A Change of Kit by Soft Power

On Friday night at the Parc des Princes, in front of 45,000 fans, France and the Korean Republic kicked off the eighth edition of the official FIFA Women’s World Cup. This was a far cry from 1971 when a rebel squad of British women touched down in Mexico to play in the unofficial World Cup — an that act helped rekindle interest in a sport which burgeoned after the first world war but, in 1921, was banned for 50 years by the FA.

Incredibly, the World Cup in France will be the first time England have sent out a fully professional team to compete. Football is now the top participation sport for women and girls in England. The Women’s Super League (WSL) finally turned professional in 2018, there was the design of female performance-focused kits this year, the introduction of women’s teams into the FIFA video game franchise (2016) and central contracts are now worth an average of £30,000 meaning the players can train full-time.

The idea was to celebrate the 2019 World Cup through the design of eleven football shirt numbers, designed by eleven creatives from six different countries. Individually they were to champion gender equality. As a set, they’d represent team spirit and solidarity. These would then be sold with 100% of profits being donated to grassroots organisations fighting for equal representation for women’s football in London.

Soft Power gladly accepted an invitation to contribute as one of the eleven — given the number 2 and an orange shirt we went about coming up with something that would do the project justice and hopefully, sell, for a good cause.

Through our working relationship with Nike London we are no strangers to trailblazers like Amandine Henry, Lieke Martens, Fran Kirby or Ji So-yun therefore we didn’t want to create anything that could be deemed patronising or out of step with the movement. We wanted a unisex design that could be worn by an 11 year old visionary starting her own school football team or a 40 year old playing five-a-side with his mates on a Tuesday night. With this in mind, we loved the idea of the word BALLER as a catch all statement. We dabbled with prefixes of ‘Absolute’, ‘What a’ and ‘She a’ but ultimately felt the single BALLER line was more impactful. We then worked the ‘2’ into the double ‘L’ — a sweet opportunity we spotted when examining a range of alternative phrases plus it was a clever way of using the exclusion area for the number — which had been specified in the brief.

In dedication and as a nod of acknowledgement to the baller we feel is the standard bearer for this subject — Ada Hegerberg is a four-time winner of the Women’s Champions League. She has scored 259 goals in 253 career games at club level. She is the current holder and first-ever recipient of the women’s Ballon d’Or making her the best player in the world today. She is 23 years old. Sensationally (given the gap of four years between every World Cup) Hegerberg has decided to pull out of this year’s tournament in protest at inequalities between men and women in football. It’s such a brave and inspiring act that evokes the attitude of Muhammad Ali in 1967 when he was stripped of his titles in protest against the Vietnam War. Maybe Hegerberg will return in 2023 to become the greatest of all time?

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