Women’s football is gaining ground, but it’s an uphill battle

Christian Tolstrup Jensen
Dept. of Sport Sciences, Malmö University

The anthology Media, Communication and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup contains a great variety of studies, which as a whole show how the commonly reported progress in women’s football over the last 10–15 years have not solved all problems – far from it. Even in academia, one of the editors, Molly Yanity, finds it necessary to defend the topic when titling the introduction “Why does the coverage of Women’s soccer matter?”. The answer given, based not least on Yanity’s own experiences, is the potential for inspiration. This point proves controversial later in the book as several studies point out that coverage of women’s football and the player should go beyond “inspiring” and recognise the players as athletes.

Throughout the book, the overarching question is: who controls the narrative of women’s football? An important part of the answer is shown, if also rather implicitly, in the partition of the book into two parts with a focus on traditional media and social media respectively. Having read all the studies, the decisive difference between traditional and social media is not their different formats but their perspective. While traditional media look on women’s football from the outside, the players on the social media look on their game and the world from the inside.

The studies on the traditional media thus show that these were far from neutral disseminators of information during the world cup. In chapter 12 for instance, Francisco Buitrago Castillo undertakes a rather traditional study of how Columbian media covered the national team at the world cup. Analysing a wide range of traditional media, Castillo shows that the coverage was “basic and light” (p. 191), in itself a relevant finding showing the global variation in how women’s football is covered and a remainder of how it still is often overlooked.

The social media studies too focus on coverage beyond the field, albeit the centre mostly being the players’ use of various alternative media outlets to promote their own voices rather than scandals.

The social media studies also focus on coverage beyond the field, although the focus is primarily on the players’ use of various alternative media outlets to promote their own voices rather than scandals.

In the chapters 2, 3 and 4, the question then is not whether sport journalism takes women’s football lightly, but rather how sport journalism can paint an image of women’s football based on specific issues, conflicts or scandals rather than the game on the field.

In Chapter 2, Alexis von Mirbach, Zehua Li, and Jörg-Uwe Nieland analyse the coverage in five newspapers from Germany, USA, Nigeria, China and Brazil and show that the world cup became politized and subject to extended media attention following the Rubiales-Hermoso kissing scandal. Importantly, the players were far from the only ones taking part in the debate, in some cases preferring to focus on the game, leaving, according to the authors, the game outside the field to other agents such as FIFA. Similarly, Ornella Nzindukiyimana and Matthew Hawkins in chapter 3 show how media categorised the Canadian team as consisting of players steered by their mental state rather than complex athletes and the game as only relevant for women and for inspiring girls rather than a game that could unite the nation. Finally, in chapter 4 Katie Olsen and Mildred F. Perreault compare the coverage of three cases of sexual violence in Spanish, Haitian and Zimbabwean football around the world cup, finding that the cases from Haiti and Zimbabwe received very limited attention in the media compared to the Spanish. Further, in all the cases, the social media coverage was rare, leading to a plea for more and nuanced coverage on social media.

The social media studies also focus on coverage beyond the field, although the focus is primarily on the players’ use of various alternative media outlets to promote their own voices rather than scandals.

Studies on players’ use of ‘classic’ social media, i.e., Instagram, feature prominently in the volume with Eleni Tsalkatidou in chapter 9 concluding that they “have fully realized the potential of Instagram as a self-presentation tool” (p. 140). Both Tsalkatidou and David Pulgarin-Mesa, Olan Kees Martin Scott and Bo Li in the similar chapter 14 show how the players primarily present themselves as professional, successful athletes, an image quite different from the one painted in the traditional media. In chapter 15, Shannon Scovel and Mildred F. Perreault go a bit deeper when analysing how the US-American player Megan Rapinoe used social media to construct herself as a professional footballer but also how her success far from silenced negative voices in the comments. In chapter 5, in the section on traditional media, Jeffrey W. Kassing and Grace-Ann M. Kominak show how the Catalan player Aitana Bonmatí exercised the same control as Rapinoe, only Bonmatí did this in the traditional media, still enabling a focus on her skills with no signs of the infantilisation otherwise common in the depiction of female athletes. The obvious question, how Bonmatí managed this, however remains unanswered except for the suggestion that she provided much of the content herself, begging the question: how did she do that?

Other alternatives to traditional newspapers analysed in the book are tv-documentaries and podcasts given that these alternative outlets are important because of the agency they give to the players. In chapter 10, Brittani Sahm thus shows how podcasts on the women’s world cup bypass classic media (even if the podcast is eventually owned by a traditional media corporation) and become an outlet which focuss on the actions on the field, the game and the challenges faced by female athletes such as “lack of support from federations [or] unfair criticism” (p. 159). Similarly in chapter 11, Molly Yanity and Lindy Briggette analyse the depiction of the Australian national team in the Disney+ documentary series Matildas: The World at Our Feet as a family. Importantly, the authors show that this was a construction based on the players’ own words and the idea of a family as constituted by mutually supportive members rather than a constraining, gendered, traditional institution.

Finally, the analyses in chapters 6 and 13 of the US-American national team deliver a very strong case for why women’s football needs alternative outlets. On the one side, Brett Siegel’s analysis in chapter 6 of the team’s performance (exit in the round of 16) based on coverage in traditional media shows how especially right-wing voices were prominent in a campaign that almost wanted the team to fail due the players’ perceived break with general, traditional norms and “moral failure”, preventing the team from being generally accepted in society (cf. chapter 3 on the conditions in Canada). On the other hand, Kate Harman in chapter 13 analyses the players’ own perspective as shown on social media, which focused on gratitude, honour, pride and a trust in future growth despite the setback. An alternative stance albeit not freed from norms. As the author concludes, it was a balance between a need to appeal to the fans while “attempting not to rile up their detractors” (p. 203, cf. chapter 6).

Two chapters dedicated to the US team are also representative of a book, whose focus is Western. In addition to the aforementioned study on Columbian media, the only other main exception is Nifsha Rizwan and Adam Ehsan Ali’s study (chapter 16) of the Moroccan player Nouhaila Benzina, who wore a hijab during the tournament. Here they show not only how the debate on two North American social media channels (ESPN and TSN) had supportive posts but also how many criticised the hijab as “wholly oppressive” and how voices from Islamic milieus found Benzina’s actions regrettable. Thereby Rizwan and Ali add an intersectional perspective to the book and conclude that there is reason for “cautious optimism” regarding the future for Muslim women in sport – and women’s football I would add, from reading the book.

Conclusion

The book’s own aim is to improve media coverage of the event in 2027, and in all the contributions, there is a focus on the practical implications. In a few cases, in particular in the studies on time zones (chapter 7) and the inclusion of sport journalist students (chapter 8), the advice of future practices could even be seen as the studies’ main contributions.

For me as an academic, the anthology’s value lies in the plurality of cases, theories (both showcasing alternative approaches such as family and showcasing central ideas (Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018)) and in the diverse sources in addition to being an analysis of a particular World Cup – a source for comparison with previous and future World Cups. Regarding the latter, I missed a discussion in which the editors reflected on the studies’ findings and made comparisons between the findings here, in the parallel book, Politics, Social issues and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, to which they refer in introduction, and the study on the 2019 edition, which they also edited. But I guess that is then something for the book on the 2027 World Cup.

Copyright © Christian Tolstrup Jensen 2025

Literature

Toffoletti, K., & Thorpe, H. (2018). The athletic labour of femininity: The branding and consumption of global celebrity sportswomen on Instagram. Journal of Consumer Culture, 18(2), 298–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517747068