Larry Ryan: Monstering up women's football with a new broadcast deal
OUT OF REACH: Chelsea’s Samantha Kerr rounds Wolfsburg goalkeeper Katarzyna Kiedrzynek to put the Blues on their way to a 2-1 victory in
Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final first leg at the Ferenc Szusza Stadium in Budapest.
A landmark week means an important philosophical question may soon be upon us — do we want the best female footballers in the world to own Louis Vuitton washbags too?
It is five years now since football’s most solid citizen, Seamus Coleman, ruled that Louis Vuitton washbags represented all that had gone wrong with the men’s game.
Though the washbag’s place as the key signifier of wealth in a Premier League dressing room was arguably overtaken two years ago, when James Maddison unveiled his new £6,500 Louis Vuitton backpack.
This week’s news of the broadcast deal to show up to 66 Women’s Super League games each season on and surely brings designer washbags a step closer for all. But for now, a living wage would be a start.
Words like monumental, watershed, and milestone are being used. Women who scratched around for decades to get any attention for their football were tearful about the announcement.
The three-year agreement is worth around £8m (€9.3m) per season, with Kathryn Swarbrick, the FA’s commercial director, vowing it will “monster this whole thing up”.
We don’t know yet how many will watch it, though we have heard early and often from the usual suspects who assure us they won’t. But keeping 22 games on free-to-air BBC1 and 2 should ensure that viewing figures of the English women’s top flight will at least match the million or so watching live Premier League games.
The deal might be worth a fraction of the £1bn (€1.1bn) the Premier League rakes in yearly. But as media rights consultant David Kogan, who worked on negotiating the contract, pointed out, it belatedly puts a value on women’s football, previously bundled as a sort of optional extra with men’s games.
“I think it’s the start for women’s football globally,” he told podcast.
“It’s a transformation in psychology. You will see an absolute transformation in the power and status of the women’s game.”
At a time when there are private equity firms throwing hundreds of millions at minority men’s sport, it seems the potential in the second-biggest global sport after men’s football is finally being recognised.
In creating this new monster, the signs are that tried and tested methods will apply. Sky Sports’ managing director Rob Webster has promised “the full treatment with lengthy build-ups and reaction to all live matches”. Welcome news, because let’s face it, there are no kids inspired by understated charm.
It will mean hype and bombast. Probably forensic analysis of the diving of foreign players, alongside praise for the cleverness of English stars in the search for ‘contact’.
It may trigger handshake controvassys and managerial sackraces, and maybe even a fresh resurgence of banter. It is sure to send transfer speculation into overdrive and cause windows to swing open and slam shut.
It will probably, eventually, mean VAR.
But those will be small prices to pay to give girls around the world identifiable role models. For lubricating the marketing machines that fill magazines and launch trading cards, and maybe even get women’s club teams into video games.
Some argue we are at the kind of ground zero Sky arrived on when it founded football in 1992. Would we build the same top-heavy structure if given the chance again?
Do we want massive wage inflation? Are we set fair for sportswashing and washbags?
Given Manchester City and Chelsea are now the dominant sides in the WSL, packed with the world’s best players thanks to subsidies from their men’s operations, some would say the former is already in place.
Kim Little, the great Scotland and Arsenal midfielder, sounds downright wary of washbags, arguing men are paid too much and women shouldn’t follow that lead.
“I also think it takes away a little bit from the authenticity of it and just the pure football side of it.
The trojan efforts that female players have made to promote their game, to be accessible to fans, to show their gratitude for any opportunity at all, has persuaded us that they are real, authentic people. The lack of customised Ferraris in their carparks has probably played a part too.
But you can’t live on authenticity. While the very best female footballers can well afford backpacks woven from gold — Chelsea’s Sam Kerr, who scored a brilliant goal against Wolfsburg in the Champions League this week, is reportedly on half a million per year (not a week, though, like Messi) — Katie Wyatt of pulled out a remarkable stat that underlines disparity: A punditry shift on an Amazon Prime broadcast of the Premier League brings in the same as what some WSL players earn in a month.
So there’s plenty of ground to make up from this ground zero.
As USA star Megan Rapinoe told Joe Biden this week: “I’ve been devalued, I’ve been disrespected, and dismissed because I am a woman. And I’ve been told I don’t deserve any more than less, because I am a woman.”
The psychology shift should be global. Recently, Irene Lozano, president of Spain’s Sports Council, in finally declaring Spanish top-flight football professional, said her government was ready to “put an end to this injustice”.
Today, Ireland’s top home-based players build from their own ground zero, with all WNL games broadcast live for the first time, albeit online and by unmanned cameras.
A living wage, any wage, is still a distant dream for them and a global goldrush to the WSL may make that route to a sustainable career more difficult.
But the generation after them should see a new value placed on their dreams.
This week, many current WSL stars publicly welcomed the new deal, and no doubt their agents privately toasted it too.
Incidentally, there is already the odd designer washbag knocking around WSL dressing rooms, without the fabric of the game being torn apart.
As one player reported, when tackled on this hot topic: “There’s not many but in our game no one looks at anyone for what they have and don’t have, so it’s not really an issue.”
And anyway... “mine’s a Gucci”.
