When Yasmin Hussain was 13, her dad sat her down and told her she had to stop playing football.
It wasn't that he was against it. He'd watched her play with her older brother and his friends for years. She was the only girl. She loved it. But her brother had his GCSEs and couldn't go with her anymore, and her dad was worried. A 13-year-old girl, the only one among 14 or 15 boys, with no supervision.
"He said, you know, it's time you find a club to play in. A safe environment, a female coach," Yasmin told Jordan Elgott and Rohan Anand on the latest episode of The Grassroots Hotline. "This was over 25 years ago. There was nothing around."
No girls' teams. No female coaches. School didn't offer girls' football. She joined the netball club instead, not because she wanted to, but because it was the only sport with a female environment. And football, the thing that had brought her more joy than anything else in her childhood, was gone.
For 20 years.
"Something was missing"
Yasmin got married, had children young, moved from Manchester to London. Life was full, but the gap was always there.
When her youngest turned six and all her kids were in school, the loneliness hit.
"My husband was at work. My family were all in Manchester. I had my daughter when I was 20. I was a young mum. I struggled to make friends down here. I went to university and no one would ask me out because I had a baby to get back to. It was a really tough time."
The only thing she knew would bring the joy back was football. Then she came across Muslim Sports Association on Facebook, advertising a female coaching course. She called her husband over.
"I said, look, there's a coaching course. I want to do that. He knows I'm football mad. He said yeah, I can see you doing that. I said, no, no, I don't want to do it for the coaching badge. If I'm doing it, I need to go all the way. You either support me or I will do it."
There was one space left. She got it.
"I lacked knowledge. I looked completely different. And I was terrified."
The coaching course taught Yasmin how to be engaging and how to handle safeguarding. It didn't teach her how to coach football.
"They don't teach you the technical things. I didn't even know what part of the foot you should be dribbling the ball with. I played football, but you just kicked it. No one taught you the technique."
Her first placement was coaching boys at Frenford. She was a hijab-wearing Muslim woman walking into an environment where nobody looked like her, delivering sessions she didn't feel equipped to run, in front of parents who stared.
"Not only am I looking different, I had no confidence to deliver anything. I'm stood there, tense. I thought, is this for me? Am I doing the right thing?"
A turning point came when the head of youth football at Frenford sensed she was struggling and pointed her towards a Wildcats session at another club. It was girls' football, focused on fun rather than technique. That was where Yasmin found her voice.
"The girls looked at you as a role model. They kept asking me, coach, can you show us? Whereas the boys' sessions didn't value me. Not because I couldn't deliver, but because I didn't know anything and they could sense it."
She built her confidence there, then carried it back into Frenford, where she and Muslim Sports Association shared the same vision: getting more women into football, especially from diverse communities. Frenford & MSA Women FC was formed in 2017.
From 6 players to over 100 girls
The early days were hard. When the club entered the Super Fives women's league, they had six players. Yasmin had to sacrifice trips to Manchester during half term because if she didn't show up, the team wouldn't have enough for substitutes.
"If I didn't go, it was like, if you're not going, I'm not going. And then the team falls apart."
They were entered in the wrong division. Beginners playing against experienced teams. Losing heavily. But the club didn't do trials and didn't turn anyone away. Word spread.
"When people found out, our inbox was getting full. Can we join? Can we join? We ended up from one team to three teams. Now we have an 11-a-side team as well."
Today, over 100 girls play at Frenford & MSA. Yasmin coaches across five different schools, delivering free football for girls. The club has nine female coaches. They run Wildcats sessions, school leagues for primary and secondary girls, and competitive teams in the Greater London league.
None of it would have happened without her husband. For three years before Yasmin was offered a paid role, she volunteered. Her husband took a day off work every week to look after the kids so she could coach. He lost a day's wages and had to pay someone to cover him at his business.
"I don't credit him enough. But a lot of people ask how I do it, and I don't think it would be possible if he didn't support me all the way."
The sports hijab and the phone call that changed everything
The moments Yasmin is proudest of aren't trophies or coaching badges. They're the barriers she's helped remove.
At one school, on International Women's Day, she was talking to a group of girls about football. A teacher asked why more of them didn't play. One girl put her hand up and said her biggest fear was her hijab falling off during PE. It stopped her from playing in lessons, let alone joining a club.
Yasmin's solution was simple: a sports hijab, added to the school uniform policy. The school implemented it. Girls who had never played started playing.
"Such a simple solution. But it removed barriers for so many girls."
Then there was a girl who came through the free football sessions Yasmin runs at a local school. She wanted to play for Frenford but wasn't sure her dad would allow it. She asked Yasmin to call him.
"Her dad said, look, I want her to play. But my biggest fear is I don't want her wearing shorts and a t-shirt. And I said, who said she has to?"
It was a short conversation. Yasmin understood the cultural needs because she came from the same background. She explained that the club accommodated those needs and that fixtures stopped for prayer times. Her dad said yes.
That girl went from never having kicked a ball to becoming the club's top goalscorer, eighth in the whole league. She started her coaching journey with Yasmin, and at 18 she now leads sessions at Frenford. She started her football journey at exactly the age Yasmin had been forced to stop hers.
"I'd give it up a hundred times"
Yasmin recently completed her UEFA B coaching licence. The reaction online stunned her. Over 2,000 likes. Messages from women across the country who knew how hard the journey was.
Two years before earning it, she didn't know what a full-back was. She went to West Ham for six months to observe their academy coaches. She learned formations, units, and tactics from scratch. When her under-16s first entered the 11-a-side league, neither she nor the players knew positions. Her first tactic was parking the bus.
"We were losing. I said, right, low block, everyone just get back. But then we'd leave and I'd think, why are you two so far apart? Close the gap. And then we started to lose less. The girls were celebrating like, oh, it's only 5-0 this week."
She created her own coaching philosophy around the word RISE: Resilience, Integrity, Support, Enjoyment.
When asked what she'd say to her 13-year-old self, the girl who was told she had to stop, Yasmin didn't hesitate.
"I'd say the sacrifice you made is going to be all worth it. Because if I look at how many girls are playing now, I'd give it up a hundred times."
Listen to Yasmin's full conversation with Jordan Elgott and Rohan Anand on The Grassroots Hotline.
