It’s almost time. At 8pm tonight the Fifa Women’s World Cup kicks off in Paris with an opener between hosts France and South Korea. The month-long tournament that follows will be a kind of test of whether footballing equality – or something approaching it – can ever happen for women.
The teams taking part in the competition know what they have to do: win a football match, and then keep winning matches until they lift a trophy at the final on 7 July.
But the rest of us are also being watched. The real answer to whether women’s football can ever advance beyond minority-sport status lies with the spectators. Until now, not enough people have watched women’s football – or even cared that it exists. The top players don’t yet have the celebrity of their male counterparts, and there remains a somewhat unfair prejudice that the women’s game is inherently less enjoyable. (Come on, it’s at least 47 years since the FA graciously lifted its ban on women’s football!) Will anything have changed at the end of this tournament?
I truly hope so: a newfound appreciation for women’s football would be an even greater turnaround than the deification last year of Gareth Southgate for his feats in charge of the England men’s team. If mass audiences do start to watch women playing top-flight football, the rest – equitable sponsorship, packed stadiums, decent player salaries, not asking the world’s best forward to twerk – may follow.
Viewers might even discover they prefer it to the men’s game. There is less diving, faking and arguing with the ref. It is perceived as being more accessible, according to the European Club Association, “because women players tend to behave in a more genuine way”.
One of the major problems women’s football (in Britain and beyond) faces is exposure – but not this month. Tonight’s opening game, and all the subsequent matches, have primetime coverage on BBC One. The last major event in the sport’s calendar – the daftly named SheBelieves Cup, a four-team tournament held in the US in February – had half-empty stands, a rather drab atmosphere and was shown after 10pm on BBC Four. (England won, in case you missed it.) Exposure on the main channel, a decent line-up of pundits – ex-England defender Alex Scott is among the best – and a European time zone for all the matches should maximise eyeballs here.
And yet, where is all the publicity that should be supporting the terrestrial coverage? Yes, it’s great that the woman-led Offside Rule podcast will be doing daily reports, but over on the newspaper back pages and main sports bulletins it’s hardly wall-to-wall hype and pap shots of off-duty players.
For those who already follow the sport, today is a real moment of hope and determination that 2019 might mark the start of a new era. Next year the Tokyo Olympics will showcase women’s football (Japan, ranked seventh in the world, is the toughest competitor in England’s group D). And in 2021 the Uefa Women’s Euros are set to be hosted in England. By then, we might know if the great women’s football experiment will ever succeed here or not.
It all comes down to fandom. The World Cup could be the best chance yet for female footballers – but also specifically England’s Lionesses and Scotland – to gain home support. The top domestic league, the Women’s Super League (WSL), is now fully professional. Five or six years ago the best players were paid almost nothing, forcing them to take second jobs. Tales of players paying for their physio and travel were not uncommon. The best talent emigrated to the US college system, which is still one of the most lucrative destinations for an upcoming female footballer. (This month the youngest ever pro soccer player, Olivia Moultrie, was signed to the Portland Thorns, at the age of 13. Premiership academies sign boys at nine.)
It doesn’t really help matters to make comparisons with the Premier League. Today, women’s salaries barely match Héctor Bellerin’s monthly wardrobe allowance (WSL pay is around £25,000 per annum, roughly doubled with an England salary). Media coverage and sponsorship in the WSL is patchy.
But young female talent has strengthened, with some of the finest England players – look out for star defender and vice-captain Lucy Bronze and 25-year-old forward Nikita Parris – transferring to Olympique Lyonnais, the world’s best women’s team. (Earlier this year, in the course of researching a profile I wrote about Bronze, I kept count of who, out of various football-loving friends and acquaintances, had heard of her: there was a generational divide, with her 11-year-old-boy fanbase surprisingly strong.)
England’s current strength is one of the most compelling reasons to believe that the sport could at last gain support here, the birth nation of football. The Lionesses are now ranked third in the world. Manager Phil Neville, who took over in 2017 after the ignominious sacking of Mark Sampson, has made himself popular with his players, proving that professional management experience (he didn’t have much) can sometimes matter less than empathy, years of actually playing the game and sheer energy.
He will know, as his players do, that success at this World Cup would bring more than a trophy home. It would inject the oxygen of publicity and popularity into a sport which has flagged over recent decades, as funding, sponsorship and crowd numbers fluctuated. England have a good chance of going deep into the competition, hopefully bringing along with them a watching nation who might be willing to give this burgeoning sport a shot. Let’s see how we all do.
• Susie Rushton is a writer, editor and sports fan
