On Sunday evening, I walked nearly five kilometres to a bar to watch Spain play in the World Cup final. I could have stayed at home, but some matches seem to require a room full of people, the noise of chairs scraping across the floor, the sudden silence before a chance, the shouting at players who are thousands of kilometres away and cannot possibly hear any of it.
Spain won. We all know. Afterwards, the streets filled almost immediately. Spain knows how to celebrate! Flags appeared from windows and car roofs, horns sounded without pause, people gathered wherever there was space to gather, and traffic stopped behaving like traffic. I had planned to take an Uber home, but there was no point. Cars could barely move and no driver seemed likely to reach me any time soon. So I started walking the same four and a half kilometres back.
It was not a quiet walk. The celebration followed me through the streets. Cars crawled past with flags hanging from their windows. People leaned on their horns as if noise itself could extend the match. Children were still awake. Of course. We are in Spain. Strangers shouted to one another across the road. Spain had won, and the result had escaped the stadium and taken possession of the night.
Somewhere on the way home, I began thinking about Lionel Messi.
Messi is about 1.70 metres tall. By the standards of professional basketball, this is not especially promising. His reach would be limited, his height an obvious disadvantage, and nobody would build an NBA team around his ability beneath the basket. One of the greatest footballers who has ever lived would almost certainly be an unremarkable professional basketball player, assuming he managed to become one at all.
This is not a criticism of Messi. It is barely even an observation. Nobody watches him play football and concludes that his achievements matter less because LeBron James is taller, stronger and better at a different sport. Nobody judges Messi by the physical standards of basketball, because the comparison would be absurd. It would tell us nothing about Messi. It would only reveal that we had chosen the wrong measure.
From there, my mind moved to a familiar kind of video. An ordinary man announces that he could beat a professional female athlete. Sometimes she plays tennis. Sometimes she runs, fights, lifts or plays football. His confidence is generally far greater than his experience, but that is part of the format. Then they compete. She wins, often comfortably, and the internet enjoys the spectacle of male certainty colliding with reality.
I had always found those videos funny. They are funny. Yet on that walk home, I began to see something in them that I had not noticed before. Even when the woman wins, the man remains the reference point. Her performance is framed through him. The question is not how good she is, what she has achieved or how extraordinary she may be within her sport. The question is whether she can beat a man who does not belong there.
Men are, on average, taller, stronger and faster than women. Perhaps not every man here in the south of Spain, but generally speaking, the guys are taller. That is biology. There is no reason to deny it, and doing so would not make the case for women’s sport any stronger. It would make it weaker. The physical differences are precisely why the comparison makes so little sense. We understand without difficulty that different sports reward different bodies. We do not dismiss Messi because he would struggle beneath a basketball hoop. Yet female athletes are constantly measured against male bodies, as though men represented a neutral and universal standard of human performance.
A woman can become the best in her country, the best in the world or the best her sport has ever seen, and still someone will introduce a man into the conversation to explain the limits of what she has done. Her achievement is allowed to be extraordinary, but often only with an invisible qualification attached to it. Extraordinary, for a woman.
That thought had not appeared from nowhere. Some time earlier, while preparing for a Backyard Ultra in Seville, I had begun following more trail and ultrarunning accounts. That was how Rachel Entrekin first appeared in my feed after winning the Cocodona 250 outright and setting a new overall course record. She had not merely won the women’s race. She had beaten the entire field. It was the kind of performance that should turn an athlete into a name people recognise beyond the boundaries of a single sport.
Yet hardly anyone seemed to know who she was. I noticed it immediately, perhaps because I barely knew how to spell her name myself. Even now, I have to stop and check it. That felt revealing. Her achievement was unforgettable, yet her name had not become familiar. The record existed. The race existed. The photographs existed. The story had happened. Somehow, it had not travelled very far.
Walking home through the celebrations on Sunday night, another question began to form. Spain had just won, and nobody in the streets could possibly miss it. But what had it felt like three years earlier, when Spain’s women became world champions?
I had watched that final from Germany. I had not been in Spain, so I had no memory of the roads, the bars or the celebrations here. I could not honestly claim that the country had failed to celebrate. I simply did not know. By the time I reached home, I wanted to find out.
