Soccer History | National Football Museum — Britain's First Statue of a Woman Footballer

When Lily Parr's statue was unveiled in June 2019 it was the first statue of a woman footballer in Britain. The Football Association counted 110 statues of male players.

Parr was born in St Helens in 1905, the fourth of seven children, and was playing for Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston at around fourteen. She was close to six feet tall, left-footed, and a heavy smoker.

She died in 1978, aged 73, and is buried in St Helens. In 2002 she became the first woman inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame.

Her numbers need handling.

Her career total appears as 986 goals across 32 years in the museum's own fact file, and as nearly a thousand in most retellings, including elsewhere on the museum's own site.

Her first season is worse. One account gives 43 goals, another 108.

The museum's page about her puts the 1920 Goodison Park crowd at around 46,000. Its separate account of that match, and every other source, says 53,000.

Then there is the story everyone tells. A male goalkeeper is said to have doubted her, challenged her to beat him from the penalty spot, and had his arm broken by the shot.

The National Football Museum states it as fact. No version of it names the goalkeeper, the date, or the match.

It may well have happened. Nothing about it has ever been pinned down, and that is worth knowing before repeating it.

What is documented carries her anyway. She played in the first recognised women's international, when Dick, Kerr Ladies representing England beat France 4-0 in 1920. She went on playing through the Football Association's fifty-year ban on women using its members' grounds.

After football she trained as a nurse and worked in a psychiatric hospital. She was openly gay.

The statue is a life-size bronze by Hannah Stewart — some accounts spell the surname Stuart — commissioned by the confectionery company Mars. A permanent display about Parr opened at the museum in 2021, and in 2023 the New York Times gave her one of its Overlooked obituaries.

One practical note. The 2019 reports describe the statue standing outside the museum. The photograph here, taken in July 2025, shows it indoors among the displays, so check before making a trip for it specifically.

Sources: National Football Museum; BBC; Wikipedia; Smithsonian Magazine; Euronews; Football v Homophobia.

Cover photo: Hmickey, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dick, Kerr Ladies team photograph, 1923: author unrecorded, public domain. Both via Wikimedia Commons.