A life-size bronze statue of Lily Parr was unveiled outside the National Football Museum in Manchester, the first statue of a woman footballer in the UK.
On 3 June 2019, a life-size bronze statue of Lily Parr was unveiled outside the National Football Museum in Manchester, becoming widely recognised as the first statue of a woman footballer erected in the United Kingdom.
The statue depicts Parr in her playing kit, striking her famously powerful left-footed shot, and was created to permanently honour her status as one of the greatest and most influential footballers — male or female — in English history. Its unveiling came amid a surge of renewed public interest in women's football, fuelled by the growing success of the England women's national team and increasing recognition of the sport's suppressed early history.
The statue's placement outside a major national museum, rather than in a peripheral or purely commemorative site, signalled an institutional shift toward treating women's football history as integral to the story of English football as a whole. It served as a powerful visual corrective to decades in which women's contributions to the sport had been marginalised or erased, particularly following the FA's 1921 ban that had curtailed official recognition of the women's game for nearly fifty years.
The unveiling generated significant international media coverage, reintroducing Parr's story — including her status as an early LGBTQ+ icon and one of the first openly gay figures in British sport — to new generations, and cementing her legacy as a foundational figure in the modern women's football movement.