Ask most football fans to name the game's greatest ever goalscorer and you'll hear Cristiano Ronaldo. As of the 2026 World Cup, Ronaldo sits on 976 career goals for club and country, the most in the history of men's football. A working-class winger from St Helens, playing in an era with no professional contracts, no television deals and, for most of her career, no official recognition at all, is still narrowly ahead of him.

Her name was Lily Parr. She scored an estimated 986 goals across a 32-year playing career, was banned from FA grounds at just 16, and kept playing regardless for another three decades. Today she has a statue outside the National Football Museum, the first ever built for a female footballer in the UK. For most of the twentieth century, almost nobody outside Preston knew her name.

A Working-Class Girl With a Rocket of a Left Foot

Lilian Parr was born on 26 April 1905 in St Helens, Lancashire, the fourth of seven children.^[1][2] Her older brothers taught her to play both football and rugby on a stretch of waste ground near home, and by her early teens she could reportedly score from almost anywhere on the pitch.^[3][4] She grew to be close to six feet tall, a striking, powerfully built teenager in an era that expected girls to take up needlework, not football.^[3][5]

In 1919, at 14 years old, Parr signed for St Helens Ladies.^[4] It was meant to be the start of a local career. It turned out to be an audition nobody had planned.

Discovered By Accident

In her second match for St Helens, the team came up against Dick, Kerr Ladies, the Preston munitions-factory side that would go on to become the biggest name in English women's football. St Helens lost 6–1, but Parr's performance caught the eye of Dick, Kerr's manager, Alfred Frankland, who invited her to move to Preston and join his squad.^[4][6] The offer came with a job at the Dick, Kerr & Co. factory, lodgings with a teammate, and 10 shillings for every match she played.^[7]

She started out at full-back before Frankland moved her to outside left, the position that would make her name.^[8] A local newspaper reporting on her early performances wrote that there was probably no greater football prodigy in the whole country.^[7]

The Most Prolific Goalscorer of Her Generation

Parr's first season with Dick, Kerr Ladies produced 43 goals.^[9][10] Her second produced 108.^[10][11] Over a career that ran from 1919 to 1951, first with Dick, Kerr Ladies and then their successor club, Preston Ladies, the National Football Museum credits her with 986 goals in total.^[9][10]

She was part of the Dick, Kerr Ladies squad that drew a crowd of 53,000 to Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920, still regarded as one of the largest crowds ever recorded for a women's club match.^[15]

England's First International Star

In April 1920, Parr played in what's widely considered the first women's international football match, when Dick, Kerr Ladies, representing England, beat a French representative side 2–0 at Deepdale in Preston, in front of a crowd of 25,000.^[16][17] Dick, Kerr Ladies went on to tour France later that year, playing further matches in Paris, Roubaix, Le Havre and Rouen.^[18]

Banned, But Never Beaten

Parr was just 16 when the Football Association banned women's football from its member grounds in December 1921, ruling the sport "unsuitable for females."^[19] The decision threatened to end her career before it had properly begun. It didn't. Dick, Kerr Ladies, later renamed Preston Ladies after losing the backing of the factory, kept playing wherever they could find a pitch, touring the United States and Canada and continuing to draw crowds abroad even as support at home dried up.^[20][21]

Parr trained as a nurse and went to work at Whittingham Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Lancashire, using her wages to support the football career the FA had tried to shut down.^[13][22] She kept playing for Preston Ladies until 1951, when she was 45 years old, three decades after the ban that was supposed to have finished her.^[9][22]

A Life Lived on Her Own Terms

While working at Whittingham Hospital, Parr met her partner, Mary, and the two lived together for the rest of Parr's life.^[13] Parr has since been recognised as an LGBT icon, remembered for a life lived openly and on her own terms at a time when that came at real personal cost.^[23]

Parr died in 1978 at the age of 73, after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and is buried in St Helens.^[9][10]

Recognition, Decades Later

In 2002, Lily Parr became the first woman inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame, among its inaugural class of honourees.^[9][24] In 2019, the museum unveiled a life-sized bronze statue of Parr, the first statue of a female footballer ever erected in the UK, sculpted by Hannah Stewart and commissioned to coincide with that year's FIFA Women's World Cup.^[24][25] A permanent gallery dedicated to her life and legacy opened at the museum in 2021.^[26]

Why We Tell This Story

At Hero Athletica, we talk a lot about why girls drop out of sport and how to keep them in it. Lily Parr's story is the sharpest possible answer to why that fight matters. She was one of the best goalscorers football has ever seen, and for most of her life almost nobody outside her hometown knew it, because the sport she loved was taken away from women just as she was becoming a star.

She kept playing anyway, for 32 years, on whatever pitch would have her. Every girl lacing up boots today is playing a game Lily Parr helped keep alive when the people running it tried to take it away.