This Sport Could Change Your Life

Girton alumna Lottie Birdsall-Strong (2013 Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies) is on a mission to give every young person the opportunity to fall in love with sport.

“I often describe sports as the ultimate Trojan horse. It’s an incredible vehicle to add value to people’s lives.”

One nil down. Seconds to go.

England were on the verge of crashing out to Italy, just one step away from the Euro 2025 final..

Then came the cross that caused chaos. The parry from the goalkeeper. And the low, confident finish from 19-year-old Michelle Agyemang which gave England a dramatic, last-minute lifeline.

A few days later, the Lionesses lifted the trophy to become back-to-back champions. All over the country, millions celebrated a resilient, inspiring team that never, ever, think it’s all over.

Moments like that have power. They are recreated hundreds of times on playgrounds and pitches and gardens. They inspire young people to play, and dream.

The key is to ensure that every child who wants to play can do so to the best of their ability, regardless of gender or background. This is where people like Lottie Birdsall-Strong come in.

How far we’ve come

Lottie Birdsall-Strong is the Head of Youth Strategy at the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB). As part of her wide-ranging role, covering investment, impact and participation, she is responsible for work that ensures over half a million young people per year play cricket. 

The former Girton student has devoted her career to sport. She has been a strategist at the Football Association (FA) and a councillor at the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees at Manchester United Foundation.

“I often describe sports as the ultimate Trojan horse”, says Lottie. “It’s an incredible vehicle to add value to people’s lives.

“Not everyone has to love it, but what I can’t stand is the idea that there are people who don’t have the opportunity to discover if they love it – either as a player, a fan, or someone who might want to work in the industry. Opportunity and potential. That’s what gets me out of bed.”

And fortunately, according to Lottie, there are already promising signs in girls’ football. Since 2020, at Manchester United Foundation, there has been a 208% increase in female attendances at football sessions across Greater Manchester. “At Manchester United Girls’ Academy, which is managed by the Foundation, our vision is to have the most successful talent programme in the country, with the aim of developing first-team and international players.”

While more than 16 million people watched England’s 2025 final win against Spain, Lottie knows as well as anyone how far the sport has come for women and girls in the UK. “I started playing football when I was about four or five. At times, I had to hide my ponytail under a baseball cap to pretend I was a boy, otherwise I wouldn’t have been allowed to join in some of the matches in my local park. My friends even gave me a boy’s name to complete the disguise.

“You’d get a lot of other kids telling you that girls couldn’t play football. But my family couldn’t have been more supportive in every single way, and it develops a resilience around doing what makes you happy.”

She grew up in an Arsenal-supporting family, playing in Highbury Fields, in the shadow of the team’s old Highbury stadium. It was there that she was spotted and invited for a trial at Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence. 

“Football developed a real sense of teamwork in me, and I learned how to make something stronger than the sum of its parts, to trust in people, and value different strengths. That’s as valuable in the boardroom, as it is on the pitch.”

After ten years at Arsenal, she secured a scholarship to play football in the USA in North Carolina. There she discovered the impact of legislation such as Title IX, which requires schools receiving state funds to give equal opportunities to all students, regardless of gender. 

She decided to explore how measures like this around the world stimulated the growth of women and girls’ sport – what worked where, what didn’t, and why – a quest that took her to the corridors of Girton College, University of Cambridge. 

“I realised there was so much potential to do more, and I wanted to be part of figuring out how to do that. Girton is such a special place. It inspired a relentless curiosity in me, and a confidence to connect with other people.”

The power of sport

Since then, Lottie has been part of the charge to improve participation, engagement and commercial viability in a variety of sports. 

She was involved with the creation of the FA’s Gameplan for Growth strategy in 2017, which aimed to double the number of women and girls participating in football by 2020. She has also successfully worked with two Prime Ministers in two British governments on investment and impact in sport. On top of that, she has helped shape the growth of tennis with the LTA, as well as Manchester United Foundation’s drive to improve female football participation.

“I’m a big believer in data and insight, and I enjoy working with it. But really, I like talking to people and understanding challenges, whether they’re strategic, financial or social.

“There are so many things one sport can learn from another, even if they’re not trying to do the exact same thing."

Other industries and sectors outside sport are also of great interest to Lottie. They are often very willing to share, and you can find parallels and solutions in places that are not always immediately obvious. For example, on one occasion, she was inspired to solve a significant strategic problem by reading about something the British Army were doing.

