And the results are in. 17.4 million people watched England’s Lionesses beat Germany in last nights Euros final and that doesn’t include those who watched in pubs, on big screens and all the rest of it. Whatever your feelings about the women’s game, the facts are undeniable. Women’s football is hugely popular. What needs to happen next is to make sure this popularity is not for one night only.
Before last night, I had only ever watched one game of women’s football and that was the quarter final match against Spain. I have never watched one ‘live’, so to speak. The explanation could be that I’ve never been interested in women’s football but I think it goes deeper than that. The club I used to support have had a women’s team, or at least a team that was associated with the club. I knew of a few people who went to their games and I often felt that perhaps I should go too. But I was never sufficiently enthused.
The only football club I literally supported, by which I mean paid to watch and actually attend games, was Bristol Rovers. I fell out of love with them some years ago and I certainly won’t be back at the Memorial Stadium for as long as the odious (deleted for legal reasons) Joey Barton is anywhere near the club. So apart from the odd non-league game, I never watch live football at all. In fact, despite the extortionate cost of Sky and BT, the only football I watch on telly is when Liverpool are playing. As you can tell, I am not exactly an active supporter of football at all, men’s or women’s. But last night, and indeed the entire Euros tournament, has shown that women’s football can thrive.
I am your ultimate non-expert on women’s football but my guess is that both the FA and the government need to invest in the game in order to provide pathways for girls and women to play. On the face of it, women’s football in England is overwhelmingly white, the exact opposite of the men’s game. This is a fact, not a statistical blip and has been pointed out by numerous people, like this excellent piece on the Football 365 website. As the article concludes, efforts are being made to change the look of women’s football but this will be a slow process.
As well as this, much will depend on persuading armchair supporters, and indeed the many thousands who were present at Wembley last night, to attend their local club’s matches. It is all very well going to Wembley to watch a one-off big match but if the same people don’t follow up by watching local and grassroots football, much of last night’s success will be in vain. That is not, in any way, to denigrate those who attended the final last night, especially those for whom it was their first live game but it’s the same at any level. If you only turn up at the big games and don’t bother with the so-called lesser games, there won’t be too many more big games to enjoy.
My impression was that last night’s crowd was far more middle class than your average women’s game. That impression, I hasten to add, is based not on actual facts, just the way it looked and sounded. The atmosphere appeared to be very different and, as the football writer Henry Winter pointed out, “that was the first time I’ve heard the German national anthem”. Perhaps, that’s less of a class issue and more a matter of good manners and respect but nonetheless it was very welcome. I think I was the only person loudly booing the German anthem and that was only for the purposes of a cheap ‘joke’ at home. Generally, it was all rather lovely. However, some commentators, not always football folk, did make a few crass comments.
A certain commentariat suggested that the crowd for this final was a cut above the type of crowd England attracts for men’s games. The implication was that last night’s crowd was entirely peace-loving whereas the crowd for, say the final last year against Italy, comprised entirely of foul-mouthed violent thugs. Look, I don’t condone the ticketless idiots who stormed into the stadium last year, nor the booing of opposition anthems, but it is nonsense to suggest was in any way representative of all supporters. And there was other stuff that bugged me.
I found the BBC commentary team – not the pundits, who were excellent – absolutely abysmal. In fact, it wasn’t a commentary at all, at least to my ears, although I admit to being slightly deaf these days. It was more of a flurry of clichés amid incessant high-octane chat between two friends. Perhaps that was down to the inexperience of the commentary team, I don’t know. But my conclusion was that this is one area of the BBC’s otherwise excellent coverage that can and must be improved.
And there’s social media, some of which made absurd comparisons between the women’s and men’s teams, suggesting that the women cared more than their well-paid male equivalents, as if being wealthy somehow removed passion and hunger to win a football game. On that basis, you’d only ever employ a plumber, tiler, spark or general builder who was using a food bank, certainly not a successful one who made a good living.
Above all, the thing I enjoyed most was the shared experience. A significant chunk of our nation riding on the same emotional wave, something you rarely get these days with so much sport tucked away behind a paywall. A great example of public service broadcasting.
England’s win last night showed what is possible. What follows next matters even more. We can all talk about the legacy but that requires good people to step up and take the lead. In 2012, London hosted the Olympics, arguably the greatest sporting event on the planet. It was a huge success at the time but a decade of austerity along with a lack of vision has brought about little change. Opportunities only matter if you utilise them. If little happened after 2012 under a Conservative government in which some Lib Dems had jobs, are there really grounds for optimism under a hard right, insular small state, low tax Tory government? Only time will tell, because time passes quickly and chances are few.
