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How women’s football in Afghanistan redefined itself
Summary
Khalida Popal’s memoir tells the story of the rise and fall of women’s football in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2021
One stifling afternoon in the early 2000s in Kabul, Afghanistan, violence came to the football haven Khalida Popal and her friends had conjured for themselves on the schoolground. A group of men jumped over the concrete walls that separated the girls from the real world. They hurled insults at the girls, kicked their school bags, and scattered the goalposts marked with stones.
“The ringleader grabbed a scarf that lay on the floor and shoved it hard into the face of one of the players, stumbling her backwards," writes Popal. “Then, silent and seething, somehow more terrifying than he was before, he strode to the centre of the yard, a mixture of rage and pleasure in his expression. Revealing a large knife that he held up in front of us dramatically, he proceeded to stab into our football, once, twice, a third time."
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It is just one of the harrowing pictures Popal paints in her recently released memoir, My Beautiful Sisters: A Story of Courage, Hope and the Afghan Women’s Football Team. The book spans about 25 years from 1996 when a hardline Taliban first took charge in Afghanistan till their re-instatement in 2021.
As the title suggests, the book is about women’s football in a country trying to redefine itself under US occupation. During those chaotic years in the early 2000s, Afghanistan grappled with the fall of the Taliban and with the concept of democracy.
The book delves deep in the social and psychological construct of a country that leaves no space for women and their rights, where they are suffocated of all life and laughter. It sparkles briefly with the pure joy of a bunch of girls left alone to play football, to reclaim their childhood in some form, and then plunges again into the many ways they are demeaned for doing so. “To be a young woman in Afghanistan is to grow up with violence," writes Popal. “To learn not to fight back."
It is against this background that she and a handful of schoolgirls in the Afghan capital dared to lay the foundation for women’s football. Not surprisingly, they met with resistance every step of the way. It was a daily battle to retain the players they had and to recruit more. Football was viewed as foreign and corrupt. Their teachers didn’t approve of it neither did their parents. They had to fight to find a training ground. To find a place they could practice in t-shirts and shorts, ignoring the stifling dress code. To find a coach who could hone their raw talent.
Coming from a relatively progressive family, a young Popal used football to connect with the wider world, to find camaraderie and sisterhood, to push back. She was driven, holding on to the one thing that gave her and her teammates some joy. Briefly, she was even successful. Where she once had to organise school football games on the sly, she became the co-founder of the country’s national women’s football team in 2007. While a having a women’s football looked good for a country trying to prove they were moving in the right direction, it rarely went beyond tokenism and the lure of international funding, she writes.
This left the women sportspersons, who were playing against the odds, vulnerable. Popal reveals how she, with the help of some former pros and FIFA, blew the lid off the rampant sexual abuse by the Afghan football federation chief, Keramuddin Karim. The narrative is grim and shocking—Karim used his position of power to prey upon young girls, and then had the establishment protect him and quiet the dissenting voices. Unfortunately, this is not unique to politically unstable countries. Despite women’s sport growing exponentially in the last few years, young women remain at risk of exploitation by coaches, administrators and people in power. They have big dreams but little agency. Even Team USA, which has been a sporting superpower for decades, was hit by a sexual abuse scandal that came to light in 2016.
Being involved in football, Popal writes, made her and her teammates easy targets. While she herself had to flee Afghanistan in 2011 because some elements in the national sports administration were disgruntled by her growing stature, her teammates had to find a way out when the Taliban reclaimed power in 2021. It was Popal’s football connections from around the world that helped her get many of them on the last few planes out of Afghanistan and find them refuge in countries like Australia.
Throughout the book, the author extensively uses football as a metaphor, yet this is not a book about football or how it lay its roots in the most hostile of places. It is a book about courage, belief, and resourcefulness. Like most literature that comes out of Afghanistan, Popal’s story is raw and haunting, and shimmers with unusual grit in the face of adversity.
Deepti Pawardhan is a Mumbai-based independent sportswriter.
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