The gender divide in football get no starker than the news Wilf Zaha has been awarded a £130,000 a week contract, whereas members of the Crystal Palace Ladies have been told to stump up £250 in sponsorship each themselves if they can’t raise it from outside sources.
Of course this is disgraceful but it does raise two interesting points.
My friend Tom appeared at our units today, admittedly he is a Brighton fan, proclaiming Palace a disgrace. But of interest lots of other people for the first time are talking about this controversy in the women’s game. Last year it wouldn’t have warranted a mention. The ladies game has been recently revamped by the Women’s FA and to date it has been a flop, but you know what they say….’there’s not such a thing as bad publicity’ and this maybe the hint of some interest, an embryonic spat. Football is half the game, the other half is the conjecture around it. This makes it such an enormous hit. This is probably the first ‘news’ story of the modern women’s era and the marketing team for the new revamp must be delighted there is at last tiny stirring of interest.
The FA’s ladies restructuring, is in my eyes, badly thought out. The ladies game cannot possibly compete with the men’s game and merely organising it better is not going to help it gather appeal. I think the fact that the Palace ladies went straight to the press, rather than going to press equipped as you do in this modern age, with a crowd funding initiative, or gone on the Palace fan’s forums to plead for help shows the problem. The ladies teams are too reliant on their brother clubs for everything facilitating the view the ladies game is a poor alternative to the men’s game and in hock to them which is poor publicity. Women’s football needs to raise it’s game. The Women’s FA need to think outside the box and the ladies club’s need to strive for independence and alternative avenues.
The women need to strike out with their own initiatives. The Palace excuse was terrible, it is good PR for the ladies to go out and source their own funding. No it is a basic duty of the club to pay for this. But interestingly there is a point, and you see this at all women’s clubs. There is no self determination. No effort for women’s football to strike it’s own identity. I watched the Everton ladies smash my team Lewes in the FA Cup. I would go regularly and watch the Everton Ladies. It does not have the speed and aggression of the Premiership but they played wonderful football. The match was like football when I was a boy. Accessible, cheap to watch, normal people playing, full of integrity, untainted by greed and a great sport. The women’s clubs and FA should be going back 50 years and run their sport with integrity, with DIY in their dna, as it used to be and they may in time begin to eclipse the ugliness and greed of modern football and offer a new alternative for the disillusioned rather than a poor alternative.
The Rights of Fans. 