144. CHALLENGING PERCEPTIONS - Why Top Tier Football Clubs Continue To Do Women's Football A Disservice
A weird thing about my life since the 2022/23 season of the Women’s Super League (WSL) kicked off is that, despite being a season ticket holder for Aston Villa Women, I am watching most of their football take place not in the grand surrounds of Villa Park in the Aston area of Birmingham (the club’s namesake and home turf) but in the Poundland Bescot Stadium in the completely different town of Walsall. In two weeks we shall be playing Brighton and Hove away. My wife and I thought it might be a nice excuse to visit a friend of ours in Brighton and take them to the game…but then we remembered that the Brighton team play in Crawley, not Brighton.
Why complain about this in a philosophy blog? Because a perpetual area of philosophical inquiry concerns perception versus reality, and sometimes this coming apart of perception from reality (or reality from perception) often leads to questions in ethics too. I believe this problem - of the women’s teams of football clubs not sharing the same home ground as their male counterparts - touches on both.
Why perception and reality? Because one could legitimately ask am I supporting the Aston Villa women’s team, or am I really supporting the Walsall women’s team? My team wear the colours of Aston Villa, they are financed by the club, but they play football mainly in the home ground of Walsall.
Put another way:
P1) Poundland Bescot is the home ground for Walsall F.C. and Villa Park is the home ground for Aston Villa F.C.
P2) Aston Villa Women’s Team play their home games at Poundland Bescot, not at Villa Park.
C) Therefore it is more likely Aston Villa Women’s Team is a Walsall team than an Aston Villa one.
The reality might be they are Aston Villa, but the perception concludes otherwise. Perception and reality comes apart in other ways too. Aston Villa’s men’s team are a Premier League club in the UK. The women’s team are in their equivalent in rank within the women’s game: members of the WSL. Yet if I buy a ticket for one of the two Aston Villa teams, I get the feel of going to a top ranking team in a top tier league, and in I get a ticket for the other I feel, instead, like I’m going to EFL League 2 game. Not because of the quality of the football, but because of the packaging of the football within a League 2 ground.
This disparity in perception is important, because there is an historic perceptual problem with the perceived quality and legitimacy of women’s football. A perceptual problem based on a history of deeply entrenched sexism and misogyny which has seen the women’s game disparaged, banned by the FA, and generally portrayed as “lesser” since women first ever started playing.
This distortion here between perception and reality is instructive: you only ever see men’s football your whole life and you give women and girls little or no opportunity to watch the game, play the game, learn the game, or get good at the game. Then when, against all those obstacles, women start playing it anyway, you compare what they are doing with all these impediments in their way against the men who have been inducted into playing, learning, and getting good at the game their whole life without such impediments, and who have entire structures of coaching and mini economies based around generating successful football teams thrown at them, and you find the women’s game inevitably different and therefore call it “lacking”. The more the women’s game improves in quality of play as determined women continue to overcome the obstacles and impediments in their way, and they make the game their own, the more any remaining differences still become an opportunity to critique and call it “lacking” instead of simply something “different”, maybe even “better”.
Consider the different styles of football we see on display in an average World Cup tournament. Or even differences between English and Scottish football. Some countries play a slightly different game than our own, but because it’s historically been men playing men, such differences are accepted as just part of football’s rich and diverse tapestry. When the differences emerge from women’s teams, however, rather than their being perceived as just another specific choice or style, they are somehow seen - or at least described - as a failing instead of a choice. They were not simply able to mimic the men, the story goes, rather than that they decided to eliminate something the men do because they decided it wasn’t necessary.
A better educated viewer, or player, understands that difference can be a good thing, not a bad thing. That it might bring improvements, or alternative approaches to a game rather than ruin it. And also that every team is made up of individuals who bring their own unique takes on the game anyway, meaning there is no single “women’s style” or any single “men’s style”. As with the men’s game: it entirely depends on the players, coaches, and managers. And styles make matches.
But what has all this got to do with Aston Villa playing in Walsall and Brighton and Hove playing in Crawley?
Well, because the way you change perceptions is by changing them, and recognising the importance of perception and making sure that what we perceive is as close as possible to the reality we want it to be.
When I see a big football club claim to support women’s football, but segregate their women’s team away to other venues - smaller venues in lower leagues - it sends a clear message to me as a fan that this club does not actually fully value their women’s team. Or at least, doesn’t value them in the same way that they value their men. But if a club presents to me a women’s team put on a par with their men’s team - sharing the same venue and the same level of resources - then my perception understandably transforms. Suddenly this isn’t something “less than”, it is something equal too. Maybe even better?
This is not merely hypothetical. Although not a “real” sport, professional wrestling has been a place where perception and reality have long been fluid, but the wrestling industry gave us an explicit example about how changing the presentation of women within a sport (even a worked sport like wrestling) can become a game-changer. All it took to change the idea in fans’ minds that women’s matches were time-fillers, there merely to titillate male viewers or serve as a bathroom break for the live crowds, was to show us explicitly that they weren’t. To give the women equal billing on the card to men. To give their storylines and matches equal airtime and equal importance. To position them in important spots on the card and to give the matches equal time to show off the equally brilliant wrestling.
The women whose matches were previously ignored could fight just as well before, but no-one was noticing how good they were because the company they worked for weren’t noticing either. They were presented to viewers as less important than the men, and so they were perceived as such.
That simple change, and the significant investment of time and money from the promoters that came with it, transformed the entire industry and made women’s wrestling just as vital a part of any show today as the men.
We have also seen the example, in England, of the success of the women’s national football team - the Lionesses. When the women’s Euros were presented to the nation as important and exciting football, the crowds and television audiences swelled. When WSL matches are promoted on BBC and Sky sports channels and made into something important, the fans come. And many of us stay…I know I did, hence the season ticket I bought for Aston Villa Women within hours of the Euro 2022 final.
But when my season ticket makes me and my team feel like second class citizens at our own club, the disappointing reality undermines the initial perception of progressive equality. The team is amazing, the football is first class, but the message we get is clear: they are not considered worthy of the same treatment as the men. And that just isn’t right. Hence the ethics. If a club is going to invest in a women’s team, it has to be more than lip service and PR to make themselves look progressive and enlightened whilst still treating the women as if their game is less deserving of being watched than the football played by men. They have to actively invest in overcoming the sexist historical legacy and be front-footed about changing people’s perceptions. They have to show legitimate faith in the women and give them the same resources - and grounds - as the male team and recognise that reshaping the perceptions of a general public who, for generations, have been told that women’s football is something inferior, will take time. The stadiums won’t fill immediately, but they will fill eventually, and they will have a much better shot at doing so if people believe that what they are going to see is something worthy of their time. The message they currently get, when an interested Villa or Brighton fan inquires about their women’s team, is that if they want to support the team they will have to travel elsewhere to do so. If the club itself doesn’t think the match is worthy enough to put on, why would the fan who’s never been before think it worth travelling to see?
Since women first laced up their football boots and showed a close-minded patriarchal society that they were just as capable at playing football (and everything else) as men, women’s football has been smashing down barriers and changing the narrative with every goal. Too many of us have seen the reality to stand anymore for the false perceptions that have historically been perpetuated. We can no longer plead ignorance, or biological essentialism, and dismiss these amazing players and diminish their sporting contributions. That the very clubs who own these brilliant women’s teams continue to do so, is a continuing moral failing.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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