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Putting Women's Super League football on TV can only help grow the sport

Comparisons with the men's game are pointless - and better coverage will help Women's Super League to improve

Last weekend was a significant one for sport on TV, with women’s domestic league football shown live on terrestrial television for the first time.

This, Everton vs Manchester City, formed part of an opening weekend for the Women’s Super League, which has managed to negotiate a three-year broadcast deal with Sky Sports and the BBC: Sky will show 44 games and the BBC 22 in a deal worth £8 million per season, a sensible balance between the in-depth treatment of Sky and the eyeballs of free-to-air.

Both as a sport and as a TV product these are exciting times for women’s football. Sky gave the opening fixture, Friday night’s Manchester United vs Reading match the full treatment, plenty of build up, tactical chalkboards and on-screen jiggery-pokery with the giant iPad, and a decent panel. Host Caroline Barker, analyst Karen Carney, and pundit Emile Heskey were joined by Casey Stoney, who was until very recently the woman with her backside in the Man United bacon slicer. She now manages San Diego, which sounds like a much nicer place to work.

Women’s football has to endure redundant comparisons with its men’s counterpart more than most sports. To my mind, it is inane to critique it on the grounds that, for instance, Man United men would beat Man United women: this we all can see. Although Arsenal, who knows? 

More interesting is to see a sport at a certain point in its history: professionalism and money from this sort of broadcast deal will continue to raise standards. But fast enough, under the increased levels of scrutiny? That remains to be seen. As Stoney pointed out on the BBC: “We currently have professional players refereed by amateur officials” and, for instance, the absence of goal-line technology at the Leigh Sports Village stadium meant Reading had a goal wrongly not given at 0-1. That sort of amateurishness helps nobody.

Despite the occasional spike in interest like the England vs USA World Cup 2019 semi-final, women’s football is still in the “build it and they will come” phase as a broadcast product. Introducing Friday night’s match, Barker said “to be the change, you gotta see the change”, the modern mantra, and who knows how many women and girls might take up the sport if they can watch it on the TV, or how many fans will be enticed. 

The marketeers claim the sky's the limit, as they would. Speaking as someone who enjoys watching football on TV but does try to live some sort of other life as well, I personally don’t know how many more hours a week I could set aside for a new TV tournament, female, male, or whatever. But perhaps demand for football really is as insatiable as we are told. Also this weekend, ITV agreed a four-year deal to show England women's qualifiers and friendlies.

Manchester United's Ona Batlle celebrates scoring their second goal - Putting the Women's Super League on TV can only help grow the sport
Manchester United beat Reading in the first game of the new Super League season, which is being broadcast jointly by Sky and the BBC Credit: Action images via reuters

A couple of bits of context elsewhere on the BBC: there was a tribute on Saturday’s football to Lance Hardy, a former BBC football editor and champion of the women’s game who died recently. Kirsty Wark’s podcast series about reunions gathered some of the early pioneers of women’s football, which was of course famously banned. It can be both true to say that a sport still has a long way to go, while also acknowledging that it has made massive progress.

It will be interesting to see if the broadcast deal and similar developments see women’s football replicate the greed and inequalities of the men’s game: one notes the clubs in the women’s top flight are hiving off 75% of the telly dosh, 25% for the Championship tier below, and let the devil take the hindmost for the rest.

In broadcast terms, the women regularly presenting football on, for instance, the BBC have set such a standard of excellence – your Gabby Logans, your Barkers, your Alex Scotts – that it will be interesting to see if more airtime to fill means female mediocrity on screen rather than undiluted class, as is the case with the vast acres of men's coverage and punditry. 

Perhaps true equality in football TV will only be finally realised when a female version of Paul Merson is putting the boot into a female foreign manager “oh yeh wossername, the Italian, Spanish one is it, she don’t know our league do she?” Something to look forward to there, then.

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