Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

FIFA Women’s World Cup 2007 has kicked off….

…and Germany have trounced Argentina 11-0! It is looking like it could be an interesting tournament, with the USA, Germany and China fielding decent sides and a few of the others capable of an upset (although maybe not Argentina!) The thing that amazes me the most though is that I remember when it started back in 1991. No coverage, hardly any teams. Now you have a huge opening ceremony, coverage across most of the world’s media and even the petty pre-tournament squabbles and moans about the organisers. A few years ago you would never have had any of this, but it is a good sign. The game is now becoming truely professional, the peopel involved are there to win, not just to play, and people are also expecting the organisation to follow suit.
This brings me back to the UK and why we don’t seem to show up as a force in this game. In the UK football is the default sport, you actually have to go out of your way to play something different. The Premiership is the most watched league in the world and the mix of male and female is actually pretty good, nowhere near as male dominated as you might expect* as the grounds are actually not the scary intimidating places of old. However there are few of the teams with a genuiniely good womens team. Arsenal are the obvious exception, but I have blogged before about the farce of the Charlton Athletic women’s team getting disbanded when then men’s team were relegated from the Premiership even though they were the only team in the country that could even give the Arsenal ladies team a game. In contrast there is a healthy and growing game evolving in places like the US and Germany.
In all honesty I find it a bit strange. We have the FA going on about the lack of English players as being the lack of success for the England team, when we have a starting eleven where the majority would pretty much be guarenteed a place in the big sides around the world (I will blog on this at another time) but at the same time the FA does very little with the huge sums of money coming into the English game to promote the women’s game. It is still considered a small, part-time concern. In addition, why in’t the Premiership putting money into this as it is one of the few markets that are not nearly close to saturation - I mean how many more pubs are there that don’t show it, how many more Manchester United shirts can you sell in suburban London? In those old laws of diminishing returns, you have to spend a fortune for a small incremntal gain in the men’s game, but s small amount of cash should make a step change to the women’s game and could lay the seeds for a very lucrative sideline to the men’s Premiership. With the women’s game growing globally at the rate it is, it’s on of those situations that requires you get in now, cheaply, or wait and be forced to pay a lot more later.

* OK, it’s not that balanced as football grounds must be the only places in the UK where there is no queue for the ladies loo at half time, only the mens!