In the Netherlands, there is an enormous increase in girls’ participation in football, both in official clubs and in other, more ‘unorganised’ sports spaces such as playgrounds and football courts, especially amongst girls with migrant and Muslim backgrounds. Girls’ increasing football participation challenges the dominant idea of football as a men’s sport. Furthermore, Muslim girls’ football participation plays against the backdrop of an increased problematisation of the presence of Muslim citizens in Dutch public spaces. However, in current feminist and anthropological studies, leisure and sports are not central topics. This dissertation discusses how power and difference, converged through gender, ethnicity, and religion, play out in girls’ football and in public playgrounds in a Dutch neighbourhood, and how girls challenge these power structures and inequalities by playing football. The ethnographic research took place in public playgrounds in the Netherlands, mostly in the Schilderswijk in The Hague with a self-organised girls’ football competition. Theoretically, I argue that conceptualisations of religion and Islam in feminist intersectionality scholarship, in studies of religious women’s agency, and in studies of Muslim women and sport do not correspond to the anthropological lived realities that are at the core of this dissertation. These studies either look at Islam as a form of racialisation and as embedded in macrostructures of power, or at Islam through the eyes of pious women in explicitly religious spaces. As such, they fail to understand religious difference and Islam within spaces and bodies that are not always explicitly or primarily religious, as is the case with the football girls in my research. First, I show that despite a growing participation of girls in football, public football playgrounds are still dominantly constructed as masculine. Furthermore, the gendered construction of the playground intersects with racialised constructions of public sports space, and with implicit secular norms ...