Women's football still has a lot of ground to make up on the men's game
It's not just a matter of money. There remain clubs at which women's teams are treated as being expendable, and that's simply not good enough.
The Women’s Super League began last week with money continuing to flow into the game. A new sponsorship deal with Barclays will be worth £45m over the next three years, doubling the amount of money being put in. The Premier League loaned the organisation £20m earlier this year on extremely favourable terms. And of course, this comes on top of NewCo, the new company formed to take over the running of the top two levels of the game.
Attendances have continued to skyrocket. In March, the previous WSL attendance record of 689,297 was broken with 36 games still to play and the total number of people for the season ended up comfortably exceeding one million. WSL matches have been taken off the fairly unpopular FA Player and will now be streaming on YouTube, with a twelve-fold increase on the viewing figure in comparison with the FA’s platform. The opening weekend fixture between Arsenal and Manchester City at The Emirates Stadium was attended by a crowd of almost 42,000.
Yet there remains work to be done, and there remain questions to be asked about the structure that is coming into place. The story of what happened regarding an exasperated statement issued by the Solihull Moors women’s team over their treatment by the club, in which they complained of “ill-fitting kits, a lack of basic equipment, no provision of transportation for games hours away, and most concerning, no guaranteed pitch to play midweek fixtures on”.
This crisis was by all accounts becoming existential. “A few weeks ago, we were forced to forfeit a cup game against West Bromwich Albion Women due to the club’s failure to secure a pitch”, which had resulted in them being thrown out of two competitions and that the club was trying to charge them £2,600 per match to play at the club’s ground. Of course, the Solihull Moors men’s team, who currently ply their trade in the National League, would not face such challenges.
Whether this is the case is dubious (and it certainly doesn’t excuse the second-class treatment or dismissive attitude), but there is a sliver of a case for saying that as a Fifth Division club, Solihull Moors don’t have a lot of money sloshing around, but that can hardly be said to be the case at Manchester United, the second wealthiest football club in the world.
There have been growing rumours of discontent behind the scenes with the Manchester United women’s team since the INEOS buy out of (a proportion of) the club last year. It has felt as though the women’s team has not been anything like a priority for the club since this took place, and by the end of June he had to admit himself that there were still no detailed plans over the women’s team.
There were unsavoury reports of the women’s team being pushed to one side to make way for the men at the club’s Carrington training ground, where renovation work has been taking place. High profile players such as goalkeeper Mary Earps, Katie Zelem and Lucia Garcia—who scored twice in the final as United won the FA Cup, a match that Ratcliffe did not attend—all left the club.
And that has seemed to spill over into the start of this season with a relatively meagre-looking crowd of just 8,761 people turning out for their first WSL match of the season against West Ham. This figure is barely a substantial increase on the number of people who were attending matches when they were playing outside the city at the Leigh Sports Village, but it should also be added that 8,761 is not a big crowd in a stadium that holds 74,000 people and with tickets priced at £15, and that the atmosphere suffered accordingly. Is there apathy in the air for the women’s team at Old Trafford?
It also remains the case that women’s teams tend to be treated as expendable when a club’s overall financial position becomes gloomier. It was revealed during the summer, for example, that the Blackburn Rovers women’s team was losing ten players and had a playing budget of £100,000 for the season, with women’s players expected to sign contracts at £9,000 a year for 16 hours a week. For reference, Salary Sport indicates that Blackburn’s men’s squad has eleven players who earn that amount or more per week.
Stories similar to this kept popping up elsewhere, over the course of the summer. In the north-east, Thornaby FC received a considerable backlash after they announced the complete closure of their women’s operation, which would have left over 100 women and girls without a team. They reversed their decision, and recently announced plans to expand it further.
Noted basket cases Reading resigned their women’s team from the Championship, the second-tier, as a cost-cutting measure and placed them in the fifth instead. The women’s team have, perhaps unsurprisingly, started this season in the Southern Region Women’s Football with two straight defeats and are rooted to the bottom of the table. They were also kicked out of the Madejski Stadium for good measure, and now play their ‘home’ matches twenty miles away in Slough. For the record, Salary Sport indicates that the men’s team currently has five players earning more than £5,000 a week.
There is a tendency to get hung up on wages when talking about the gap between women’s football and the men’s game, but although that does remain a yawning chasm it’s far from the whole of the story. This isn’t necessarily a matter of the vast wage disparities, although many of us would agree that this matter remains important.
It’s about basic, fundamental respect, about a state of mind that some clubs and some within clubs don’t seem to have revised. The bare, basic fact is that for most clubs who run one, women’s football is a cost. That’s why expenditure on it is not included in spending for PSR regulations in the Premier League. But those who switch straight to the subject of raw economics overlook one extremely important element to all of this.
Men’s football owes women’s football. The women’s game grew in popularity throughout the years of the First World War, and although it would be a stretch to describe its handling as in any way ‘progressive’, attendances for matches were shooting up. We all know what happened next. On the 5th December 1921 the FA banned women’s football (or at least their clubs from having any contact with it, including allowing them to use facilities), stating that, “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” It took until the 24th June 1971 for the ban to be lifted; almost exactly half a century.
What might women’s football in this country look like now, had that ban never been introduced in the first place? How might it have benefited had, say, it replaced the men’s game as the game to watch during the War? How might it have benefited from the post-war attendance boom? What if it had been part of the industrialisation of the club game that took place during the 1960s? What if it had simply become as normal a sister to the men’s game as women’s tennis has been to men’s tennis for decades? Perhaps extra sticks would have been put in their spokes. Presumably male insecurity would have reared its head in some other way.
That Manchester United should have been able to elevate themselves to a position of WSL membership and winning the FA Cup is both a sign and a warning. On the one hand, the women’s team was only reformed in 2018 following an absence of 13 years. To have got that far in such a short amount of time is a demonstration of the muscle that the overall organisation carries. But this also tells another story, of the extent to which the women’s team were second-class citizens of Old Trafford, disbanded shortly after the Glazers got involved and not revived for more than a decade.
There are bitter ironies to all of this. When football clubs do get into financial trouble, it usually isn’t because they’ve been wildly overspending on their women’s team. It’s usually because they’ve been doing exactly that on the men’s team. And what needs to change is attitudinal. A cultural head shift. There’s been a lot of movement on this in recent years, most of it extremely positive.
But there remains a lot of work to do. If football clubs are continuing to press their case as valuable assets to their local communities then those clubs need to see themselves holistically. Many clubs, to their credit, have done this. But stories of the expendability of women’s football clubs remain all too common. At its root, it’s about basic, fundamental respect.