Women's soccer no longer needs to 'prove' itself, reporters insist

Girls on the Ball reporters Sophie Downey, 36,and Rachel O'Sullivan, 34, who launched an online platform for women's football in the UK and Ireland. The pair are reporting on the latest Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand Picture:  PA

Two self-starting women's football reporters covering the World Cup have said the women's game no longer needs to "prove" itself.

Rachel O'Sullivan, 34, from Dublin, and Sophie Downey, 36, from London, launched Girls on the Ball — an online platform for women's football in Ireland and Britain — in 2012 having been inspired by a trip to watch Britain against Brazil at Wembley during the 2012 London Olympics.

"We both went home then and said, 'you know, let's try and find out a bit more about women's football', and there just wasn't really anything out there," Ms O'Sullivan said.

Ireland's Denise O'Sullivan, left, runs with the ball during the Women's World Cup soccer game between Australia and Ireland at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia, on July 20, 2023.

"So we thought maybe we could set up a website for women's sport. But that we would start with football."

Eleven years on and their platforms have tens of thousands of followers, while the pair are enjoying reporting on the latest Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Ireland making the finals was a huge boost to the women's game here.

"I don't think we need to prove ourselves any more," Ms O'Sullivan said.

"I think we need to move away from 'how many fans came' or 'look how many people came to the stadium' — it's here. We're selling out stadiums, we're getting thousands and thousands of people to games. The tournaments are getting bigger and better every single time.

"We don't need to ask for permission to be taking up these spaces, the game has more than proved itself."

After later attending their first Arsenal game, the pair were soon going to dozens of fixtures and clocking up more than 30,000 miles of travel a year.

Juggling other paying jobs, covering women's football often required Ms O'Donnell and Ms Downey to go the extra mile, getting changed in the back of a car before going to work or phoning bosses up to request more time off to cover the latter stages of a tournament.

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Both are now able to cover the women's game full-time, and are enjoying the spoils of a decade of hard work, which has allowed them to travel and work at the World Cup as accredited media.

"This is just a different level," said Ms Downey. "Because going away from home is part of the whole major tournament experience.

"England was wonderful in its own way and the way that it happened and the results and everything was really unique, but coming away from home where you're in another country for a month or more, and fully immersing yourself into that.

"This one has grown so big even compared to 2019, four years ago — the crowds are so different, the activities around the football are so different... everything about the game has just elevated so much even in the four years.

"It's been a really wild experience, a real learning experience — the travel's hard but you get over that because the football is so good."

The pair hope Girls on the Ball will become "one of the go-to platforms for women's football", while they also want to cover stories "that need to be uncovered".