Women's football has decided what 'growing the game' will mean, and all looks very familiar

One day, people may come to look back upon a Golden Age of Women’s Football, a time when match tickets were affordable and relatively plentiful.

One day, people may come to look back upon a Golden Age of Women’s Football, a time when match tickets were affordable and relatively plentiful. A time when Women’s Super League games were freely available for anybody to watch on free-to-air television. A time when optimism was in the air for a brighter future.

There has always been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the growth of the women’s game. On the one hand, this growth has been partly fuelled by a reaction to the worst excesses of the men’s game. There is little of the toxicity that surrounds the Premier League and beyond, while the cost of attending is not beyond those who’d already been priced out of the Premier League.

But on the other, those who work within the women’s game can be forgiven looking at the millions of pounds sluicing around the top end of the men’s game with a degree of justifiable envy. Why should they get paid tens of thousands of pounds a week while we get paid tens of thousands a pounds a year?

Small wonder, then, that Beth Mead supports the formation of a new private company to take control of the top two divisions of the women’s game in this country. She would likely be one of its primary beneficiaries, should it reach the commercial potential that American private venture funds who really love money believe it will; the sky may well be the limit for her bank account.

But the overall amount of money brought in will not be evenly distributed. 75% of revenues from this new organisation will go to the clubs of the WSL. 25% will go to the clubs of the Championship. Not a penny will go to anyone below this gilded few. It should be absolutely clear that women’s football’s move into the private sphere will not be about equitably distributing money across the whole of the women’s game. “Growth” can mean many things, after all.

Indeed, if anything, those cheaper ticketing options and appearances on free-to-air television are already starting to feel like loss-leaders. It remains to be seen, whether future television deals will continue to favour free-to-air broadcasting to any extent whatsoever, but the increasingly pressing need to start generating vastly increased revenues will only make this less likely rather than more. The cable TV broadcasters who will be likely to pay more will likely want exclusivity, and they certainly won’t want to share with the likes of the BBC or ITV, not for the really big bucks.

This is a conversation that has already been held before this season. Lewes Football Club’s much-vaunted “Equality FC” moniker was put to the test when supporters voted—albeit on a low turnout of members—to approve a deal with an investment company called Mercury/13. But this deal seems to have floundered on the basis of that very equality. A statement from the club after the deal collapsed said that:

Lewes FC stands as a unique entity in the football world: with core principles of equality that are deeply embedded in the club’s ethos, identity, and structure. Mercury/13’s mission to invest only in women’s football teams would pose a disruption far too big to Lewes FC’s foundation.

In other words, Mercury/13 weren’t interested in the men’s team and this ran headfirst into the club’s fundamental ethos. And this in itself demonstrated the challenges ahead. Lewes is a small town of 17,000 people. Brighton & Hove Albion are just a few miles away, and have recently announced plans for a purpose-built women’s stadium, which would end their own women’s team’s lengthy exile playing their ‘home’ matches twenty miles away in Crawley. In the brave new world of venture capital-funded women’s football, it’s unlikely that there is much of a place for clubs from towns with a population of less than one-third that of the capacity of The Emirates Stadium.

This has been coming for years, since Premier League clubs realised that a comparatively modest financial outlay into their women’s teams could bring significant rewards. The top six in the Women’s Super League currently consists of Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs. The current top four occupied the top four places in the table last season, too. Whether this counts as ‘impressive’ or not is debatable, but it remains notable that the Women’s Super League took just a few short years to become about as predictable as the Premier League has become. Just as was likely always intended.

What will this brave new world look like? Well, there’s no financial fair play, so the biggest clubs will presumably be able to continue sailing off into the horizon with no danger of being caught by the rest in the interests of ‘growing the game’. VAR, which is currently in the process of making Premier League matches borderline unwatchable, will likely land, as women’s football becomes too important to get decisions ‘wrong’, just as the top end of the men’s game has. They also plan to end the 3pm blackout. What the effects of that might be on smaller women’s teams who are allied to the very small men’s teams that they will in part be seeking to take viewers from, is anybody’s guess.

And this power imbalance is present and correct in the make-up of the new company. Even Championship clubs will have no say whatsoever on commercial and broadcasting decisions, but such is the fervour for NewCo that this is being greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. “In a sense they were caught between a rock and a hard place – the Championship cut out of NewCo being one of the alternative options”, wrote Suzanne Wrack in the Guardian as the announcements poured forth. Oh, so that’s… alright… then?

Wrack writes that, “WSL clubs are pushing for Championship clubs not to be able to vote on commercial decisions, primarily because those in the top flight are responsible for generating most of the revenue across the leagues and the 25% share to the Championship is a statement of their commitment to not splitting off from the pyramid”, all of which sounds very familiar indeed to those of us who remember 1992 or other attempted breakaway leagues in recent years. Supporters of clubs don’t seem likely to get much of a say whatsoever on these matters, either.

Perhaps it was always inevitable that it would come to this, that Big Money would come to dominate, with all the issues that come with that. Women’s football had an opportunity to choose a different path to one that ended in private venture capital firms sniffing around after their cut, but has chosen not to take it. For those within that ecosystem, this growth comes with potentially significant benefits. For everybody else, whether it does or not is somewhat more debatable.