The Impact

With the WSL starting this weekend I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on the European Championships now we've had a good while to absorb it. Let me start by saying I'm not a "been here since day one" kind of guy with women's football.

I'm a bandwagon jumper and comfortable with admitting that. Whilst I've always been an advocate of participation for all who love the game, I've only been watching women's games on TV since my friend Matt Bee took over at Burnley Ladies in 2016. And even then I only watched on a very rare basis. 

I'm not writing this as a tub-thumping post to try and push people to watch more of it. (I don't really know why I'm writing this and rarely understand my motivations whenever I decide to write anything). Perhaps this is more about how the Euros this summer made me feel. 

I didn't expect it to have such an emotional impact on me. I thought I was watching it because I love football, and because it seemed like a huge deal. And maybe because I knew some of my clients would be talking about it and expect me to know about it. But I found myself developing an attachment to the players in a very different way to how I ever have with their male counterparts.

The attachment is based less on having seen them play for their club teams and more about the journeys they've been on as people. And what they as players represent. 

People expect me to have an opinion on women's football quite often and a lot of them tend to ask me weighted questions. Like "what do you REALLY think about it" I feel like this is because what they really want is for me to agree with them that women's football isn't as good as men's. 

I struggle with the notion of good and bad football anyway. I personally tend to associate good football with great passing play and shows of technical ability. But I also like to see teams play a long ball with coordinated movement to capitalise on a physical advantage. You can find both of these methods of okay in both the men's and women's games. I guess a lot of the time people want to make physical comparisons between the two sexes which I find largely irrelevant because they're not playing against each other!

What I will concede is that in general the technical standard is lower in the women's game. And this is another stone often thrown in its direction. My argument however would be that the comparison between football which is been emotionally and financially supported worldwide for well over a hundred years, and football which was banned for pretty much half of that time, is ludicrous. 

The women's game when it started drew great crowds before the FA put a stop to supporting its infrastructure. I was born in ninety three, around twenty years after the professional ban was lifted, and the sight of girls playing football when I was growing up was still unusual.  

The ban may have been up but the social barriers to women playing were still there and definitely still are. 

And the fact remains that more little boys grow up wanting to be football players than little girls. For numerous factors. The foremost of those being that more parents seem to be determined to get their boys into football and to divert their daughters into more conventionally "female" sports.

More boys means more men and more competition at the highest level. All of this results in a higher overall quality. 

The great thing about recent events is that it shows little girls that playing and succeeding in football is not only possible, but a worthwhile venture. And more personal to myself, what has happened this summer is that the girls that we train on a regular basis have been given female household names to pin up as idols. 

No sport really flourishes without visible role models. Role models that are universally recognised. England has that now in the women's game and hopefully next summer will help to consolidate this. 

Perhaps the next tournament will provide us with new stars who get to enjoy even more stardom than the ones we've just seen. And it will be another small step towards equality not just in football but in society. 

The impact is already visible in the form of boosted attendances predicted for WSL games across this opening weekend, despite the delay to its commencement. And transfer records being broken for players all over Europe. Showing that not only is interest increasing, but also the financial backing.