Women’s game has to be more than a warm-up act

ARSENAL will have been disappointed at the response to their first double header between the women’s and men’s teams, but what did they expect? Who wants to sit in a stadium watching football for five hours, no matter who is playing? This isn’t just about the women’s game. Double header matches rarely work because fans don’t want to hang around that long. They like the game in short bursts. It isn’t NFL, or cricket, where people come in for the afternoon, or the best part of a day, and stadium facilities are geared to the long haul. So when Arsenal’s women kicked off a friendly with Bayern Munich at 12.30pm — with the men’s match against Lyon beginning at 3.15pm — they did so before a largely empty stadium. Had the fixtures been reversed they would have encountered a different twist on the same problem. When England’s women used to follow the men on to the pitch at Twickenham most of the capacity crowd hopped it to the bar. That’s what rugby fans want. A couple of hours of the sport, the same again for a jolly-up. Crowds cannot just be manufactured. Chelsea plan to give away all tickets for their Women’s Super League match with Tottenham on September 8 and are expecting a ‘sell-out’. But how can it be a sell-out when nothing is sold? How can the worth of the women’s game be established if tickets are free? One-off stunts are no replacement for organic growth, building a fan base, small at first but loyal and steadily growing. Boxing needs an undercard; football doesn’t. The majority of fans don’t want to hang around all day; and women’s teams need their own identity, not a job as a warm-up act.