Fandom and Friendship: How women’s football and its biggest star changed my world

A personal reflection on how Megan Rapinoe changed the life of one fan from London.

I’m in the clubhouse at Dulwich Hamlet FC watching a punk band cover Babes in Toyland and Peaches, surrounded by everyone I know in south London and a gang of happy, drunk Germans. It’s the periodic Altona 93/Dulwich Hamlet ‘Freundschaft’ exchange trip, as the Hamburg-based sister club — founded, like Dulwich, in 1893 — and their exuberant fans have flooded south London with German footballing flair, craft beer, lovingly patched denim vests and really excellent stickers, and I wouldn’t know any of these people if it wasn’t for Megan Rapinoe.

This is not a story about Megan Rapinoe’s career. That’s been written by many, including Megan Rapinoe (and her book ghostwriter). This is a story about how one moment can change the course of your life, and how one inspirational person can gift you not one but two chosen families, without her even knowing it. It’s a small story, from one fan’s point of view, but it illustrates the giant beauty of football fandom and the power of great athletes to draw people together. There are millions of such stories out there, from fans who remember the athletes who sparked their relationship with football and the friendships they cherish today.

Four years ago, I was having a slow day, which is to say I didn’t get out of bed. A name plagued my Twitter mentions. Some banal Trump acolyte and their tediously evil antics? Another dreadful TV grifter picking on people for clicks? Who was this Megan Rapinoe asshole and why was she trending? That’s how much of a sports fan I wasn’t. I clicked: a short video. “I ain’t going to the fuckin’ White House”. Heh. She seems cool — what does she do? And so it was that I turned on the World Cup and threw a switch that would electrify the next four years of my life.

Watching the USWNT ball out that summer with dazzling chutzpah and style, I needed to know more. The style, skill and spectacle swept me up and became all I could think about. I needed to see these players, but closer to home, I needed women’s football in my life immediately. In early July 2019, a few days after Rapinoe’s infamous soundbite aired, I went to my first women’s football game — serendipitously, the first-ever game for Dulwich Hamlet’s new women’s team — and fell in love. Previously a casual follower of my local club, I resolved to go to every women’s home game from that moment on.

In this non-league club and the people championing its new team, I found a kind, impassioned, oddball south London football family. I dusted off my old music journalist’s pen and started writing regularly about women’s football, for my own club and as a freelancer. I was elected to the Supporters’ Trust board at Dulwich, to help support the club’s future and contribute to its work in our community. Here in lower league football, every connection I have at the best, most beloved, most principled club in the UK — every fan, friend, collaborator and co-conspirator — is thanks to Megan Rapinoe telling Donald Trump where to stick it, and walking it like she talked it in the 2019 World Cup.

Three months after this human fireball crash-landed into my consciousness, I found my way to Tacoma, Washington, to watch her and her Seattle gang grind the Portland Thorns beneath their heels late in the NWSL season. As the Reign claimed a 2-0 victory I made friends in the supporters’ section, joined them in the pub, and stayed in touch ever after on Whatsapp until we could drink together again post-pandemic in Seattle. I met Rapinoe after the game, gave her a portrait I had made of her, and she gamely took the only good selfie I’ve ever been in.

Three weeks later, the result of a “playoffs, yeah?” pub conversation with my new pals after that game, I stumbled squinting from an 11-hour Greyhound odyssey into the North Carolina sunshine, for the Reign’s 2019 NWSL semi-final against the Courage. That Sunday offered a grueling and finally heartbreaking two-hour campaign as the unassailable home team exhausted the Reign’s defences at the end of extra time; and adoption by a gang of kind North Carolina Courage fans who drove me to and from the game and tailgate, offered me a place to stay when my Airbnb flooded, and remain friends to this day. All because Megan Rapinoe doesn’t respect blowhards with combovers.

There was a CONCACAF final in California, where I saw Rapinoe score her first goal since the World Cup to beat Canada 3-0, and gave her a Dulwich Hamlet scarf after the game. There was a pandemic, and a job loss, and a girl in south London spending lockdown on Pacific time, watching every past and present Reign game she could find online, and building friendships through Twitter with other supporters.

There were travel restrictions on Europeans, which meant that getting to the Reign’s first local derby double-header against Portland at Lumen Field in August 2021 required pouring most of my savings into working in Barbados (poor me) for two weeks just so the border staff at Sea-Tac would allow me to touch North American soil. The week I got there, I discovered I had a family in the Pacific Northwest: new friends who drove me to games, invited me to dinner, showed me around the city, loaded me up with Reign swag, and made me feel utterly held. The girl who said she would never get a tattoo got inked that week in Capitol Hill. “There art thou happy” — in Seattle, my new home away from home.

