Spain leads way as crowds flock to women’s game
Using La Liga grounds is attracting big numbers, write Katie Whyatt and Molly Mcelwee
There is a revolution going on in Spanish football, and it has nothing to do with the previously untouchable Real Madrid being so unceremoniously dumped out of the Champions League this month.
Last Saturday, Atletico Madrid and Barcelona set an attendance record for a European top-flight domestic women’s game when 60,739 flooded the Wanda Metropolitano, the home of Atletico.
Yet, remarkably, it did not even represent that much of a surprise. In January, 48,121 attended Athletic Bilbao’s cup game against Atletico at the San Mames, the club’s main stadium – a bigger attendance than for any of Athletic Bilbao men’s team home games this season. Three days later, 21,234 came to Real Sociedad’s Anoeta stadium in San Sebastian to watch the Basque derby between Real and Athletic.
In England, the development of the women’s game has been hamstrung not only by the Football Association ban that lasted half a century, but teams being removed from their club’s main stadium: Reading, for example, play at Wycombe Wanderers’ Adams Park, 26.3 miles from the Madejski, but their attendances have boomed when they have had the chance to play in Reading.
Yet the recent events in Spain reflect a perfect cocktail that transcends geography.
“The main target for Athletic Bilbao was to make women’s football visible,” Maria Tato, deputy secretary of the club and the person responsible for running the women’s team, tells The Daily Telegraph. “In less than a month, we got the women to play in the main stadium. To make that possible, we started a social movement, attracting all clubs from many different sports to see how well women could play.
“It was as simple as asking for support for the football society. We wanted to show them that women’s football is competitive and attractive – and society responded.”
Most significant of all, however, are clubs’ and fans’ attitudes to what a women’s team represent. The leading sides in Spain have capitalised on the connection between the men’s team and their supporters to ensure women’s sides are not perceived as an arbitrary arm of the club but central to what they represent.
“The feelings for Athletic Club is something beyond the taste for football,” says Tato. “It goes further. It’s passion, a way to see and understand things, a different way to manage things. To get that, you need to visualise what Basque country means. Here, there’s a different way of understanding everything. We use our minds and hearts at the same time.
“Athletic Club supporters have a lot of heart – they are very passionate. It’s a strong feeling of belonging that is transmitted from parents to children, and from football fans to those who are not.
“But we don’t want this to be a day-long thing: we have the intent to make it habitual for women to play in San Mames, officially. But the key is not the size of stadium, but the image and idea that are transferred to the public: the feelings for the club, of equality.
“We have received many requests to try out and imitate our initiative and we will do our best to make this movement contagious and spread it all over Europe and throughout the world.”
It is arguable, too, that the Spanish are two or three steps ahead of English football as far as publicity is concerned. Prior to the Barcelona game, Atletico Madrid plastered local buses with players’ faces. In England, the League Cup final, at Bramall Lane in Sheffield, was scarcely publicised and so drew just 2,424.
“The fact that two such huge attendances were recorded in the Basque country is no coincidence,” says Chantal Rayes, a Spanish football journalist. “When you ally this regional pride with a good marketing and communication strategy, success is guaranteed.
“Athletic Club and Real Sociedad spent weeks promoting the games on their channels, interviewing the players, creating videos and making continuous calls to arms to their fans. By contrast, fewer than 9,000 fans went to the recent Spain v United States friendly in Alicante, for which promotion was far less extensive.”
Spain does not have a monopoly on good news. The £10million sponsorship of the Women’s Super League by Barclays should cement England’s status as an appealing destination for top players, given it was already Europe’s only fullyprofessional women’s league. Spain lags behind, even if – as Barca’s Toni Duggan says – the standard is technically “far superior”.
“The Spanish league is on the road towards professionalisation,” says Jorge Vilda, the Spanish FA’S technical director and head coach of the Spanish women’s national team. “There are professional teams competing in it: Barcelona and Atletico Madrid. The overall standard is improving every year, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement before it’s among the best in the world.”
Manchester City, the English side most integrated with their men’s club, mirror Barcelona in other ways. “The men’s fans support the women’s team naturally in Barcelona and I had the same at City,” Duggan says. “We’re all under one umbrella.
“We were in LA this year [for the pre-season tour], integrated with the men, which is a massive step. The president would be with us, then with them, watching them train. It’s just one club.
“The fans are so passionate – even if there’s 1,000 people, they’ll have flares. And then there’s the way they promote it. It’s on TV every week, it’s all over the news, the games are live. That is a different level to England.”
‘We will do our best to make this contagious and spread it all over Europe’