Name for extra girls footballers on birthday playing cards

Efforts to advertise girls’s sport are being undermined by a scarcity of birthday playing cards that includes feminine footballers, a bunch of MPs has claimed.

They’re urging producers and retailers to promote extra playing cards celebrating feminine soccer gamers to encourage younger girls to take up sport.

Liberal Democrat MP Helen Maguire tabled a movement within the Home of Commons to lift her issues and name for motion.

She instructed the BBC the business was “not transferring with the instances” and may do extra to advertise gender equality in sport.

A greetings card producer mentioned extra playing cards that includes feminine soccer stars could be showing in shops quickly, on account of client demand.

Maguire mentioned she determined to desk an Early Day Movement within the Commons after making an attempt to purchase a birthday card for her workplace supervisor “who’s a large soccer fan”.

“I appeared on the women’ part and there have been no sporty ones. The one ones I may discover had been within the male part,” she instructed BBC Information.

The MP for Epsom and Ewell mentioned she “ended up shopping for a card with a male footballer on it”.

Her EDM has been signed by 12 different MPs, together with fellow Lib Dems, two Inexperienced Get together MPs and the DUP’s Jim Shannon.

Requested if the movement was a very good use of taxpayers’ cash, notably when it was straightforward to purchase playing cards that includes girls footballers on-line, she mentioned MPs wanted to maintain selling girls’s sport.

“Hopefully it’ll assist teenage women to recognise that sport is an effective factor,” she added.

Daniel Prince, managing director of Danilo Promotions, which manufactures formally licensed greetings playing cards and calendars for soccer golf equipment, mentioned they had been eager to advertise girls’s sport.

“The rise in feminine soccer has clearly created client demand, and on the again of the success of our feminine soccer calendars we’re additional growing our card vary.

“Extra playing cards that includes feminine soccer stars can be showing in a serious excessive road retailer later this yr.”

Maguire’s EDM says “the under-representation of feminine athletes” in greetings playing cards and different merchandise “undermines efforts to advertise gender equality in sports activities” and urges firms to “encourage the following technology of feminine athletes”.

EDMs are utilized by MPs to attract consideration to points, and they’re by no means debated and infrequently result in new legal guidelines.

MPs desk hundreds of EDMs yearly on an unlimited vary of topics, though some have argued the price of printing and processing them can’t be justified.