Women Soccer Players Fight For Equality

7 August 2019

Four female members of NIF’s Soccer Team for Social Responsibility officially launched their campaign called “Women Soccer Players Making Change.” Their goal is to increase access to girls’ soccer in schools, extra-curricular activities, and organized regional leagues – so that every girl in Israel has the opportunity to play soccer.

In the short term, this campaign will work to secure funding from the Ministry of Sports to open a new women’s league in the coming season, and to discuss measures that can develop women’s soccer in Israel by changing social perceptions and the criteria for distributing budgets.

The four women – who are all top Israeli international players – are Oshrat Eini, Shay Sadeh, Nora Abu Shnab and Karin Sandell. “After we saw the women’s World Cup this summer, it’s as if we saw some sort of parallel universe of how women’s soccer can and must look. We decided that enough is enough,” Eini said.

NIF’s Kick It Out campaign was founded in 2003 to fight racism in soccer. In recent years, after being enormously successful in reducing racism, the campaign has broadened its horizons to combat homophobia, sexism, and all forms of discrimination and promote to tolerance, shared living, and inclusivity. The Team for Social Responsibility was founded in 2017 to leverage the celebrity and role model status of star players in achieving these aims.

See the women in this clip: