10 million quid is a game changer...

THE beauty of 10 million quid is that it’s finite. You can count it. You can see it. You can spend it. So the money invested in the Women’s Super League by Barclays is worth a thousand trumped-up stories about 60,000 attendances, when half the crowd gets in for nothing. At the weekend 60,739 fans filled the Wanda Metropolitano stadium for a women’s game between Atletico Madrid and Barcelona. Yet the real figure — and it is still a good one — is 26,912. That is the number that paid for tickets priced between £4.30 and £8.60. Yet Atletico women’s gates in the five games before that were 442, 467, 346, 1,085 and 216. So this was a one-off event to watch the best women’s team in Spain play at home in a huge stadium, with free entry for Atletico season ticket holders and kids and heavily promoted so that 56 per cent of tickets were given away. It would be like taking the crowd that lines the Thames to watch the Boat Race as indicative of the weekly interest in the Cambridge University rowing team. The Barclays money is so much more than that. It affords proper funding, and incentives, it allows clubs to build, quickly but organically, and raises the potential for a significant broadcast contract, because it is now a league that means business. This has the potential to change women’s football in a way free tickets cannot, because letting fans in for nothing suggests your project is not worth paying for; whereas 10 million quid says it is. And then people notice. What can draw enduring crowds to the women’s game is evidence of quality, not charity.