Match week 23
A week in which FIFPRO/FIFA announced The Best award and the World XI and nothing was adding up, FCB Femeni v Real Madrid sold out Camp Nou, and Tottenham's men's team leave everyone STUNNED
Gooooooood morning/day/evening. Also this edition of the newsletter is slightly late, as it’s been another week of dealing with illness for me, but the Scottish men’s football has had a well-deserved break and hopefully recovered many of their sick players. That’s meant that a lot of my work is back on the schedule and that my head is back in the game, and to be honest I could also not not pop in here as things have been HAPPENING in football this week. Let’s get into some of it!
FC Barcelona managed to sell out their Champion’s League quarter-final fixture against historical rivals Real Madrid (and it’s branded as the El Clásico as the historical clash between the two men’s sides, although it’s not really an historic fixture in the women’s game considering that this team under the branding of Real Madrid is 18 months old, as they were founded as CD Tacon (the high heel) in 2014 (compared to Barca Femeni who were founded in 1970, although only becoming an official section of FCB in 2002) but women’s football cannot afford to say no when these men’s clubs come in and offer money+their branding, and although the two teams cannot necessarily measure up against each other just yet, rivalries between the two biggest cities in any country are quite common) at Camp Nou, meaning that around 85 000 tickets have been sold! These news have been hard to miss in the past week, it’s been posted about everywhere - obviously great advertisement . On the other hand I’m just wary of the
Sweden are having an exodus of Swedish female players who are leaving the domestic league in favour of foreign club calls, BK Häcken’s Stina Blackstenius being the latest player to make the move, landing in London with Arsenal, and her former teammates Emma Kullberg and Julia Zigiotti Olme (who are a cute couple off the pitch just fyi) also left for England, but Brighton and Hove Albion. Beata Kollmats also left Gothenburg for Roma, with Ronja Aronsson joining on the Italy track but for Fiorentina.
Someone who is going against the tide is Häcken’s Jennifer Falk, who’s been rumoured to be pursued by Manchester City, but she told Fotbollskanalen that her gut feeling was to stick around in Gothenburg (and to be honest, she would have a hard time competing against Ellie Roebuck and Karen Bardsley), which is great news for a club that’s seen a lot of their players leave (especially considering that they had that merger with Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC in which they acquired a lot of players and also had to let many go). Overall the trend of leaving Sweden for different pastures does not seem to be bucking anytime soon, and the domestic league is struggling to keep a hold of their talent. In one way it’s obviously fantastic to see so many Swedish players be of interest to big clubs abroad, and simultaneously the interest is to further develop the Swedish league to (once again) be considered one of the most competitive and exciting leagues in women’s football, in turn being a top destination for big names.
This week also contained the presentation of the FIFA The Best award, alongside the FIFPRO World XI (FIFPRO is the international federation for footballers.)
Not many people were surprised to see Alexia Putellas being awarded with ‘The Best’ award (which is rather self-explanatory in its nature), but rather the outrage was with the results of the World XI, which was picked by fellow footballers (around 3675 of them to be more exact), and the fact is that it landed on a rather outrageous pick for the 11 best players, that read more like a popularity contest than a serious pick of the players who had performed the most. Read what fellow player colleagues Stefanie Labbé, Heather O’Reilly, Janine Beckie and Hedvig Lindahl amongst others had to say on the matter.
No players from FC Barcelona (who won the treble last season - the league, Copa de la Reina and Champion’s League) and no Canadian players (who, I regret to say, won the Olympics in the summer at the expense of Sweden who had to settle for second place.)
It’s clear that even within the women’s game itself there’s a lack of knowledge, and potentially accessibility to the game. Of course it’s impossible for semi/full-time professional players to keep on top of all of the top players in all the top leagues around the globe, but this is just ridiculous. The women’s football world is also not that big, and with social media and youtube highlights readily available, doing even the slightest bit of research in preparation for the vote would not have been that hard. For me, it’s clear that there’s also a lack of women engaging with the game from within, and that’s a real shame, but I think it’s about time that we acknowledged that. It’s not always and only men that are misogynistic, and it might not always be with a malicious or even conscious intent, but the fact is that almost all of us have been raised and conditioned in a patriarchal society, something which is bound to have an effect also between women: internalised misogyny. There’s a more lighthearted wee article on the topic, as well as more academic texts.
The AFC Women’s Asian Cup is in full swing and Iran, massive underdogs in the competition as well as debutantes, just took their first point with a 0-0 against hosts India. Exciting things to come! All the more reason to be impressed is the fact that they did it while wearing hijabs, something that got Iran banned to play international women’s football by FIFA back in 2011.
This might seem like a thing of the past now with this fantastic team having overcome the difficulty and leading the way, but consider that this is currently the case in France:
(via @_shireenahmed_ on twitter)
This documentary on Feyenoord’s women’s first team is all that I knew I needed (and didn’t know how to articulate). It documents their first six months in the Dutch top-flight, and it’s such a well-made doc! So much insight into running a professional women’s team! So much potential in this squad!
It’s amazing how, when you give female football players the platform and the space, they will often win you over in no time with their stories and passion … More of this please!
Lastly, I will leave you with these highlights from Tottenham’s latest game on Wednesday night against Leicester City, where they were 2-1 down in the 94th minute (after having dominated for much of the game and they really shouldn’t have been in that position to begin with) only for Steven Bergwijn to step up and deliver two rapid goals (with some beautiful work by the likes of Matt Doherty, Lucas Moura, Pierre-Emile Højbjerg and Harry Kane, amongst others, the whole team more like it) to win the game in the 97th minute. Suffice to say that I was IN A STATE.
It’s really worth spending 10 minutes on, I promise. What. A. Ride. We’re playing Chelsea (again, ugh) on Sunday and after that game I’ll write a longer piece on the rollercoaster that is being a Tottenham fan.