“No-one’s interested in women’s football.” Tell that to the huge crowds at the World Cup in Australia.
At the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, women’s football is finally getting the attention it deserves. But why did it take so long? Newsrooms that ignored the sport for decades must take some of the blame.
It was a throwaway comment from a long-gone newsroom meeting, one that popped into my head as 50,000 of us slowly headed to a stadium in Brisbane where England’s women were about to — very narrowly — defeat Nigeria at the World Cup.
Three hours later, queueing for trains back home, many in the crowd stared at their phones, watching the night’s second match, as Australia made their own push for the quarter-finals.
Australia and New Zealand were chosen to host the Women’s World Cup to drum up interest in a sport that is far from dominant here.
Yet games are sold out, millions watch the few matches broadcast for free, and it’s caught the imagination of a nation previously largely immune to the sport’s charms.
No-one’s interested in women’s football? It’s hard to find anyone talking about anything else.
“Let’s tell them it matters”
The comment came at a news meeting in 2019, a few hours before England took on the USA in the semi-finals at the last World Cup. For 15 minutes we’d discussed a range of middle-ranking stories, trying to figure out which could best be turned into a semi-convincing lead. I had an alternative suggestion.
“If we were a few hours from kick off in an England semi-final at the men’s World Cup, we wouldn’t have even considered these stories, because we would have spent more than half our time talking up the match.”
Colleagues were convinced I was wrong. Leading on a women’s football match — even if it was a World Cup semi-final — would turn off half our audience. People simply didn’t care about the England women’s team as much as the men. Sure, it could be the top sports story, safely isolated at the tail end of the programme, but a lead news story — the idea was ridiculous.
In the end, we did lead on the World Cup that night — in part because the alternatives were so weak — and a few hours later around 11-million people watched the match on the BBC — more than four times the audience that saw England depart the 2015 tournament. Very slowly, the women’s game was winning the attention it had been denied for so long.
“Quite unsuitable for women”
The British Ladies Football Club was one of the first prominent women’s teams, playing their first match at the Crouch End Athletic Ground in north London in 1895. But the first real powerhouse was the Dick, Kerr Ladies team of my home town, Preston.
All were First World War workers at a factory, and they played in front of significant crowds, raising money for charity.
They continued playing after the war, drawing 53,000 spectators on Boxing Day 1920, becoming the first team to play an international match, and the first to go on an overseas tour, where they took on men’s teams in the United States.
Their star player was Lily Parr, the first women inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame. She scored more than 900 goals, and once took a penalty with such ferocity she broke a man’s arm.
My grandmother was obsessed with football. She worked at the same Dick Kerr factory during the Second World War, and watched Tom Finney play at Preston North End. By then, women’s football had been banned. The FA outlawed it in 1921, calling it “quite unsuitable” for women.
2002 — Still a long way to go (The Times)
That ban was lifted in the 1970s, but decades later the sport was still largely ignored by a media that would clear the decks if David Beckham or Wayne Rooney bruised a toe.
The disparity was occasionally highlighted. In 1995, The Times said England’s women “deserve all the support they can get”, calling them “as enthusiastic and committed a bunch of athletes as one will find.” The message didn’t get through. In 2002, Graham Taylor, a former manager of the England men’s team, kicked the women out of their hotel on the eve of a World Cup qualifier, because he wanted it for his own team, the middle-ranking men of Aston Villa.
Women were playing football around the world, but the people who could help build the sport simply ignored it. How will people find you, be excited by your skills and your passion, if they’re never even told you’re there?
“You should care about this”
Slowly, things improved. England’s women finally made it onto BBC 1 during the 2015 World Cup, four years later they pulled in big TV audiences, and after their win at the 2022 Euros they finally became the respected, bankable stars they could always have been
But why did it take so long? Why could broadcasters, starved of live sport as pay TV came to dominate, not see the goldmine in front of them?
It brings me back to that meeting, and the idea that people weren’t interested in women’s football. If true, that was our fault. We hardly ever mentioned it, and if we did it was treated as an amusing curio.
Mainstream newspapers, television and radio aren’t as dominant as they once were. But they still matter, shaping the narrative, helping to define what new is, and crucially what it isn’t.
The most powerful choice journalists make every day is the decision to exclude a story, to deny it an audience. We pretend to be impartial observers, passing on facts for others to decide on. But we have always been gatekeepers, promoting some issues, ignoring others.
We know that, when we give a story top billing, we’re telling our audience “this matters, you should care about this.” If they didn’t care about women’s football, it’s because we never game them a chance to.
We like to use our bully pulpit to create new scandals and crises, a perpetual sense that “something must be done” about something we’re all outraged about, regardless of whether or not it’s actually outrageous.
The idea that we could use that power to promote something that wouldn’t cause division or anger seems to many in our industry unfathomable. Anger, after all, drives engagement.
Yes, the women’s game is finally being taken seriously, but imagine how many more could have been inspired to take up the sport if we’d done this decades ago.
As she retired at the World Cup, Brazilian legend Marta told reporters “when I started playing I didn’t have a female idol — you guys didn’t show any female games.”
My grandmother never lost her love of football. Into her eighties, she would phone me to make sure I knew Manchester United or Liverpool were on ITV4 that night. At the age of 90, I took her to Deepdale past the statue of Tom Finney, the legendary player she had cheered in her youth, as we watched her team one last time.
She died before the women’s game achieved the recognition denied to those pioneers in Preston almost a century earlier. She would have loved every moment of this long-delayed moment in the sun.
