People always look at me funny when I tell them I like football. I don’t think it’s necessarily because I’m a woman, but more to do with the fact that I’m a small woman, and probably ‘traditionally’ suited to ballet or, I don’t know... baking fairy cakes? (They go even more cross-eyed with confusion when I tell them I also like the occasional boxing match.) The responses usually range from “I didn’t have you down as a football fan!” to “It’s because your brother likes them, isn’t it?” all the way to “Oh yeah, Fabregas is soooo sexy, isn’t he?” Sometimes they’ll test me and get me to recite the offside rule, because apparently that’s a hard one for us women to get our heads round.
The ironic part is that initially I was reluctant to like football, because I thought it would somehow threaten my femininity. I was nine-years-old when my mother, a lifelong Gooner, wanted to watch the 1998 FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Newcastle United. She needed to keep me quiet for the afternoon, so told me we’d get the men out of the house, make some popcorn and make a ‘girly day’ of it. I obliged, but on my own terms: I insisted on wearing a dress, and decided that Emmanuel Petit would be my favourite player, because his long blond hair made him look almost like a woman. (Y’know, from behind. If you squinted.) Unfortunately (and I say ‘unfortunately’ because, thirteen years down the line, I’m not sure it was worth all the disappointment and heartache I’ve since had to suffer at the hands of Arsenal FC), by the end of the match, I was standing in the centre of the living room screaming in delight at my newly-adopted team’s victory and declaring my love for Marc Overmars. I was in it for the long haul from that moment on, and this is what I learned very quickly: football doesn’t really cater for women.
Yeah, you can buy the jerseys specially fitted for women, football grounds have toilet facilities for both sexes and women like Gabby Logan have begun to pave the way for female football presenters – but it’s all still largely male-oriented, and I don’t really buy the argument that this is because boys are born with a predisposition to appreciating the Beautiful Game while girls are born with a predisposition to appreciating all things pink and fluffy.
Where women are included in the world of football, they are also excluded. The first (and last) time I watched Soccer AM (a popular Saturday morning magazine-style football show) a couple of years ago, I was appalled to find a segment of the show dedicated to ‘Soccerettes’. This is the concept: a female football fan will turn up in her favourite team’s shirt... and little else. She will stand there compliantly, smiling cutely and flicking her hair seductively, and we the audience (the audience being a crowd of jeering men) applaud her, not for her love for or knowledge of football, but for how tanned her legs are, how toned her bum is and how big her boobs manage to look through a two-sizes-too-small football shirt. You can even log onto the Soccer AM website and rate these women out of five; just in case objectifying them on national television wasn’t degrading enough, let’s put it out there on the internet, as well, and all little girls watching the show on a Saturday morning with their (mum and) dad and bowl of cornflakes will decide either that “Football is a man’s sport and I’m best off playing with my Barbies” or “So that’s what I have to be if I want to like football.” Meanwhile, the men on the show sit about cracking jokes and talking about the real nitty-gritty football stuff. Of course.
This isn’t the only occasion Sky have been guilty of either encouraging or turning a blind eye to sexism, either: until their recent dismissal, both Richard Keys and Andy Gray had been decorating football punditry with their snide misogyny for years. It was only until earlier this year when both were caught with their microphones switched on while they were tearing into female assistant referee Sian Massey that action was taken against them, and I don’t think I’m being unfair in suggesting that their dismissal was more a matter of keeping up appearances than taking a moral stand against sexism. (In case you were holidaying on Mars at the time and missed it, here’s an audio of their conversation.) Frankly, I don’t believe these networks really care; after all, it’s not like football wants women, is it?
That is a question I have often wondered. Does football want women? Football wants money, we know that much, and essentially, excluding an entire sex from your following seems a bit of a daft thing to do if you want to rake in more money, but are the people running the business – men – really interested in getting us on board?
I don’t think so. Belonging to a club is like belonging to a tribe, and with it comes fellowship and foes. If you freeze-framed the crowd at a London Derby, the picture you would get, I would imagine, would look somewhat like a scene from Braveheart (except maybe without all the horses). It’s a battle. A war. There’s blood, sweat and tears (losing to your club’s closest rival is, after all, about the only acceptable time in a man’s life when he can cry without being called a pansy), and women don’t go to war, do they? They don’t get their hands dirty, ever, through fear of breaking a nail. Apparently.
I remember my brother once saying to me that men never ran out of things to talk about, because if all else failed there was always football. Maybe it’s a male bonding thing, and a woman talking about football is like a man talking about his first period. Maybe they want to keep just enough of us around so that they have something nice to look at during halftime, or so that they have someone to hold their pint while they nip off to the loo. And the big fellas at the top aren’t exactly offering any useful suggestions as to how we can change this, either. As the Guardian reported back in 2004, when the President of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, was asked what could help women’s football gain more prestige, he kindly suggested the following:
“They [women footballers] could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men - such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?"
