The End of the Good Girl

What muddy pitches can teach us about the next generation of female leaders

It’s 9.30 am on a Saturday, and the wind is up, wrestling fiercely with the tie-dye trees that surround the pitch. Parents stand alert on the sidelines, absorbed in the action, shouting concise instructions. A pony-tailed woman sidesteps down the line enthusiastically. Across the field, the girls sprint, pivot, fall, and get back up again.“Keep going!” calls the coach from the sidelines when momentum cools.

This is football. For girls.

In my generation, this sport was still fringe for many of us, something for the outliers. And yet here they are — twelve-year-old girls tackling, kicking high, shouting instructions to each other. They push ahead, they fall, they rise again.

These girls are not afraid of a scuffle or a bruise; they throw their whole bodies into the game. Watching them, I wonder, is this what real paradigm change in leadership looks like? Is this the quiet, muddy, miraculous end of the good girl era, the one that taught us to stay agreeable and “nice”? To play small.

Because here, on a blustery Autumn day on a soggy pitch, there’s no room for that. These girls are learning to hold their ground (literally), to use their voices and to trust their strength. They are discovering that resilience isn’t earned through pleasing others or fitting in; it is forged through falling, rising, and standing up again.

I scan the sidelines. Parents line the pitch, eyes fixed on the game. What strikes me isn’t just their collective intensity, it’s the particular, steady presence of the fathers. There’s something culturally charged about that. For decades, this kind of focused, almost reverent attention has belonged to father–son rituals: the Saturday match, the competitive banter, the quiet pride.

Now, those same fathers stand here for their daughters. Their attention isn’t an act. It’s an anchoring presence that tells these girls, without a word, that their strength, drive and skill are worth witnessing. And that matters because the stories we grow up with shape what we believe is possible. When fathers bring that kind of unguarded presence to girls’ sport, they shift something at the foundation.

And then I reflect on myself.At school, I was always the weak one in sports. Uncomfortable in my body and self-conscious. Always the last to be picked for teams as I hung my head in shame. But in the playground, everything was different.

No whistles. No teachers. No watchful eyes. Just a tennis ball, a tangle of limbs, and a pack of boys and one girl kicking around a ball for the pure fun of it. There, in the unofficial game, I felt fierce. I didn’t care what I looked like; I had earned my place as one of the boys, and I was being my wild self.

That’s the thing about the old paradigms: girls understood they had to hide their power unless it looked a certain way — graceful, contained, acceptable. But the real fun was happening in the scrappy, informal spaces, where nothing was too much and instinct prevailed.

This shift feels even more powerful when I think about how different things were not long ago. For decades, girls’ participation in sport plummeted just as they hit puberty. Research by Women in Sport found that almost half of girls who once considered themselves sporty stopped participating after primary school. Many of us absorbed the quiet message that sport was a phase, not a path.

But something is changing. With the rise in media coverage of women’s football, athletics, and other elite sports, more girls are staying in the game. According to Sport England, activity levels among girls aged 11–16 have risen steadily in recent years, even outpacing those of boys in some areas.

So here they are. On this windy field. Not dropping out. Not fading away. But rising — muddy, loud, unafraid.

When I imagine the future of leadership, I see these girls grown up. Bringing this same grounded resilience into boardrooms, classrooms, studios, and communities. A generation that won’t trade authenticity for approval. Who lead like they play: collaboratively, instinctively, with the courage to collide and the grace to recover.

The good girl bows out quietly, and the whole woman walks — or runs — onto the pitch.