tracks. The Lionesses hashtag was born.
What has changed in women’s football in England over the past 10 years?
Investment. Changes in Parliament. Eighty thousand fans at internationals. Pay rises for players. After last summer’s European Championship — a senior trophy.
And there’s another visible difference.
Just over 10 years ago, the Lionesses did not exist. There was simply the England Women’s football team.
Think back to that day at Wembley last July. There were Lionesses on the pitch, yes. But there were Lionesses on jerseys, Lionesses on hoardings, Lionesses on pub signs and in newspaper headlines.
The Lionesses were the toast of Wembley last summer (Getty Images)
It has become one of the most powerful sporting brands in the UK. In a landscape filled with marketing spiel, it has truly been taken to heart by the team.
“It’s always meant courage to me,” says ex-Lionesses goalkeeper Karen Bardsley, who was in the squad from the genesis of the term. “Bravery on a more emotive level. It also means doing the right thing, regardless of who’s there, who’s watching and not watching.
“There’s an element of being a role model — honesty, speaking up for what you believe in — but ultimately it’s about that winning mentality, the competition, the pursuit of being the best in every aspect of your life. It’s about facing the challenge head-on.”
This is the inside story of that transformation, told by a small group at the vanguard of women’s football — from tweet, to tournament, to team identity.
Young girls now do not want to play for the England Women’s team. They want to be Lionesses.
“It sounds overly simplistic when you consider where the women’s game is now,” begins Leigh Moore — who sent out that first tweet. “But it was very much me and a phone.”
Back in 2012, Moore worked for the FA as a digital marketing manager. With the Women’s Super League in its infancy, his remit was to build visibility for both the league and the national team. The challenge was seismic: Jesus had two disciples for every full-time women’s football employee working at the FA at that time.
Despite the success of British athletes such as Jessica Ennis-Hill, Laura Kenny and Christine Ohuruogu during that Olympic summer, women’s football was overlooked.
“We felt like things were starting to move a little bit more with the WSL,” Moore says. “But ultimately, not enough people turned up and cared.”
“Social media was our secret weapon,” Moore says. “It allowed us to write headlines the media wouldn’t. It wasn’t getting the attention that it is now. In fact, it was being actively ignored by many.
“Because such a small number of people had eyes on the women’s game at the time, we were able to introduce the hashtag very easily.”
Introduced against the Netherlands, and with every member of the team encouraged to post, #Lionesses was trending fourth in the UK.
Thanks for all the messages! So glad we won! Now to recover and head to Slovenia 2moro for the game Thurs! It’s another biggie! #Lionesses
— Jill Scott MBE (@JillScottJS8) June 17, 2012
Moore did not coin England as the Lionesses. Glenn Lavery worked at the FA as a writer, reporting on the England teams. He joined just before the 2007 World Cup — the first edition England had qualified for since 1995.
“You don’t just want to be repeating England, England, England, England,” Lavery explains. “So just as we would have used Three Lions for the men’s team, I occasionally used Lionesses for the women’s side.”
He insists he was not alone in this — “I’d like to say I was certainly there in the early days, but I wouldn’t claim to be the very first person to use it” — with the success of the Millwall Lionesses women’s team in the 1990s a definite touchstone.
But as Moore tweeted — inspired in part by Lavery’s reports, working alongside him in that small team — it made things official. The FA was calling England Women the Lionesses. For the most part, in those early days, it was used for social media Q&As, shorthand in score updates, and on the occasional piece of stadium branding to cover the empty seats. But its use was growing.
“That’s where it began,” says Moore. “And we just doubled down on it.”
Going into the 2015 Women’s World Cup, the FA decided the late-night kick-off times in Canada would present a significant problem. Visibility needed to be boosted. England Women’s brand needed to cut through.
Sissel Gynnild Hartley had joined the FA two years earlier as marketing manager for women’s football. A Norwegian, she jokes that when she started, England were chasing Norway in terms of both grassroots participation and on-pitch performance.
“England is now so far ahead of Norway,” she laughs, having returned home to work for the domestic women’s league. “That’s obviously a daily frustration for me now.”
Given their task — giving England Women a specific identity — there is a certain irony to Gynnild Hartley carrying out the task alongside Welsh-born marketing executive Lowri Roberts.
“Back then, they were very much known as the England Women’s team,” says Gynnild Hartley. “The term ‘Lionesses’ was used in a looser journalistic way. And from a branding perspective, England Women had the feeling of being lesser. This is the England team. And then this is the England Women’s team.
