England lose to Germany in the Euro 2009 finals

A familiar headline, perhaps, but a different context. Commiserations to the England women's football team for losing 6-2 to Germany last night in the European finals, but congratulations for raising the profile of women's football and actually making it onto the hallowed turf of the Guardian's sports pages and those of other newspapers. Hope Powell, the England manager since 1998, played in the Euro finals in 1984 and has worked hard to create a structure for developing the game and players from the grass-roots to the elite. She was the first woman to gain a Pro licence coaching qualification in this country, the youngest ever England manager and the first ever female national coach.

It's been interesting to read some of the stats and facts around women's football. According to this report in the Guardian, just after the First World War women's football drew crowds of up to 50,000 but in 1921, 'the Football Association put an end to all that, banning women from playing on FA-affiliated pitches (effectively, all grounds with spectator facilities) with the assertion that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged".' It was 1971 until that ban was overturned - less than 40 years ago - and the game is still trying to recover the ground lost. And it was only five years ago that Sepp Blatter, Fifa's president, said that the game would be more popular if the women wore tighter shorts.

The medal haul of the Beijing Olympics showed the fruits of athletes being funded to devote themselves full-time to their sport. Many of the England women's football team, in contrast, have jobs as coaches to support themselves or have had to go to the US in order to turn professional. They are paid just £16,000 a year - less than the top Premier League men get paid in a day. Money in sport is largely linked to media coverage, so it's not surprising that if people aren't watching women's football then they won't attract sponsorship. But that's also a circular argument, because no one can watch it if  it isn't on TV in the first place.

Comments

[david]

respect! I coached girls/womens "soccer" in the US in the late 80's and "soccer" attitudes to women playing the game then were light years ahead of us, even today Big Up for Hope Powell!

[Amanda]

I was having a discussion with my husband the other day about whether we thought a woman would end up managing a Premiership male football team at any point soon. In theory it could happen, but we thought that sadly it was unlikely to happen for a long time. Hopefully, I am wrong...

[Jenny]

I think you're right Amanda - it's not going to happen soon. There's too much separation between men's and women's football at the moment in all sorts of ways - quality, investment, profile... Women's football is seen as something that women watch and women report on and write about. It needs to become more mainstream and normalised , and less 'strange' before we're likely to see more women making inroads into men's football. For a start, how many women have had the necessary experience to manage a male team?