641 days ago
The narrattive is that women’s soccer is getting massive crowds every week. It is, of course, a complete lie as I have demonstrated time and time again. At some point I will do a piece on the attendances at WSL side West Ham Ladies and how they show what a joke the economics of women’s football has become. The entire media class colludes with this lie, terrified of being branded as sexist. Today the England National Side, the Lionesses, beat Italy 2-1 in the Arnold Clark cup today at Coventry’s CBS Arena and then boasted of the attendance, a record for this ground. This is just so 1984.
788 days ago
Record attendance at WSL game scream all the newspaper headlines after the Arsenal Spurs derby yesterday. Arsenal itself tweets out a picture of the crowd and of a big screen boasting of 53,737 tickets sold. Well all up to a point..
821 days ago
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.
1894 days ago
I have watched West Ham women live, I watched them lose the FA Cup Final last year on the TV, gripped. I cheered on the brave Lionesses this summer. Supporting my daughter’s sporting career in ways you cannot imagine, I take women’s sport seriously. But to pretend that there should be equal pay for women’s soccer players with the men and that both games are of equal status, as the BBC does, is to deny the facts.