When I got home, I began with the simplest question I could think of. How many people in Spain had watched the women’s final in 2023? The answer did not fit the story I had half expected to find. The match had drawn an average audience of around 5.6 million viewers in Spain, and almost nine million people had watched at least part of it. It had become the most watched women’s football match in the country’s history. There had been a large public celebration in Madrid, with music, flags, a stage and thousands of people waiting to welcome the team home. Spain had watched. Spain had celebrated. The images were there.
And still, I had no picture of it in my mind.
That was the part I could not let go of. The easy explanation would have been that nobody cared, but clearly people had cared. Millions had watched the final. Crowds had gathered. The players had returned home as world champions and lifted the trophy in front of supporters who understood perfectly well what they had achieved. The event had not been hidden. It had happened in public, on television and in front of an audience larger than the population of many countries. Yet three years later, I had to search for it as though I were looking for evidence of something obscure.
The contrast became harder to ignore because the celebration outside was still continuing. I could hear horns from the street while I was reading about the reception in Madrid. I knew the names of Spanish male players whose careers I had never followed closely. I knew Lamine Yamal because I have a ten-year-old son, and apparently it is impossible to live with a ten-year-old boy during a World Cup without learning the names, clubs, ages and preferred positions of people you have never met. I even bought my own Panini sticker album so we could swap stickers together. Somehow, over the past few weeks, those players had quietly become part of our everyday conversations. I had not chosen to memorise them. They had simply become familiar.
Only later did I discover that Panini had also published a Women’s World Cup sticker album. I had never seen it in a supermarket. Nobody had ever asked me to trade stickers. My son had never come home excited because he had finally found Aitana Bonmatí. And until that evening, I hadn’t even known it existed.
So I tested myself: how many members of Spain’s world champion women’s team could I name?
The answer was uncomfortable, not because I had no respect for them, but because I did. I knew the achievement mattered. I knew winning a World Cup was one of the greatest things a footballer could do. I knew millions of people had watched them do it. Yet their names had not reached me in the same way. They had not settled into the part of memory where public figures become so familiar that we stop remembering how we first heard of them.
I began thinking about the athletes we all seem to know. Lionel Messi. Michael Jordan. Usain Bolt. Roger Federer. Cristiano Ronaldo. Michael Phelps. Their names are available instantly, even to people who have never watched a full basketball game, athletics meeting, tennis match or swimming final. They belong to sport, but they also belong to culture. Their achievements have been repeated so often that they no longer need explanation.
Ask the same people to name female athletes and the rhythm changes. Serena Williams usually arrives first. Simone Biles often follows. Perhaps Steffi Graf, depending on the country and the age of the person being asked. Then comes the pause. It is not an angry pause or a dismissive one. It is usually accompanied by a slightly embarrassed smile and the assurance that there must be many more. Of course there are many more. That is precisely the point.
The difference is not only visible in the names we remember. It is built into the language itself. When we say the World Cup, most people picture the men’s tournament. The women’s competition requires an adjective. The same is true of football, basketball, cycling and countless other sports. The men’s version is allowed to appear universal. The women’s version is marked as a variation of it. We say women’s football, but rarely men’s football. We say women’s sport, but almost never men’s sport. One is treated as a category. The other has quietly become the default.
Language does not create the entire problem, but it reveals it. It shows us which stories are assumed to belong to everyone and which are expected to announce their difference before they begin. It also shapes memory. A victory described as part of the World Cup enters the centre of sporting history. A victory described as part of the Women’s World Cup is more easily filed away as something adjacent to it.
By then, the question had moved beyond football. Rachel Entrekin returned to my mind, still carrying an overall course record and still requiring me to check the spelling of her name. I thought of how many women had done something extraordinary enough to be remembered, yet remained known mainly to those who already followed their sport. Their achievements had not vanished. The records were still official. The medals still existed. The photographs could still be found. History had kept the evidence. What it had failed to keep was familiarity.
That is when I began to understand that the gap I was looking at was not simply a gap in performance, because the performances were there. It was not even only a gap in attention, because millions of people had watched. It was a gap between witnessing something and carrying it forward. Between seeing history happen and allowing it to become common knowledge.
The problem is not that women do not make history. It is that we have become experts at not noticing when they do.
