Fotball som kjønnet mulighetsrom

The topic of this article is sport and gender. We focus on football – which today is the most popular sport among both girls and boys in Norway. At the same time, it is highly gendered at the elite level. Women’s football is often portrayed as secondary compared to men’s football. This is a key ingredient in the “metanarrative” of women’s football in Western culture. At the level of associations and clubs, however, different measures are implemented to promote girls’ motivation and prevent dropout. The aim of this article is to examine what “sports project” young girls consider available to them– in this particular sports context. For this purpose, we analyze interviews with players on two teams Copyright © 2020 Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1891-1781-2020-03-05 Årgang 44, nr. 3-2020, s. 231–245 ISSN online: 1891-1781 VITENSKAPELIG PUBLIKASJON for girls aged 14–15 years, conducted as part of a fieldwork study. We argue that football still represents a particularly gendered context that restricts what girls think football can be for them, which we refer to as their “sports project”. We find that the metanarrative of women’s football plays a significant part here. Even if girls see the metanarrative as both misrepresentative and unfair, it is also incorporated and a part of them, and visible in their assessment of what good football is and how they talk about gendered inequalities in their own club.