“It was about building an audience around them, building a brand around them.”
There were wider reasons as well. This was just after England’s men had been knocked out of their World Cup in the group stages with just one point, just one year before Roy Hodgson’s side’s embarrassing loss to Iceland in the Euros, and Sam Allardyce’s 67-day spell in charge.
In contrast, there was reason to be optimistic about the women’s game. The WSL was growing in size, prestige and popularity. Manchester City had just launched a women’s side, strengthening the league yet further.
Ellie Roebuck with Bardsley and Scott during “Lionesses Down Under” in Terrigal, Australia, last month (Naomi Baker – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Gynnild Hartley led a creative brief and sent it to Matta, a marketing company that has also worked on the England women’s rugby team’s rebrand as the Red Roses and Tottenham Hotspur’s embrace of ‘To Dare is to Do’.
“I actually remember the conversation I had with Matt Hunt, who was Matta’s strategy director,” says Gynnild Hartley. “He said to me: ‘Oh, you mentioned in the brief your casual use of the term Lionesses. And you’re talking about creating this identity, building something unique. Well, we think you should just use Lionesses’.”
The plan was set. At a pre-tournament prep day, the entire squad was presented with the proposal. Moodboards were brought out, camera shots were justified, with it also being highlighted that inspiration had been taken from the transformation of the British Olympic team into Team GB.
The branding was overt — “Lionesses” written in big red lettering across the team. Communal spaces, as is the case for the current England team in Australia, were similarly emblazoned.
“We had posters on the wall, signs in the meal rooms, a list of players with 100 caps — all were Lioness branded,” remembers Lavery.
Some players, such as Toni Duggan and Steph Houghton, immediately embraced the idea. Before 2015, squad photos had been taken formally, in what is known as the arms-crossed ‘soldier pose’.
“You go, these are female athletes,” says Gynnild Hartley. “What are the best ways we can photograph them? This campaign meant we had a reason to do things differently and not just copy what has always been done for the men’s game.”
“We’re not just small men,” adds Bardsley, quoting Chelsea manager Emma Hayes. “We’re not men at all. We’re completely different people with completely different backgrounds. We’re pretty relatable human beings and we wanted people to know that.”
Others had some initial scepticism.
“Karen Carney, at some point, said she didn’t know how she felt about it,” remembers Moore. “She asked whether we should be England Women. I know Kaz well and she’s proud of the name now — but there was definitely a period when there were all sorts of voices asking if we were cheapening the game, if it was gimmicky, too childlike.
“Whenever I was faced with those questions, I used to reference the All Blacks or the Springboks. Some of the most iconic and successful teams have this second-hand name everybody knows them by.”
(Naomi Baker – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
But help was needed if the name was to stick. England’s unexpected run to the semi-finals, going out only to a late own goal against Japan, brought crucial positivity and buy-in.
“My now wife (ex-England goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain) was playing at that tournament,” remembers Moore. “She left me at home to organise the wedding, so I just remember being stressed, watching, organising… but let’s be really open about the role marketing, branding, and communications have.
“They’re nothing without success on the pitch. That is 80 per cent of the challenge — the last 20 is getting the campaign around that right.”
The success of both meant plans could be expanded for the 2017 Euros, under taglines such as “Be Fierce” and “Salute the Lionesses”. It was the first campaign where the entire brand identity was separate to the men’s team.
One example showed each player with a roaring lioness in the background, each slightly different based on the characteristics of the player. The majority of the squad made it their Twitter avatars.
By then, Lionesses social media accounts separate from the men’s side had also been created.
One moment shows the extent to which the team embraced being Lionesses. In the opening game against Scotland, Jordan Nobbs scored. In celebration, Nobbs and Lucy Bronze did the salute photographed in the branding.
“It was completely organic,” says Moore. “It wasn’t something they were asked to do.”
Bardsley feels that tournament was the moment they became Lionesses — the motif surrounded them.
“It just happened so quickly,” she explains. “All of a sudden we were Lionesses.
“In a sense, it became a charter. Not formally or in team talks — it was never like ‘get your claws out girls’ — but I remember we talked about Lioness behaviours and that evolved into a gameplan here or there. It was about courageousness, mentality and adaptability — things like that.”
Another staging post was reached soon after, with Lionesses written on the England kit for the first time.
