It’s a woman’s world

De­spite the coro­n­avirus pan­demic that has plagued (pun in­tended) foot­ball, it’s turned out to be a fan­tas­tic sea­son for Barça. Of course, I’m not re­fer­ring to Ronald Koe­man’s shower of over­paid un­der­achiev­ers, I’m talk­ing about the club’s fe­male team, which won a his­toric tre­ble of league title, Cham­pi­ons League and Copa de la Reina to de­servedly put them top of the head­lines.

I won’t go into the de­tails of how Barça’s women foot­ballers have shown up their male coun­ter­parts this sea­son, but you can get the low­down in Bar­ney Grif­fiths foot­ball col­umn on page 42. How­ever, I will share a few ob­ser­va­tions, en­tirely un­so­licited though they may be.

At this point, I’d say there is gen­eral ac­cep­tance that the con­tri­bu­tion women have made and make to so­ci­ety needs to be boosted and prop­erly recog­nised after cen­turies of being rel­e­gated to the back­ground. We’ve seen many ini­tia­tives and ef­forts to do just this in re­cent decades, some of them even en­shrined in leg­is­la­tion. To cite a very re­cent ex­am­ple of how women as a group have gained ground in the sta­tus and in­flu­ence to which they have a right can be seen in the fact that there’s a ma­jor­ity of women in the new Cata­lan cab­i­net, and that one of the stated aims of the ex­ec­u­tive is “fem­i­nism”, what­ever that means, al­though I think we can as­sume it means a com­mit­ment to gen­der equal­ity.

Any­way, the rea­son why I love so much what Barcelona Fe­meni, as they are called, have done is that they have done it on the back of hard work and tal­ent. They have grabbed the head­lines thanks to the ef­fort they put in on the foot­ball pitch and have earned the right to be called cham­pi­ons. Talk about break­ing the glass ceil­ing! And what’s more in a sport that has long been sti­fled by a mis­placed iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with mas­culin­ity. How many openly gay play­ers are there, for ex­am­ple?

Ahead of the 2019–20 sea­son, the fe­male sec­tion of my team Ever­ton dropped the word Ladies from their name and are now sim­ply called Ever­ton. Mean­while, in March in the UK, it was an­nounced that the Women’s Super League (WSL) had signed a broad­cast­ing deal with Sky and the BBC - two of the coun­try’s biggest tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ers - worth al­most 28 mil­lion euros over three sea­sons, the largest com­mer­cial agree­ment in women’s foot­ball to date. An­other ex­am­ple is the BBC’s cov­er­age of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, which at­tracted a total view­er­ship of 47% in the UK with a peak of 11.7 mil­lion peo­ple watch­ing Eng­land’s semi-final loss to the United States.

We hear a lot about gen­der equal­ity, about lev­el­ling the play­ing field and over­com­ing the pa­tri­archy, but women’s foot­ball is ac­tu­ally doing it, or­gan­i­cally, and with­out the need for spe­cial treat­ment or a pat on the head. I’m sure there’s a les­son in there for other sec­tors of so­ci­ety in which women should play a larger role.

Vicky Losada, the FC Barcelona Femení cap­tain, said after her team’s Cham­pi­ons League win: “Women’s foot­ball has grown and it has found it­self a place in so­ci­ety, in the media, that means it won’t take a step back now.” I have no doubt that she is right, and that she and her team point the way for achiev­ing true gen­der equal­ity.