When Fifa announced its list of 36 referees appointed for the World Cup in Qatar, the three names that stood out were Stephanie Frappart, Yoshimi Yamashita and Salima Mukasanga.
They will become the first women in history to officiate at the men’s World Cup match and will be joined by three more assistant referees in Neuza Back, Karen Diaz and Kathryn Nesbitt. Frappart, in particular, is used to making history as the first woman to officiate in Ligue 1, the men’s Champions League, the men’s World Cup qualifying.
It’s a familiar story, though, to Lyn MacIntosh, believed to be one of the world’s first accredited female referees when she registered with Fifa in Dallas in the early 1970s. It coincided with the push to popularise football in the USA and while she later struggled to register with the local FA when she returned to Wales in 1977, she found the inter-collegiate and amateur men’s players in Texas were happy to welcome her.
“Frankly after a few minutes, they forgot you were a woman,” she tells i. “You were just somebody in black and white and they either liked what you did, or they didn’t. And they either cursed you or thanked you, or just ignored you and got on with it. It wasn’t often, just the odd time you’d get ‘why don’t you go home and have babies?'”
MacIntosh took a Fifa course and registered with the RAF’s FA (her husband was stationed with the air force in the US) before she began taking charge of local games.
By then, it was 1975 and Pele had moved to New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL). Such was the desperation to publicise the sport that the Brazilian was taken on a PR tour, during which he was amazed to find an “arbitra” – or female official.
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“He came to this park and spotted I was referee. And Pele’s going ‘arbitra, arbitra!’ [the Portuguese term for a female referee]. When it was half time, I got to meet him and I’m like a little kid, he’s speaking Portuguese, but it was wonderful to have big smiles on his face, and he thought it was wonderful that there was this lady, this ‘arbitra’. He was beside himself.”
After moving to Canada, MacIntosh had the same experience meeting Eusebio, who was “more of a God to me than Pele – I absolutely adored him”.
Moving back to the UK almost ended her refereeing career, when she struggled to register with a local league in Wales. “I went there and they’re all looking out through the door – ‘you mean there’s a woman out there?! And she wants to register?!’ They didn’t know what to do and said ‘we can’t do that’.”
She found a route back via a league that was struggling to find officials. “There was a couple of ‘oh bloody hell it’s a woman!’ Afterwards they’re all coming up, ‘good game, ref’ and ‘she’s not bad for a woman’. And the manager said we hope you’ll do more.” That was when she noticed other local referees watching her from behind the goal.
“The manager said ‘I think they wanted to come and watch you’. They wanted to come and watch me screw up, that’s what they wanted. I never got another game though.”
MacIntosh doesn’t believe the officials at Qatar 2022 will face the same challenges, given their experience as Uefa and Fifa officials in previous high-level men’s games. But that reflects how much has changed in 50 years since she first picked up her whistle.
“I was 17 when I got married, I had never challenged anything,” she says. “But my refereeing became my thing. I wasn’t somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, I was just a referee, not a woman, making the game as good as it can be – because it’s all about the football, not the referee.”
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