“That was a tipping point,” adds Moore. “When Nike put it on the back of the kit, it was when you could turn on the TV and hear: ‘The Lionesses won last night’.
“Each generation of players has broken down a different barrier. In that 2012 to 2017 period, players really understood and wanted to push forward their visibility, they threw themselves into it.”
The marks are present in Sarina Wiegman’s current team. This is the side that young talent such as Lauren James, Alessia Russo and Ella Toone grew up watching.
It is no coincidence that women’s teams go by monikers more frequently than their male equivalents. Think of Australia’s Matildas, Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz, China’s Steel Roses, New Zealand’s Football Ferns. It is a highly effective way, elbows and all, to make space in the canopy for the game to flourish.
“In the past, women have struggled with our identity in the game and (the question of) if we belonged,” says Roberts. “We were banned from playing and an afterthought for so long. So a strong identity is really important. The Lionesses identity speaks to the players and the supporters and is one where women are empowered and positioned as strong and fearless.
“For me, the Lionesses is one of the most powerful women’s sports brands in the world.”
Another example. Before this World Cup, the England squad sent out a collective message via Millie Bright’s Twitter account. In it, they stated their disappointment at failing to reach an agreement with the FA over bonuses, reiterating their intention to resume negotiations after the tournament. It was a terse message — signed off by “your Lionesses”.
From your Lionesses x pic.twitter.com/TMvPaLXwHp
— Millie Bright (@Mdawg1bright) July 18, 2023
The Lionesses brand was developed by the FA. Here were the players, choosing to self-identify through that moniker, in a labour dispute with that very body. Those fears it might be gimmicky or childlike? Gone.
“By being England Women, you’re taken less seriously than just being England,” says Gynnild Hartley. “This was not the initial intention behind the name Lionesses, but they are like the hunters, right? They are calm and composed, but they are also super-fierce and feisty and can be super-aggressive. All these characteristics feed into who they are as a team as well.”
“It gave us a platform to step off from,” adds Bardsley. “We could embrace the fact we were more open and wanted to talk about things that were more important to us. Before, the way in which we were being perceived, or ‘sold’, to the wider public was not in line with how we truly felt.”
Others outside the bubble are taking notice. Look at the boots worn by England and Manchester United midfielder Mason Mount in pre-season — inscribed with the message “Like a Lioness”.
Mason Mount wore boots with “Like a Lioness” printed on them in support of England’s women’s national team during Man United’s preseason friendly against RC Lens ❤️🏴 pic.twitter.com/x6s1trdmje
— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) August 5, 2023
Mount’s boots are symbolic. Things have moved full circle. The Lionesses brand was set up to differentiate the women from the dominant men’s side. Now, some on the men’s side want to reintegrate.
“It made me chuckle to myself,” says Moore. “In 2012 we were desperate, absolutely desperate to say: ‘This is an England team that you should be proud of, that deserves your support independently’. Seeing David Beckham ask for Alessia Russo’s autograph for his daughter, Harper, I thought about where we’ve come from since 2012. It’s mind-blowing.”
Thoughts turn to the first Lionesses — those at the forefront of the brand — but who did not receive the acclaim they deserved on the pitch. Though some had their moment of glory at Wembley last summer — Ellen White and Jill Scott chief among them — others did not. The Lionesses are also about legacy.
“In the past 10 years there were players like Rachel Yankey and Kelly Smith,” says Gynnild Hartley. “Extraordinary players who were never given the stage they deserved, who never got the mass media attention.
“But with the rise of the women’s game, increased coverage, investment, and attendances, little girls can definitely dream of becoming a professional footballer, dream of being a Lioness, of being part of that mentality.”
Chamberlain, Moore’s wife, is another of that generation. The Lionesses’ on-pitch success — and capitalisation on that moment — means it should be different for those that follow. In a country where playing fields are being privatised and investment in youth sports is being reduced in real terms, the Lionesses brand is fighting that battle for hearts and minds.
“We’ve got two young daughters,” Moore says. “One is one year old, the other is three and a half. Our eldest is absolutely obsessed with Alessia Russo. My daughter is going to grow up in a world where ‘Your Lionesses’ is this thing that everybody knows, where every child and every nursery knows what the Lionesses are.
“It will be pretty cool saying that, 11 years ago, it was Dad tweeting something which helped start it all off.”
(Top photo: James Bridle –Southampton FC/Southampton FC via Getty Images
