Until recently, Saudi Arabia was one of few countries that had a men’s national football team, but no women’s team. Until 2018, women did not have access to football stadiums, and before 2020, there was no official women’s league. On the face of it – there was no women’s football in Saudi Arabia. But the story of women’s football that was unfolding before and away from the headlines is a completely different one. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, a grassroots-initiated women’s football league has been active since 2007. The Riyadh Women’s Football League was initiated and organized by young Saudi women eager to play, and the first season was played in 2008 with eight teams participating. Since the first season, between six and eight teams have participated every year. With no official support the women have kept the league going, though challenges related to everything from renting a field to finding qualified coaches resulted in only two of the teams involved in the first season still active today. Drawing on the story of the first Riyadh Women’s Football League, this talk looks back on the emergence of women’s football in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s and how pioneering women built a foundation for women’s football in Saudi Arabia.

Charlotte Lysa is a researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. She is currently part of the project FORM – Football and Religion in the Middle East, where she focuses on Saudi Arabia. Lysa holds a PhD in Middle East studies (2019) from the same university, for which she studied women’s grassroot football in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. She was a visiting fellow at Qatar University (2016), and at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh (2017, 2020 and 2021-2022).

This event is part of the CMENAS Fall Colloquium 2023: “The MENA world after a MENA World Cup” 555 Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor.

Colloquium questions: cmenas@umich.edu

This series is funded in part by the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (CMENAS) U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) grant.

To register, go to https://myumi.ch/8eA8n.