Matchweek 13+14
Weeks which saw a lot of lost hope, more alleged NWSL-coach abuse come to light, an ill-timed Ballon d'Or, and what still gives energy
I could mention a lot of things that have happened in the last two weeks, like how yet another story broke about yet another male coach who has used his position and his power to allegedly abuse women (emotionally and verbally) and how he joins the ever-increasing list of names (Richie Burke at Spirit, Paul Riley at Courage, Farid Benstiti at Reign and Christy Holly at Louisville) of male coaches who have left their club this season, for several of them following allegations like these having come to light (Molly Hensley-Clancy has been breaking and covering the stories well for the Washington Post) and how the men in question are not so much publicly sacked as quietly allowed to leave out the back door with statements such as Rory Dames leaving in order to be “refocusing my attention to my family and future endeavors” and how there’s outrage which simmers out and it goes back to some sort of absurd ‘business as usual’ feel, just with the added knowledge which we cannot un-know and the added frustration of the lack of real change in these structures
and now I’m out of breath after a really long run-on sentence. I would highly recommend that you subscribe to the IX newsletter who show up in your inbox every weekday with a round-up of news in different sports, including football/soccer on Mondays and a lot of information on this ongoing subject.
I could tell you that it makes me so angry my blood boils when I think about how little the almighty structures care about women’s football, yet they manage to scrape up loads of clout whenever they eventually do give women’s football money or five seconds in the spotlight, crammed in between everything else. 100 years on after women’s football was banned, 50 years since that ban was lifted,
we’re still here.
Fighting to be treated with some sort of basic respect.
60+ years we’ve been completely left out of the biggest award show in football, before finally being considered and eventually included, but it just further cements the sentiment of women’s football being seen as a constant afterthought (it’s serious but also just needed to laugh out loud). To begin with, the ceremony was scheduled in the middle of an international break for the female players, meaning that many of the nominees were not actually able to be there, since they had left their clubs for international duty elsewhere and did not have the time to swerve by Paris to sit and watch Alexia Putellas being handed the award by Kylian Mbappé (who I really like, I just feel like this is usually done by retired legends in the game, not a male player that is several years younger than her…) On top of that, UEFA managed to then tag the wrong player in the photo of the Ballon d’Or winners. And you might say '“oops, those things happen, don’t make it into such a big deal”
but it is.
Because the male winner of the Ballon d’Or would never be mistaken for someone else. Or be asked to twerk on stage. Or be chosen based more on their profile off the pitch, as opposed to their achievements on the grass. In my opinion, echoed very well by Chloe Morgan on Upfront (a new exciting women’s football podcast!) women’s football really should be looking at alternatives when moving forward and growing the game. We talk a lot about not getting enough investment/attention/respect from men’s football, but how badly do we actually need it? Or rather, how much are we willing to give up for it? Or could there be options, much like the WTA did in tennis, break away from the men’s side of things and just run our own ship? Food for thought (no mathematical models arguing otherwise will be accepted.)
Instead of opening the window and just scream I’m going to point out how the Italian football federation ran a campaign just last week called # Un Rosso Alla Violenza (a red card against violence, specifically violence against women) where all the football players wore a lick of red face paint on their cheek and were encouraged to post about it on social media alongside their female partners, meanwhile a female sports journalist, Greta Beccaglia, was sexually harrassed as she was just doing her job outside the stadium after the Empoli - Fiorentina game during that very game week and the irony is just too glaring, just too much.
I’m exhausted and overwhelmed and feel disillusioned because we keep talking about how things have changed for the better only to have ten things happen that negates that immediately (it’s the same just packaged differently), and so instead, I’m just going to tell you a little something about one thing that fills me with hope right now.
In the summer I became with football team. As in, I was just casually asked one day by a friend of a friend, if she could put me in touch with another friend of hers who was interested in potentially maybe starting up a football team, the thing was that she didn’t know anything about football or how to go about it and so maybe I was interested in being part of that? And so we started meeting up in the park, I brought cones and footballs and this tiny stream of people would come and I would run a drill or two but mostly we would just play and this tiny stream grew by a trickle each time and Wednesday nights started to become a favourite and wonderful people pooled time+energy together to get us a grant so that we could play at pitches with lights for the winter and everyone gave wonderful testimonies of how much this one hour a week means to them and it reminds me of the true power of football as an empowering, physical space that unites people and that’s what I try to always keep in mind when it feels like we’re lightyears apart from just that and that tiny trickle is now a stream of 85 people in the group chat and the hunger from people traditionally excluded from this space to explore football has been the antidote.
Update on my no-buying-football-shirts-for-a-year-challenge: a month has passed! Feels like it went by really fast but I’ve actually struggled a lot more than I thought that I would - current top three on my list of potential buys (in 11 months lol) are Erin Cuthbert, Magda Eriksson and Lucas.