I travelled to Seattle four times last year and saw fully half of OL Reign’s season. I’ve just come back from my second trip this year. Originally, it was about watching Megan Rapinoe play. Then it became about watching Lu Barnes, Jess Fishlock, Bethany Balcer, Tziarra King and Phallon Tullis-Joyce play. Then it was about seeing my friends, my West Coast family. It was about gameday setup with the Royal Guard, evenings at friends’ bars and restaurants, breakfast at my favourite cafes, pool at Temple Billiards after Reign games, karaoke in SoDo and Capitol Hill, Seattle Storm games, catch-ups with other travelling friends from around the world, gathering and making memories. All because one pink-haired phenomenon couldn’t just shut up and dribble.

It’s been easy to root for Megan Rapinoe over the years because the ice-cold flair she delivers on the field comes with staunch integrity away from it: a commitment to anti-racism work, a devotion to LGBTQ+ rights, and an unshakable determination to secure her team’s dues as professional athletes. “Stick to football”, the critics cried, as she set and broke records (two Olimpicos at two Olympic tournaments? Your fave could never), used that far-sighted football IQ to set her teammates up for glory, and kept an iron grip on her reputation as the most deadly penalty taker in the world.

Her work in the world never took away from her work on the pitch, because to her the two are inextricably entwined. She evolved with age, graduating from an audacious striker on the wing to a shrewd playmaker and general. She and her teammates fought the law and won, claiming the overdue equal pay they deserved. In refusing to be anything less than herself, she changed women’s football and the opportunities within it, and grew the righteous prestige the game carries, as it should.

But just by being herself and doing the job she was born to do, Rapinoe also gave this new fan the gift of a hundred people I would never otherwise have known: friends I’ve painted tifos with, sung with, plotted with, broken bread with; friends who have given me places to stay, glorious nights out, bright ideas and airfares(!), invited me to their weddings, shown me the beautiful landscape that surrounds Seattle, and loaded me up with memories I will hold for the rest of my life.

This is the story of sports fandom, played out around the world, and the real power of sports, which I think every great player understands at a cellular level. It’s never just about them, and it comes with responsibility. Many supporters take cues from how their heroes carry themselves. Fans start with admiration for one swaggering team or player, and then they find their people: lifelong friendships, communities and partners in crime with whom they build beautiful things. The growing media landscape in women’s sports is one such enterprise, being crafted on its own terms, as many of its creators push back against white and male gatekeeping from legacy media. In women’s football, which has had to dig its heels in just to exist and thrive, and in which inequities are laid bare, we find people with shared values and common cause, and we hold dear the players who champion these values.

Rapinoe has upheld hers with honesty and candour, enraging those whose sense of self and understanding of society is based on fiction — from inherent male superiority in sports and the lies told about trans lives to the denial of the USA’s white supremacist foundations and continuing inequality. For people willing to confront reality and pursue a fairer world, she has been an emblem of the possibilities ahead of us, as she uses her platform to amplify those doing the work to actually build that world. For progressively minded sports fans, she has been a uniting figure. Her fuck you to Trump inadvertently led me to two fan communities committed to those values, and to deep friendships with people who view the world with hope and potential.

This weekend in London, I enjoy our Freundschaft with our Hamburg pals, united by football fandom, a commitment to anti-fascism and inclusivity, and to the joyful power of community. Right in the middle of it, as singing Germans fill our south London clubhouse after the marquee game of the weekend, the news of Rapinoe’s retirement lands. I’m a quiet, numb figure in the corner as the revels go on around me. But as the night and the weekend continue, my focus returns to our friends who have made the trip. There’ll be time to reflect on Rapinoe’s career in its final months, at the World Cup and as she and the Reign chase their longed-for championship trophy. Right now, being present with our continental friends is what matters.

Because as one inspirational athlete’s career winds down, the events she set in motion across football continue, and the worlds she inspired me to immerse myself in are thriving. Dulwich Hamlet FCW have a proper supporters’ group now, the Pepper Army, and we’re plotting how to reach a 1000 attendance figure as they enter their fifth season. The crowds at Lumen Field are growing, as the Reign deepen their connections with their local community and new people get involved with the Royal Guard every year. The women’s game continues to greater heights, more and more fans travel to fill stadiums and watch their heroes play, the communities and friendships grow and deepen, and even against difficult odds, the world moves on and upward. Megan Rapinoe’s impact on the game is as indelible as her impact on my life, and there are so many stories yet to come.