Around a year ago, I watched, at double speed, Nikki Doucet, the new face of the Women’s Professional Leagues Limited—previously NewCo, now Women’s Super League Football—speak at a conference event in which every other word was seemingly ‘content’. If there were any doubts on the loose or amorphous details on practical expansion and developments to the two top-flight leagues which she had recently inherited, there were certainly none on the overriding positioning towards the future.
Supposedly, if the game can be a vehicle for social reform, then by supercharging the social engagement of the game, societal reform will follow. It is a rhetoric that has become slightly stale with its relentless use by corporations that perpetuate equality as measured by financial assets, whilst seemingly changing startlingly little. Perhaps the 43-minute panel I had watched a year ago was a sign of things to come, that this would be a defining driver of progressing women’s football.
These fans are haloed by companies for their loyalty, their uniqueness, their desire for a sense of belonging, and their care for the sport to grow in the ‘right’ way. In the men’s game, these existential investments in the sport are less pronounced. It doesn’t feel so accessible. The solution proposed, when corporations boil sport down to categories and content, and brand it as ‘emancipation,’ is that fans become positioned as symbols of ‘smart economics,’ as an exercise in branding management.
One of the most fascinating things I have found in the women’s game has been that fans seem to attach themselves to particular values that can build sporting cultures, unlike what was possible in the past. Locality seems to matter less, and, instead, fans can latch on to storylines or environments they feel resonate with them.