It’s hard to articulate why this bothers me but I will try!
First off, I am a massive fan of women’s football and have been all my life. I remember being told several times I couldn’t play “because you’re a girl” and my mum took me to show me that girls could play too and I was hooked!
For the longest time, women were asking for parity with men in terms of pay, sponsorship, coverage, or even just to earn a living wage. There were players in the top teams having to work second jobs because they couldn’t earn a living off football. They even had to buy their own kits and supplies.
The reason they were told they couldn’t have parity with men in terms of pay was because they didn’t sell tickets, they didn’t attract advertisers, they didn’t secure sponsorships, they didn’t sell merch, the teams don’t have massive international fan bases, and the players didn’t have the kind of name-recognition men did.
Ok, the women said, give us a fighting chance then. Broadcast our matches, advertise our games, sponsor us, help us build up the kind of name recognition men’s teams have. How can we build up fan bases who want to pay to see our matches and buy our merchandise if there’s no way they can watch us now, or if they’ve never even heard of us?
And then the broadcasters, newspapers, clubs, sponsors all said “we’re not going to invest in you because men are not going to watch women play, so you can never have the kind of broad appeal the men’s teams have.” In other words they used the potential men might be sexist in order to treat women differently.
Fast forward to 2023 - women’s football is broadcast not just at all (which is nice!) but on BBC1! The women’s Euros final got the highest crowd of any match, mens or womens. Millions of people watched the semi-finals. Every single newspaper ran England’s win on the front page, as did Australia. Social media went crazy with people - including MEN - being excited about the match, hopeful, proud. What was lovely to see was men analysing the match and talking about it exactly the same way they do with the men’s game. And little boys idolising women athletes!
The clubs, broadcasters, sponsors, etc were wrong. Women’s football has an audience. Not only that, men are interested in watching it too.
So when you say that PW not taking a 45h round trip with his entourage to watch one football match shows that like a typical man, he doesn’t care about women’s football: a) you’re wrong about men not caring about women’s football, b) where have you been for the past decade?, and c) you are not supporting the women’s team you are repeating the WRONG excuse used by the industry to not treat them fairly in the past. Men are interested in the women’s world cup!
Finally, PW himself has clearly been very involved in the women’s game. Plenty of examples have been given. It’s not “constructive criticism” if you’re wrong about the most basic facts, it’s uninformed projection. I know on MN people like to take against people because they don’t like their face or their eyes are too close together or they look like an ex or something, and then they try to reverse-engineer a more rational reason to not like them… but using female footballers’ struggle (and success!) to do that… ew