Women’s football should look to LA for its future
Arsenal take on Brighton tonight as the delayed Women’s Super League gets started — ater a minute’s silence and with black armbands. While today’s game may be tinged with sadness, women’s football overall is still on a high – almost 90,000 people went to Wembley Stadium to watch England beat Germany 2-1 in the Women’s European Championship final this summer.
But it’s still not all plain sailing; and if in the belief that women’s football is on the crest of something huge you have tried to enrol your daughter in a local club – or tried to buy some kit in the atermath of this triumph — you’ll have seen there is still a long way to go.
Some 17.4 million fans were glued to that Euros 2022 final on TV, but the reality is that football-loving girls who want to play the game still feel unwelcome, not just when it comes to geting their hands on shorts, shirts, socks and boots, but in schools and clubs too. Even the elite players play and train in substandard facilities. Sarina Wiegman’s team triumphed in spite of the pitiful support they receive.
This is a pivotal point for women’s football — UEFA believes there could be 330m fans by 2033; at 575,000 the Euro tournament’s atendance was double the record set in 2017; and tens of thousands of girls were reported to have started playing the game recreationally in England. But the momentum will be lost unless we create an ambitious vision for the women’s game. We need to create a top-down and botom-up model that ensures the game is developed at all levels: the broadcast rights will reflect the brilliance of the product and the skills of the elite players, and the grassroots will be nurtured too.
This is not fantasy football. It’s already a reality in Los Angeles where teams like Angel City FC are changing the game. We only need look at the strong women involved with them — Serena Williams, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Garner and Eva Longoria – as an inspirational example of what modern sport can achieve if you rip up the old systems and start from scratch.
We need a similar blueprint for how to develop women’s football in the UK. UEFA believes that women’s football could see a sixfold increase in its commercial value over the next decade, and this is nothing like the full potential. But first, we need to think holistically rather than club by club. We need to be bold enough to wrap this up in one big revolutionary move, starting with geting the Football Association to relinquish its hold on the WSL. Every level of the football pyramid must be overhauled. At the top, we can add new brands, new tournaments, new formats — and ensure that crucial girls’ and women’s kit and apparel, designed to reflect our physiological differences and a new set of role models. Why should our top teams be constrained to Europe? We should be playing the best of the USA regularly.
Second, we should go forward with real purpose and create a league that looks ater its players — from more accessible pathways, to professionalism, to a respect for maternity rights and a removal of the stigma that prevents discussion of menstruation and performance.
Post-career support is crucial, as is supporting much-needed infrastructure for communities. We need new women-friendly clubs to tackle the drop-out rate of girls, which is far too high. Women’s football will be a sport that nurtures. The product will benefit.
Third, the broadcasting rights strategy must be coherent and, importantly, designed to reach fans of all ages. And that means games must be scheduled at a consistent time and then streamed. The Premier League helped take football from the era of crumbling male-dominated terraces to a wonderfully immersive viewer experience with the use of multiple camera angles.