Playing to win

Women’s football is flourishing as never before. More than a billion people watched the 2019 Women’s World Cup held in France. The ninth World Cup, which takes place in Australia and New Zealand in July and August this year, is set to beat that record. At the heart of the game are so many passionate women who truly believe that the sport of football can change lives. Here are the stories of five of them.

“I WANT TO BE A PART OF THAT!” Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, 26, striker for Jamaica

Bunny Shaw collects all the old football boots her Manchester City teammates don’t want. “They call me the ‘Cleats Truck,’” says the striker, laughing. Jamaica’s top goal scorer of all time—in the men’s and the women’s game—can easily afford any boots she wants, but as a young girl she had to play in her school shoes. She knows that many young Jamaicans don’t have money for studs, so whenever she goes back to the island, she presents those top-quality secondhand boots as prizes in local female football competitions.

Born in 1997 in Spanish Town, not far from the capital, Kingston, Khadija Shaw was the youngest of 13 children. One of her older brothers nicknamed her “Bunny” after her love of carrots. She loved watching him play football on the street outside their home. “A lot of people would gather and bet on who was going to win,” Shaw recalls. “I thought, I want to be a part of that!”. So the boys started her off in goal.

Her parents weren’t happy. Her father, a shoemaker, and her mother, a poultry farmer, prized education for their kids. Her mother in particular thought football was a waste of time. In Jamaica there were no girls’ or women’s teams, “but I wanted to play football,” says Shaw, who had a World Cup poster on her wall and dreamed of competing in the sport’s greatest tournament.

So she’d play while her mother was out at the market. After she was caught, she turned to negotiating—“If I wash the dishes, can I go out and play?”—until she was selected at age 14 for Jamaica Under 15s. Her father convinced Bunny’s reluctant mother that it would be a valuable experience for their daughter.

Bunny Shaw was on her way. She made the national team in 2015 and got a football scholarship at the University of Tennessee, where she earned a degree in communications, becoming the first person in her family