At the ECB, she helped to create the Inspiring Generations strategy, which will look to invest £3.5m into the most ethnically diverse areas of England and Wales by 2027, and provide training to expand cricket in state secondary schools. She also led the ECB’s 2024 State School Action Plan, which aims to invest up to £30m to enable four million young people to access cricket by 2030.

“It’s not just about investment. It’s about considering the best impact we can have. Disability cricket and cricket in Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools has grown hugely through this strategy. We’ve heard from parents, teachers and young people about the multiple benefits, including better focus in the classroom.

“One thing that was quite clear in my mind was the need to prioritise schools. They’re wonderful places for people to engage in sports, particularly if they don’t have opportunities elsewhere. 

“Women and girls’ cricket is also growing rapidly. We’ve increased the number of professional women’s cricketers from fewer than 20 in 2019 to more than 135 today. There are eight fully professional teams in the top tier, and becoming a professional female cricketer is now a viable career path. The Hundred – a version of cricket where each team plays an innings of 100 balls – has also been a gamechanger for women’s cricket and put men’s and women’s competitions on an equal platform.

“That’s at the top end, but in the ecosystem, we’ve also got 5,300 recreational women and girls’ teams, 1,000 more than the previous year. The pathway through the game is getting stronger, and it is exciting to see the knock-on effect of that from a multi-generational perspective. 

“We also have the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup hosted on home soil in 2026 (an international cricket tournament organised by the International Cricket Council, contested in the Twenty20 ((T20)) format of the game), and we hope this inspires even more girls to see Cricket is a game “for them”. 

Lottie believes there are compelling cases for focusing on more equitable access to sport. One of her priorities is to help realise the full commercial potential of women’s sport. For example, in terms of understanding a different group of fans, research suggests women are more likely to buy merchandise and are more active on social media. Women control or influence ca 85% of consumer spending, so understanding female fandom is critical.

“It’s hugely important to view sports from a ‘joy’ perspective", “every player begins playing in a garden, a park, or a playground." 

However, she remains passionate about the value and impact sport can have at all levels, on people from all walks of life. “It’s hugely important to view sports from a ‘joy’ perspective”, she says. “Every player begins playing in a garden, a park, or a playground. A meaningful grassroots presence helps ensure the broadest possible talent pool to choose from at a national team level.”

Lottie recently worked to establish the social value of youth cricket, showing that regular cricket players are 23% more likely to express higher levels of confidence, 13% higher happiness levels, and 12% higher sense of having a worthwhile life. “Evidencing the broader value of sport and the role it can play in society is fascinating,” Lottie shares. “For example, sport can be instrumental in building a young person’s confidence. We hear stories about girls who were afraid to put their hand up in class before, and suddenly teachers are saying they’re more likely to take up leadership roles.” 

This social value also translates into economic impact. Lottie’s work has calculated that these benefits are contributing £298 million in direct wellbeing impacts to the economy. 

Studies also show that 80% of female Fortune 500 CEOs played sports in their formative years, and that 85% of women who played sports in their youth believed the skills they developed were crucial to their professional success later in life. It is an interesting thought that women and girls’ sport might be one of the best ways to improve GDP. 

Ask Lottie about the future, and she will tell you there is still “so much left to do”. 

But does she allow herself a moment to appreciate all that’s been achieved so far? “Sometimes, I’m walking my son in his buggy through our local park on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and I see girls playing football on the pitches, and I can’t help but smile. It’s just…normal.

“It’s taken decades and decades of work to get where we are. We’re now seeing some fantastic things today, but we’re standing on the shoulders of a lot of people who fought when the fight to be taken seriously was a lot harder.”

Girtonians Changing the Game 

From league leadership to governance reform, Girtonians are helping to shape the future of women’s football in England and Wales.

Dawn Airey (1981 Geography) chairs the Women’s Professional Leagues Limited (WPPL) Board, which now oversees the Barclays Women’s Super League and Barclays Women’s Championship, previously run by the Football Association (FA). Appointed in 2019 to the then FA Women’s Championship Board – established to grow the women’s game – Dawn served during the landmark three-year broadcast deal with the BBC and Sky, delivering unprecedented access to live women’s football.

Carol Bell (1977 Natural Sciences) is Independent Non-executive Director of the Football Association of Wales (FAW). The first woman to sit on the FAW Board, Carol chairs the Finance, Audit & Risk Committee and led the review and implementation of the Association’s organisational structure, chairing the A Sustainable Association for the Future steering group. These governance reforms are central to delivering Our Wales, the FAW’s 2021–2026 Strategic Plan for Welsh Football.
 

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