I have a lot of time for the good Reverend the, now retired, vicar who started off with Jimmy Somerville in the Communards. He handled the death of his husband stoically and he serves up really quite interesting material, an increasing rarity on the BBC. On twitter he brought my attention to an interesting Northamptonshire artisan cheese. But yesterday on his show the subject turned to women’s soccer and he insisted that audiences at Euro 2022 were “huge” and that was a game changer. The problem, as I pointed out to him on a tweet he ignored, is that what he said is just not true.
Average attendances in the Euro games were, as I noted here, 18,673. Exclude the final and in the other 30 games the average gate was just 15,786, less than most gates in the Men’s second tier,, the Championship, even though most Euro seats could be bought very cheaply.
Unlike most of those insisting how big this all was and slating “deniers” as sexists, I actually attended a game with my daughter, whose sporting career I have supported with journeys criss-crossing the country, costing me a five figure sum. I do really support women’s sport in a practical sense but see no benefit in lying about the standards or the lack of popular appeal of a given game. The daughter and I were among the 9,500 rattling around in a 45,000 capacity stadium to Stand Up for the Ulster Girls as they got thrashed by Norway. The crowd at that game was only just greater than that at Wrexham yesterday in the 5th tier of soccer as “The Town” put five past Maidstone United.
The organisers of Euro 2022 clearly anticipated more folks attending the tournament than actually did as they breathed in the warm, if untrue, words of the BBC which every week says how the WSL is on a par with the Premier League though some top flight women’s matches attract fewer than a thousand supporters. That is the harsh reality but the BBC and, to be fair, most of the mainstream media as well, insist that crowds at Euro 2022 were huge and at some point nobody will bother checking their facts and will just repeat the lie.
Cole is smart enough to do a fact check but I wonder if the BBC would actually allow a presenter to say anything other than attendances were huge? As time goes on a lie repeated often enough becomes an accepted fact. The clocks strike 13 and anyone who points out that the “fact” is a lie faces a social media storm, is branded some sort of “ist” and faces career suicide. Anyone else tempted to challenge the “fact” will thus decide that it is not worth it and the lie is baked in as a fact.