No. You are missing the point. To a large extent the audiences for sport in the media is created by the media itself.
The media is reliant on the football clubs, themselves large commercial enterprises, in supplying large amounts of footage and discussion points to fuel the 24 hour rolling news format that we are burdened with today. It's a self perpetuating loop. By gaining large amounts of media coverage they create audience awareness and create a market for their product, the men's game.
Is the men's game any better than the women's? On the basis of the relative world rankings it would appear not. The men's game has hovered in the "also ran" range for the better part of half a century. Is there an audience for women's sport? Look at the USA where women's football is massive in terms of TV coverage and game attendances. Since the game there hasn't, until recently, been dominated by men, the women's game has had a chance to build a large audience. The idea that people will only watch men play is, frankly, laughable.
Sport in the UK suffers badly from the dominance of club football. In other countries where the financial grip of the club game isn't so large, the range of sports covered in the media and played and watched by the population as a whole is far greateer. I'll give you an example of a country I know well. What do you think the most played and watched sport is in NZ? This is NZ, the home of the mighty All Blacks, dominators of the rugby field. NZ where the cricket team routinely beat both the English and the Ozzies. Yet the most played and watched sport, for both sexes?? Netball.