holy sh*t Euros countdown: less than two weeks to go!
An exciting week with a lot of progressive news as we're edging ever closer to the start of the Euros
We’re just under two weeks away from the start of the women’s Euros kicking off in England, and the teams are doing their last bits of fine tuning before they head over, getting a friendly or two under their belts to warm up. The Swedish WNT are hosting Brazil (coached by Sweden’s former manager Pia Sundhage) on Tuesday (28th June) at Friends Arena in Stockholm and a record crowd is expected, with over 30.000 tickets sold! The current attendance record is at 25.882, and new one would ensure the team a proper sending off going into the July tournament.
The Swedish league Damallsvenskan, which started at the end of March, has been going up until match day 15 wrapped up last week, seeing the league taking a break (as there are many players in Sweden’s squad alone who are now preparing for the international action), but not without leaving everyone with some exciting results to look forward to pick up once the league starts back up again on August 6th! BK Häcken, whose form has been poor recently, managed to edge past an in-form Hammarby in an exhilarating tie where the Stockholm team’s penalty was saved by Jennifer Falk, only for visitors Häcken to capitalise on the situation and at the start of the second half they got two goals in quick succession, rendering Hammarby’s 95th minute goal too little too late. These three points ensure that Häcken are still within reach of the other top three teams Rosengård, Linköping and Kristianstad, who all won their respective games. At the bottom, Stockholm teams AIK and BP continue to struggle, having only picked up six points each during these first 15 games.
Linköping’s Amalie Jørgensen Vangsgaard finished the first half of the season as top goalscorer with 12 goals (but despite her fine form she did not get called up for the Danish NT squad.)
There’s been a few questions about fatigue, especially for the players playing in Damallsvenskan and the NWSL which in the Northern hemisphere are considered summer seasons, as the turnaround times are tight for many players who come into the camps having played a match only a day or two previously. For the Swedish team there’s a lot of question marks around Stina Blackstenius especially, who has been captured having to step out of the team practice, suffering from fatigue in a muscle. Blackstenius has had a hectic year and half. By the time she arrived Arsenal in the January transfer window she’d barely had a rest for a year - she was playing for Häcken in Damallsvenskan last season, went to the Olympics in Tokyo during the summer, returned to the fall part of the season and once it was finished in Sweden kinda stepped right in mid-WSL season, which only finished in May, and now she’s got a tournament summer coming up.
Fortunately Blackstenius has been able to have the last couple of weeks off since the WSL wrapped up, but both her and Hanna Glas (Bayern München) have pointed out that the turnaround times around the Olympics last summer were less than ideal, having to squeeze only a few days of rest in between, and that there’s a real chance of players burning out. It’s not only physically, but also mentally very draining with that kind of schedule, and ideally they’d get more rest after the tournament as opposed to before it.
For the first time ever the women’s clubs will be receiving money from UEFA for releasing players during an international tournament (something which the men have received compensation for since 2008.) About €4.5 million will be awarded to the clubs in question, something which will have a huge impact for Swedish clubs. AIK, BK Häcken, FC Rosengård, Kristianstads DFF, Vittsjö GIK, Hammarby IF, IFK Kalmar, Kif Örebro och Linköpings FC all have players competing at this summer’s Euros, and the amount of money awarded depends on the amount of days spent in the tournament. Therese Sjögran, Rosengård’s sporting director, pointed out that these clubs are run like businesses, and for these tournaments they’re expected to give up their workers for free labour, paying their wages and insurance while they’re gone, whilst also risking to receive them back injured, and it is wild to consider that this is not something they’ve previously been compensated for (yet people expect women’s football to “work harder on itself” to improve its product before it’ll be worthy of more investment. Kind of hard when you’re swimming against the current.)
And talking about money - Spain and the Netherlands have both reached new deals with their federations for their respective men’s and women’s teams to receive equal bonuses, and the Spanish WNT will also receive an equal amount of income from image rights as well as seeing their working conditions improve. These deals have been years in the making, and it is fantastic to see . However, it’s hard not to reflect on how we’ve come to use the term “equal pay” nowadays, and what it actually means. Sure, in these deals some aspects of them are equal, but some are still not, and therefore I think it’s reckless to use the blanket-term “equal pay” to address one part of the contract being equal. Some of this is within the control of the federation, and some of it is up to UEFA and FIFA (the amount of price money for the tournaments for example.)
Just something to think about.
Three quick ones:
☕ After we’ve just addressed all the ways in which women are enjoying the fruits of hard earned crumbs, I always find it hilarious to see headlines like “La Liga files complaint with UEFA about Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City breaching Financial Fair Play rules” like kiddos in a sandbox, that’s men’s football for ya. Talk about having too much money and time on their hands.
☕ A few days ago, Tottenham announced the signing of sought-after Yves Bissouma, which has brought up a lot of complicated feelings, as the player has been dealing with sexual assault allegations.
☕ Historic and beautiful midnight sun game in Sweden, as Piteå took on Djurgården with the game kicking off at 11PM - this is the light at around 1am lol. This was an historic tie as an elite women’s football game was played on two different dates.