Feminist Economics Football: A Co-operative Game for Sheffield

The first match of Feminist Economic Football: A Cooperative Game was played in June 2021 in Glasgow. The work was created by Ailie Rutherford, Sapna Agarwal and Mandy Roberts for Feminist Exchange Network.

The concept of Three-Sided Football was conceived in 1962 by Situationist, Asger Jorn. He imagined a game played by three teams on a hexagonal pitch where some sort of fluid collaboration was essential, with the first matches played in the 1990s by anarchists and artists as a way of exploring the intersection between issues and ideas with co-operation being more important than competition.

Their feminist response, a participatory artwork, was devised and created quickly and spontaneously in response to shifts in social and collaborative arts practice through the covid pandemic as the ways we had worked together began to feel impossible. While throughout the pandemic we quickly saw profit making ventures and competitive sport prioritised as essential activity. Games of football, particularly in the wake of the European cup in Glasgow (still largely a male dominated activity) had been given a priority. We began to think about how we might reorganise our work in the form of a football match, and the idea for Feminist Economic Football: A Cooperative Game was born.

The hexagonal pitch was marked out and three teams recruited but the rules collectively re-written. The cooperative match played between three teams: Degrowth, Decolonisation and Climate Action, was a playful way of looking at how a truly feminist approach to economics can’t function without all of these aspects intersecting. Played as a game of three thirds, each goal was described as a gift. If a team, or players from two teams, brought a goal to the third team’s net, they were offering something from their principles that they thought that team would benefit from. Coaches for each team then took on the role of commentator, to bring theoretic insight into the goals and motivation for scoring them.

For Alternate Realities, Feminist Economic Football presents the adjacent possibility of a world founded on cooperation, where we work together to create a socially and environmentally just society founded on the core principles of feminist economics: a process centred on the love of people not profit. The teams have been revised for the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, this time being Decolonisation, Ecofeminism and The Caring Economy. Diverse communities and local football clubs are being invited to take part and we hope to bring together women* from across Sheffield. The training session for the players and the match itself will be documented to later be shown in Sheffield’s Site Gallery. 

For a live stream of the match, please click here.

*inclusive of transgender and intersex women as well as non-binary and gender fluid people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience of women

This is an outdoor event. Please come prepared for all weathers.