Biography | Mark Bullingham — The Night Wembley Hosted the Lionesses' First Major Title

On 31 July 2022 England beat Germany 2–1 after extra time in the UEFA Women's Euro 2022 final at Wembley Stadium.

Ella Toone scored in normal time. Lina Magull equalised. Chloe Kelly won it from a corner with ten minutes of extra time left.

The crowd was 87,192, a record for any European Championship match, men's or women's.

It was the first major trophy for the Lionesses and the first for a senior England side since 1966.

Mark Bullingham was three years into the FA chief executive's job. The Association had hosted the tournament across England. The final was played in the stadium that also houses its offices.

The next morning he went on BBC Breakfast and described the month as extraordinary. He said the win would accelerate the work already under way in the women's game, and that there was no reason girls should not play in the same numbers as boys.

Those remarks are paraphrased from the broadcast, as reported by the Independent and the Guardian on 1 August 2022.

The players did the winning. The FA's job that night was to put a full Wembley under them and to keep the building open for what followed: more WSL fixtures in large grounds, a promised statue of the squad in the stadium footprint, and a public argument that the women's game had moved from a project to a crowd.

Wembley on that Sunday was not an abstract headquarters. It was a sold-out bowl in late-July light.

A visitor standing on Olympic Way still meets the same arch the crowd walked under that evening.

Photo: Arne Müeseler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons