Women's football / women's sports

 I remember one of the biggest tennis matches of all time, and it was between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. It was the famous “battle of the sexes”, and notwithstanding that Billie Jean King managed to beat a guy who had retired a long time ago, the fact that she managed to beat the guy legitimised the woman's sport in the eyes of the world. 

It's one of those sexual equality debates that would rage all around the world. And it would get a reprisal when the debates over football salary comes in: the USA women's team would want salary parity with the men's team. There were 3 reasons why this debate took place in the US and nowhere else: the women's team were great, the men's team were comparatively lousy, and Americans in general did not know football. 

There is a sense that – given that men and women would be kicking lumps out of each other for 90 minutes each, there's a sense of fairness in that. Football is a tough game, and not least because you'd be sprinting great distances over those 90 minutes. 10 km is a rough ballpark figure. 

But tennis isn't a major spectator sport. The biggest spectator sports are American football, baseball, basketball and football. And maybe hockey. These are the big team sports with big followings. Somehow, it's in all the other sports where the women have achieved any kind of parity with the men's sport. 

Tennis and track and field are still the biggest sports where women are almost equal to men, but they tend to be the bougeo... sports. Not the gladiatorial sports with big followings. For women to be equivalent to men in football would represent a big breakthrough. 

Men's football is by some distance the biggest sport in the world. The oldest league started in 1888, and probably has 100 years of headstart over the woman's game. The woman's game is still very much in a very very early stage of development, and while it could take in a lot of advances in the men's game, it has a lot to catch up on. It would have been hard for women's football to catch up to what the men's game was like before the premier league, but subsequent developments in the game have made it harder for the women's game to catch up. 

The colour barrier in many ways has been broken. France and Brazil are countries with a lot of black players, and together they have won 4 of the last 7 World Cups. England and Belgium have black players and they're hovering somewhere in the conversation. Argentina, another perennial contender, has plenty of indigeneous players. 

However, the sexism barrier is still firmly up. And it's not just the battle of the sexes. In men's football, players at the top level are not openly gay. There had already been the case of Justin Fashanu, who came out, and even got ridiculed by his boss Brian Clough in not one of his finest moments. He ended up hanging himself. And one wonders what would have happened today, when Twitter has made the world of football an even more emotionally toxic place. 

For the woman's sport, it is a chicken and egg problem. If you don't have exceptional players, then nobody's going to follow the woman's game. And if you don't have a lot of people following the woman's game, you're not going to have the vast amount of resources that go into making women into exceptional players. When we talk about “vast amount of resources”, we mean that for the guys to be elite players, they would have dedicated most of their childhood to mastering the sport, and would have had the financial support to do so. 

To be sure, there are a few names in women's football which are well known enough, and they are chiefly Americans, who somehow have managed to forge the best woman's football team in the world, even though the men's team is – and remains mired in mediocrity. And yet, unfortunately, they will not be as well paid as the men's team, because there's not yet a woman's equivalent of major league soccer in the USA. And even then, the major league soccer may or may not reach the lofty heights of the big soccer leagues in the world, like in England, Italy, Germany or Spain. Whether MLS is at the level of France's Ligue 1 is even questionable, considering that PSG can have Messi, Neymar and Thiago playing for them and not even win the league. 

Unfortunately for the US, while it's great that the league is quite egalitarian by football's standards – no small cabal of clubs dominating the championships year after year – it hasn't reached up to the lofty standards of measuring up to the European leagues. In fact, the American continent has somehow fallen behind Europe when it comes to having a great league, and surprisingly, also when it comes to producing great players. Furthermore, it's had a terrible pandemic, and it remains to be see if that has an adverse impact on the talent conveyor belt. Quite possibly, European migrant enclaves are proving to be the rich source of football talent which Brazilian favelas used to be: ghettos where the only way out was to become a football star, that are nevertheless situated near enough to the great football cathedrals, so that any emerging talent can quickly be recognised for what it is. 

The problem now is that the football elite is becoming more and more concentrated. The emergence of the European Super League will show that for the past 10 years, maybe only 15 clubs really mattered, and those 15 clubs had an inordinate share of the world's football fans. (Probably the 15 are the 12 who wanted to break away, plus Bayern Munich, PSG and Borussia Dortmund). Football was rapidly becoming some kind of a plutocracy it was increasingly hard to break away from. 

Further to that, even amongst this elite group of 15 clubs, there is a group bankrolled by great oil states – PSG, Chelsea and Man City – who might end up dominating the champion's league for the forseeable future. All 3 of them reached the semi-finals in the most recent edition. 

If you want to know how unfair the competition is, consider that in this season break. PSG have signed Wijnaldum, Messi, Ramos, Donnarumma and Hakimi. They signed Messi because they could pay his salary, and because they were a realistic prospect to win the Champion's league, but because they were one of the few clubs who were capable of signing him, they managed to sell enough Messi shirts to recoup to some extent the vast sums of wages they were paying him. Likewise, the Ronaldo transfer to Man United is essentially free because they managed to sell enough football shirts to recoup the transfer fee.  

The point is that the gap between the haves and have-nots is growing. There are other clubs who have been former European champions, or they have previously won European competitions, but they are being left behind – Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen , Porto, Benfica, Sporting Lisbon, Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord, Red Star Belgrade, Anderlecht, Magdeburg, Dynamo Kiev, Shaktar Donetsk, Fiorentina, Sampdoria, Parma, Lazio, Napoli, Hamburg, Mechelen, Zaragoza, Werder Bremen, Everton, Dinamo Tbilisi, Valencia, Villareal, Zenit St Petersburg, CKSA Moscow, Schalke 04, Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayer Leverkusen, Galatasaray, Ipswich Town, Newcastle, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. 

I don't think many of them will get back their glorious past statuses anytime soon. Plus I think the globalisation of the sport means that a lot of the lesser leagues will not anytime soon get the audience they deserve: Thai, Japanese, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israeli, Greek, various from Africa, Brazilian, Argentinian, Colombian, Uruguayan. 

This is a big problem for women's football, although one interesting thing about that is that they can always leverage on the name of the men's clubs. It is a big shame but if women's football could reach the standards that were set by the men, they could have a good shot at attaining almost-equality. But in the women's game, you need to have the things that the guys have. You need to have stadiums full of fanatic followers, who treat football like a religion, as well as armies of travelling fans. You need vast amounts of TV money. You need to be a household name for casual fans. You need to have your posters on bedrooms of teenagers. I don't know if women's football is capable of all that. 

The greatest football stars have to live their lives in a bubble. Rather infamously, Maradona was unable to handle growing up once he was done with playing football, but he was absolutely an adult while he was on the pitch. 

The women footballers may not have the support structure that the men have, but they also don't have to sacrifice as much of their lives to football. Take a person like Alex Morgan – she played football as an ECA, and was heavily involved in it, but she never had to attend some kind of a La Masia like Xavi, Iniesta or Messi did. She didn't grow up broke in some public housing project in Paris, and she wasn't treated like a lower class second citizen, like a lot of footballers were while growing up. She was firmly middle class, unlike many of the elite players of the men's game. She wasn't in some kind of meat grinder where you either had to make it to the top or fail in life. To be fair, the state of men's football in the USA is similar, where playing football is some kind of privilege given to dandys who have a few grand to spare and who can join youth football clubs. That's why men's football in the USA sucks. 

So I guess what I'm saying is that unless a lot of things change in a very very substantial way, I do not really expect that to happen anytime soon. 

Also a shout out to Emma Raducanu, whose stratospheric ascent to the top of the tennis world caught the imagination of everybody. People were starting to talk about her, and I don't really know why, but I guess we found out, this time with the US open. Plus, she's from a lucky generation of people who can play the Grand Slam without any of the Williams sisters lurking in one of the knockout rounds. 

Back then, people were thinking that Serena William's torch would be passed to Naomi Osaka, but as it turns out, it was Emma Raducanu who grabbed it. The fact that Raducanu's half Chinese would make it more easy for me to support her, but you don't need that much of an excuse. She's less glamorous than Maria Sharapova, but she seems to have more charisma. I can't think of any tennis champion that has a bigger smile than she is, but I can tell you that one of the most exciting things that can happen to you as a teenager is that you discover some kind of talent that you have. I thought of myself as a pretty average writer until I got to write the school play. I can guarantee you, you'd be smiling too. I don't know how long more she'll be smiling, given all the stress that's coming ahead for her, but she should enjoy this moment as much as she can.

Raducanu's British, and it's always nice to play at home when it's Wimbledon. They've been crying out for a homegrown hero since Andy Murray. I've come to realise that as an elite athlete, you have to be lucky with injuries to make sure that you stay at the very top. Maria Sharapova's career was derailed by a shoulder injury, although you could argue that if she bulked up like Serena Williams did, it might have been less of an issue. Right now, the way that Raducanu's swatting everybody aside like flies, it seems to portend that she's here to stay. Until she gets injured, as all elite tennis players seem to do at one point or another. 

The tennis stars tend to have some kind of persona. Martina Navratilova was the bespectacled, eccentric gender studies professor. Maria Sharapova was the glamorous woman, probably too cool to get down and dirty with tennis. Serena Williams was the beast. Martina Hingis was some kind of a priss. Naomi Osaka was some triggered suffering saint. Emma Raducanu is not yet a star. For all you know, a meteor could drop on her tomorrow and she'd be dead. But at this point in time, she looks like the cheerful pokemon.