Carol Wilson (footballer)

Carol Wilson grew up in Newcastle, England. Her father had played for Gateshead A.F.C. Youth, and fostered her interest in football: he encouraged her to walk as a child by kicking a football down the lane, and passed with her on the sidelines of Sunday league games they attended. She had informally played football with neighbour boys in back lanes from about the age of five, but would hide if other people came by as they mocked her for joining in. When she was eight, the family moved to a house that was next to a field, and she would practice on it with her father. A poor family, they would stand outside St James' Park to listen to the crowd when Newcastle United played, as they could never afford to go in. After going to the 1971 Women's World Cup, Wilson was invited to a reception with Newcastle United and took her father. With girls disallowed from playing football, she could not play in school but maintained her interest as she grew up. She joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the age of seventeen, as a physical training instructor.

At the age of eighteen, in the RAF, Wilson would spend lunch playing five-a-side football with male colleagues, and they often had the courts to themselves; a girls' football team played next to them one time, with a scout watching that game. The scout instead took interest in Wilson, and afterwards asked a senior officer to speak with her. She was invited to trial in Luton, then to join Harry Batt's team in the Sunday league, and, not long afterwards, to join an unofficial England squad being put together to play FIEFF 1971 Women's World Cup qualifiers in Sicily and, if successful, the tournament finals in Mexico. Wilson was granted leave from the Ministry of Defence to play, but told she could not tell people her role and had to pretend to be a teacher from Liverpool.

The Women's Football Association (WFA) did not support professionalism of women's football, nor did they want manager Harry Batt to take his scouted teams to the World Cup, blacklisting his family and teams; with this, the FA ban on women still in place, and her new husband making her feel humiliated for playing, Wilson did not continue to play and did not talk about football again for years. She later admitted that she would have liked to play professionally abroad or for England again. The WFA were in the process of establishing a formal England women's team during 1971, which would debut the following year.

Wilson went on to work in logistics for Wincanton plc. She and her 1971 teammates held a reunion in 2019 and started a petition to have their team officially recognised by the FA.

Carol Wilson (born June 1952) is a British former amateur footballer. She captained an unofficial England women's national football team — calling themselves the "British Independents", now known as the "Lost Lionesses" — in 1971, including at the 1971 Women's World Cup in Mexico.