It’s the day before the 2023 Women’s FA Cup Final in England, and The Guardian tells me that a sold out Wembley Stadium ‘establishes a national ritual’. It’s part of the self-congratulatory tale we like to tell ourselves about women’s sport, and especially about women’s football in England. And there is no doubt, the shift in the coverage of women’s football, its profile, and its wider public engagement is impressive. What’s more, in social change terms it has been surprisingly rapid.
The story prompted me to remember two undergraduate student dissertations from the early 2000s. The first, focusing on experiences of English professional women footballers, led us to an ethical quandary. There is an expectation in academic social science research that participants will be assured anonymity (there are some exceptions, but anonymity is the norm). In this case it was farcical to try do so – the total number of women professional footballers at the time was so small that even the most casual of observers would easily have identified most of the participants, especially the women of colour.
The second looked at the media coverage of a Women’s FA Cup final (I don’t have a copy and I forget which year, but it was either 2002 or 2003). The match was played before an audience of less than 4000. Two things have stuck with me over the years, alongside the exceptional quality of this undergraduate project. First, if we had wanted to watch the coverage on TV (it was free to air on the BBC, no subscription channel was going to pay for it), we had to change channels at half time. Second, the in-ground coverage was so poor because of an insufficient number of cameras that there is no footage of one of the goals!
These two pieces of student work suggest that the ‘we’ve come a long way in a short time’ narrative has some justification, and it does. The recognition of women’s footballing success is impressive and (quite) loud – although still not as loud as the noise about English men’s footballers’ spectacular failures. And that’s telling.
Nor should we under-rate the cultural shifts associated with the rise of women’s football. I recall the sense of wonder at how the game might be when visiting a football stadium in Malmö one Tuesday evening about 10 (or 11) years ago for a women’s match. There we found several thousand people, up to half of whom were t(w)eenage girls and young women, and a stadium experience almost totally devoid of the aggressive masculinity the game evoked for me based on my experience of the English men’s game. More recently, I look at the excitement my 6 year old grand-daughter shows about her first outing to professional football, joining about 45,000 other people at the Emirates for a local derby. That attendance was, however, very much a one-off at a match between neighbouring north London clubs, with overlapping catchment areas, and that had invested a great deal of time and effort in promoting this game as a family event. Similarly, I have noticed that her 9 year old brother uses the second person collective ‘we’ when referring to both Arsenal’s men’s and women’s teams, even as he favours the men. It’s these little things in language that suggest big change.
What we’re not seeing in this media coverage and discussion is any significant exploration of the precariousness of these changes. There’s a small but growing field of academic work that is beginning to make clear a sense of this precariousness. This is a growing group with foundations laid mainly by women such as historians including Jean Williams and Gary James and sociologists including Stacey Pope and more recently Ali Bowes. Many of these scholars are engaging with both government and football’s corporate leadership, pushing them to address those questions. Elsewhere, the game’s public intellectuals are ensuring this precariousness is at least spoken of. This is a group, again mainly of women, including former players Alex Clark and Eni Aluko, or more tangentially connected voices such as Michelle Moore.
But many of these discussions are reduced to the all-too-shallow, despite the best efforts of these critical voices. They become celebrations of numbers and trumpet blowing about the Women’s Super League, but with too little attention paid to opportunity across the game as a whole. The mundane, banal racism Eni Aluko exposed seems to have been passed off as no longer an issue after a change in personnel, marginalising its structural presence and pervasive character.
My not so hidden sceptic can’t help but wonder 
how important promotion of the women’s game is to the football establishment in mitigating the recognition of the sport’s pervasive misogyny and toxic masculinity. It conjures a perverse sense of sportwashing sport. These characteristics appear above the parapet from time to time – in discussions of sexual violence, the reluctance of elite men players to don their rainbow laces for Pride Week (the Pride Armbands for last year’s Men’s World Cup might signal a shift in that, but it’s hard not to suspect a not-so-subtle orientalism if not racism in that tactic – it’s not only Qatar that can be accused of sportwashing at that World Cup), or outrage when the male space of Match of the Day punditry is chipped away at. These are further signs of the precariousness women’s football.
I really do want to think that the women’s game is secure, that its precariousness is in my imagination, but however far the elite women’s game has come since my students’ dissertations 20 or so years ago, these are just the first few steps on a long road. Steps the game at lower levels seems to have barely taken. Returning to my starting point – The Guardian, on a Saturday morning. It has a 16 page sport section. Over half of that (8-10 pages is not uncommon) is frequently turned over to elite football. If women’s football gets more than half of one of those pages it’s a good week for the game.
I can’t help but think that the measure of improvement in the media coverage, and more general acceptance, of women’s football (and perhaps sport generally) is not coverage when women’s teams are winning, but the same level of coverage when they’re losing – if that’s good enough for the chaps…. The Women’s FA Cup might be becoming a national ritual, but (with apologies to the RSPCA), the game’s not just for a day in mid-May.
