Ed Warner: Challenge for women’s football is to create year-round interest
Tournament organisers are learning to do right by women’s sport. But there’s a way to go yet. An Old Trafford sell-out for England’s opening match in the current Euros was widely and rightly applauded. Sticking Belgium and Iceland into the Academy Stadium at Manchester City’s Etihad Campus feels crass. We’ll never know how many might have been drawn to the game in a bigger arena, but there would surely have been more than the 3,809 who actually pitched up.
It’s no longer necessary to talk about women’s football breaking through. It’s broken through. Yes, there’s a long way to go in terms of week-to-week attendance at Women’s Super League matches, but the successful lobbying of advocates and the consequent financial pump-priming by the Football Association, leading men’s clubs, broadcasters and sponsors has paid off in heightened public awareness of an increasingly slick product.
The challenge is now to build year-round interest, so generating fan revenues that can in time mitigate the risk that the money currently being poured into the women’s game dries up.
Days before the start of the Euros, the Rugby Football Union published a 10-year strategy for Premier 15s, the top women’s club rugby league in England, now five years old. Refreshingly, the question of finance is addressed upfront, a clear recognition that elite women’s team sports need hard cash to grow roots and then flourish. The RFU’s model shows a £222m cost to run Premier 15s for a decade, offset by £174m of income. The governing body is pledging £48m to make up the difference.
Spread £222m over central league operating costs as well as 10 clubs competing for 10 years and you can see that each club is likely to be working with budgets nearer to Women’s Championship football than WSL levels. But men’s elite rugby finances are themselves significantly lower than their football equivalents. If the RFU and its partners can ensure that in time the Premier 15s clubs become fully professional, then the sport will set itself apart from most others competing for the attention of aspiring female athletes.
A free-to-air broadcast deal is one of the ambitions for Premier 15s. Clearly the right approach, as data demonstrates that the five terrestrial channels in the UK continue to dominate viewing hours. Certainly mainstream TV coverage remains the holy grail for niche sports eager to build recognition they can turn into commercial income. The big women’s team sports – football, rugby, cricket – should ensure they corner the market for available terrestrial hours.
Equality of opportunity and airtime are at the heart of the women’s sport movement. Money is often the dirty word in the equality debate. Equal Wimbledon prize money has been in place for 15 years, but still elicits carping about men playing five sets of tennis against women’s three. More prevalent, and insidious, are those who argue that player rewards should follow rather than pre-empt the building of audiences.
Last week New Zealand Cricket announced equal match fees for its men, the Black Caps, and women, White Ferns, for the next five years. A headline grabber that doesn’t mean equal pay overall, as the men will be on bigger retainers and play more international matches. NZC’s announcement flagged that the highest ranked White Fern would now almost double her playing income (to $163,246), albeit earning a third of her male counterpart (now $523,396).
New Zealand Cricket match fees:
- Tests: $10,250 = £5,282
- ODIs: $4,000 = £2,061
- T20Is: $2,500 = £1,288
Perhaps more significant in the new deal is a near six-fold increase in the income available to the leading female cricketers in the domestic game. NZC makes it clear that this is structured to allow the players to pursue full-time employment elsewhere, or study. Taken as a package, this strikes me as a pragmatic approach that could usefully be adopted elsewhere – a commitment to the principle of gender parity, shaped to boost the women’s game while recognising that it is still a work in progress.
And on the subject of equality in cricket, I love the speculation about which female player will be the first to be clocked bowling at 80mph. England’s Issy Wong is mentioned in despatches. South Africa’s record wicket taker Shabnim Ismail has almost touched it. Both are in the squads for the current one-day series between their countries. Let’s hope it cuts through to the public psyche in this crowded summer of sport.
Coarse record
The 150th Open starts today at St Andrews, the home of the R&A which has announced a 22% increase in the overall prize fund to $14m. The winner will take home $2.5m. Spare change compared to LIV riches, but difficult to see the leading players wanting away from this tournament in the foreseeable. You can’t put a price on a century and a half of tradition, just as a lack of ranking points hardly undermined this year’s Wimbledon. Did anyone miss Naomi Osaka who had no time for what she deemed an exhibition event?
Hard too to envisage a similar future for British golf courses to some of those in Japan, whatever the cycle of popularity of the sport. Some courses in Japan haven been turned into vast solar farms as interest in golf has waned. We just don’t have the weather for it, even in the current heatwave.
Hammer to fall?*
Of the 48 events being contested at the Oregon22 World Athletics Championships starting on Friday, 10 have seen new world records set since the start of the pandemic. So-called super shoes have played their part, with records in men’s and women’s 5,000m, 10,000m and 400m hurdles. Some historic marks, though, remain stubbornly resistant to challenge in the modern era of anti-doping vigour.
You can peruse the record books and make your own judgements. A few weeks ago, the governing body in Jamaica called for Elaine Thompson-Herah’s 10.54 second 100m last August to be recognised as the world record in place of Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.49 second run back in 1988. Not going to happen. But don’t be surprised if this and other records tumble in Eugene over the next 10 days. It would be great for the sport, as stale records are a bad taste reminder of its dark underbelly.
(*The men’s hammer world record has stood to Yuriy Sedykh of the Soviet Union for almost 26 years.)
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes at sportinc.substack.com