Of course, his comments were deemed outrageous enough to make the headlines, but where’s the backlash now? Great waves have been made to kick racism and now homophobia out of football, and rightly so, but where are the ‘Kick It Out’ campaigns for sexism?
Perhaps Sepp Blatter is right. Perhaps a more scantily clad female footballer would attract greater attention to women’s football than one wearing the same kit as her male compatriot, but isn’t that a bit like telling Paris Hilton she’ll sell more records if she rolls around semi-naked on a beach in her music videos than if she dresses up as polar bear eating biscuits? (Actually, I think I would like Paris Hilton a bit more if she dressed up as a polar bear eating biscuits.) People will watch the video, but that won’t make her music any more bearable. (Personal opinion. Please don’t let your Chihuahua eat me.)
The problem with the Paris Hilton analogy is that women’s football is actually a respectable sport: women footballers can actually play football, and yet they don’t get the recognition they’re due because... well, why? Because they’re not sexy enough? Because they’re intruding on a man’s world? Plenty of people will religiously follow a Conference side obviously not as skilled as the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea or (yeah, you guessed it) Arsenal, but few will follow their club’s women’s team, regardless of that team’s success. If you want to argue that you’re in it for the quality of football and that men’s football is of a higher quality, with all due respect, why do people support Crawley when they could support Chelsea?
I won’t exaggerate here and suggest that football is totally discriminate towards women; when I go to watch my team play I enjoy the game just as much as the next man sitting next to me, and it’s not like I’m hounded by sexual harassment from all angles, but as a female supporter you are always aware of the assumption that you can’t care as much as a man about the result, or that you aren’t as aware of what’s going on down on the pitch as a man is.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to win a competition to meet one of my favourite players, and so I went along to a big London derby with my brother (another avid Arsenal fan) to claim my prize. While we were waiting for the players to come out onto the pitch (me bouncing up and down with excitement and him banging on about how jealous he was) one of the women waiting with us turned to me and said, “Why don’t you let your brother meet him instead?” I was so appalled by the suggestion that I could barely open my mouth to utter a response, but my brother simply laughed it off and told her, “She wants to meet him just as much as I do. Trust me.” Of course, someone I had lived with my entire life was bound to know how much a moment like that meant to me, but the assumption from a stranger that it should mean more to him than it did to me, because he’s male and I’m female, infuriated me to no end, and the fact that it should come out of the mouth of another woman was beyond baffling.
Unquestionably, there is a huge assumption that football means more to men than it does to women, and while I find it slightly amusing that some people like to turn the fandom itself into a kind of competition (e.g. MY VUVUZELA IS BIGGER THAN YOURS!), I have to hold my small, feminine hands up here and admit that many women really are in it for the tanned muscular legs. But as long as there are those women more interested in the players’ underwear than they are in their silverwear, there are just as many men claiming to support a club just to feel affiliated to something. It’s like a prepubescent boy who’s just found his first sniff of bum fluff, who refuses to shave it off no matter how ridiculous it looks because it marks how much of a man he is. Among a lot of men there seems to exist the belief that you are not a real man unless you can stand in the pub with your pint and wave your fist in a suggestive manner at the referee and call him derogatory names. In reality, I think a lot of them would rather be sitting at home watching EastEnders. Of course, this is not all men, just like not all women started following Manchester United when they discovered David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo, nor do all women at football matches aspire to be WAGs.
The WAG culture itself is something else entirely, and though it’s been done to death, I can’t talk about sexism within football without bringing it up. So here it is:
It’s nothing too extraordinary to think that a woman might fall in love with, marry and have children with a footballer, but what is extraordinary is the fact that we as a nation can probably name more WAGs than we can name female footballers; we associate the names Colleen McLoughlin, Abbey Clancey, Melanie Slade and Alex Curran with football before we do the names Jayne Ludlow, Mia Hamm, Kelly Smith and Birgit Prinz. It’s not at all surprising that more and more young women these days seem to be aspiring to obtain WAG status than they are seeking female footballer status: one comes with money, fame and glamour, and the other comes with some old man telling you that you need to be wearing tighter shorts because you’re just not interesting enough as you are already. Go figure. And if you’re unlucky enough to fail in marrying the bloke, not to worry: just hang around the players’ hotels in your Soccerette eveningwear, and after the two of you have enjoyed a night – sorry, a minute – of passion, be sure to contact a tabloid newspaper of your choice and let them know all about how Mr England cheated on his wife, and if he dribbled before he scored. Then us women reading the gossip magazines can gossip to our friends about his poor beautiful wife and the ‘skank’ he went off with, while the men can jeer for five seconds before returning their focus to what’s going on inside the penalty box.
Of course, I am generalising here, but in a sport which pigeonholes all female supporters as ‘Soccerettes’, ‘Wannabe Wags’ or generally clueless glory-hunters, where’s the harm in a little more stereotyping? I guess I better go study the offside rule now...
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