The Grannies’ World Cup:
Showcasing the strength of the world's older women
When people talk about matriarchs, I am not sure they think of a soccer-playing African grandmother who, raised by strong women during hard times, has been raising her grandchildren because their parents died from AIDS.
But that is a picture I can’t get out of my mind now that I have read and seen so many stories about the Grannies World Cup - and the women who take to the field to play soccer as a way to both escape daily hard work and stay fit.
In South Africa, about 40% of the children live with their grandparents - in 2023, that was 10 million in total. And many of those grandparents are women - gogos, as they are known. For years, grandmothers in the rest of the world have reached out to these amazing women to offer encouragement and practical support.
And since the COVID epidemic, the idea of grandparents raising their orphaned grandchildren has become something known in North America, too. In 2021, 2.33 million US children were being raised by their grandmother and 1.3 million by their grandfather.
But the idea of grannies soccer seems to be not nearly as well known as it should be. And there are so many wonderful aspects of it. About how it grew out of sharing between young and old, between older women from many countries, and - as always with the stories of the grandmothers - how women reached out to each other to share their burdens and resources.
The grandmothers to grandmothers campaign started by the Stephen Lewis Foundation in 2003 has been mobilizing older women in Canada (and others, too, of course) to provide that support to African grandmothers who had become the face of AIDS in Africa. I have written about it several times, most recently about how the USAID cuts were hitting that work.
Early on, I had been inspired by the story of the Wakefield Grannies and how they came to be connected to the grandmothers of Alexandra Township in South Africa. Inspired by serendipity, it is a story of how a group of gray haired women changed the world for another group of gray haired women who lived far away.
I didn’t know then about the grannies’ soccer phenomenon, although it was happening at much the same time.
It started with Beka Ntsanwisi, a 57-year-old Tzaneen gospel radio host who had begun to encourage people to talk about HIV/AIDS. The ‘slimming disease” was tearing through northern South Africa but no one wanted to talk about it. (Not that different from how North Americans talked about opioid addiction early on.)
She was especially troubled by the silent struggle of many older women, who had watched their adult children die in front of their eyes and were now raising grandchildren who had been orphaned or left at home when their parents went to work in big cities.
“They were caring for the entire society, she thought, but who was looking out for them?”
It was in 2007, when Beka was recovering from cancer and going for slow walks with a few older people from her neighbourhood, that the idea of a way to help appeared.
One day, walking past a soccer field where teenage boys were playing, a ball rolled to one of the women’s feet. She swung at it and missed. Laughter ensured. But the teenage boys then showed the women how to pass and dribble, and the next day, one of the women called Beka and asked when they could play again. “I’ve never slept so well,” she said.
The timing was good. South Africa was getting ready to host the 2010 World Cup, the country was soccer-mad, and a new stadium was being built at the edge of Polokwane. The idea of grannies starting a team of their own seemed to suit the time.
Beka found some sponsors, and the league spread to dozens of neighborhoods and villages across the region, largely by word of mouth. It was not long before players from Vakhegula Vakhegula FC – which translates to Grandmothers Grandmothers Football Club – were traveling the world as ambassadors for older women in sports. As they played in the United States, Brazil, and France, they found an international community of women for whom age was no obstacle to playing.
It was in the run-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup that Jean Duffy, an engineer from Somerville, Massachusetts, came across a news story about Ntsanwisi’s work.
She had been playing in what she and her teammates half-jokingly called “soccer for soccer moms.” Many of them had coached and watched their kids in youth leagues.
Duffy and her teammates got in touch with Beka and five months later, a team of South Africans — many of whom had traveled farther on the bus ride to the Johannesburg airport than they ever had before — arrived in Massachusetts for the Veterans Cup, a national tournament for older players.
Beka made a promise to herself on that trip, which Duffy recounts in her book, Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World. One day, she would bring the world to them.
And more than a decade later in 2023, the inaugural Grannies International (GIFT) kicked off at the soccer stadium down the road from Beka's childhood home in the Tzaneen township of Nkowankowa, featuring teams from six countries. The women from Massachusetts were among those teams.
You can get a sense of what it’s like via the BBC’s report from the 2025 tournament, which attracted a dozen teams, or the WION report.
The South Africans have done something extremely powerful for older women worldwide, as the Boston Globe marvelled.
“Since arriving in Tzaneen, they’ve been treated like professionals, marching onto the pitch to the chords of the FIFA anthem, an American flag held high in the air in front of them. The stands have been packed. “She’s the USA’s Messi,” the commentator exclaims during one game as Breakers’ forward Pam Woodworth shoots past three opponents with quick, tight dribbles.’
“The difference — one of them anyway — between the Argentine legend and the American, formerly of Newton and now living in New York, is more than three decades. Woodworth, who pulls her bright white hair in a ponytail, is 72. One-third of the Breakers lineup is over 70, and none is younger than 50. And this is not the FIFA World Cup — it’s the Grannies International Football Tournament.”
It is something that has grown out of the powerful spirit of Africa’s gogos.
Fikile Sithole, who was raised by her gogo from the age of 7 and was one of the members of the first women’s national team in South Africa in the 1990s, says there was no more important person than her grandmother in her childhood.
Her granny was "a mother, a father, [and] a grandmother at the same time." And when Sithole wanted to join a boys' soccer team in her neighborhood in Soweto, near Johannesburg, her grandmother didn't tell her that wasn't what girls did. She supported her. She is "why I am where I am today," she explained. "Why I am a strong woman."