Women’s League Cup draw: Women’s sports fans just want to be respected as sports fans

Commiserations to the Women’s League Cup, a competition full of potential but one that has always lacked a pulse.

You win some, you lose some.

Having a social media influencer publicly spank themselves with the bag holding the competition’s quarter-final and semi-final draw balls live on TikTok, making anti-Tottenham Hotspur comments while also admitting openly that she didn’t know much about the teams competing, and that she would have “rigged” the draw if not for, well, not knowing much about it… altogether, it feels like a pretty big ‘L’ for a competition crying out for some injection of legitimacy.

In case you missed it, WSL Football hosted its League Cup draw on Tuesday night live with social media star GK Barry and her partner, Ella Rutherford, who plays for WSL2 club Portsmouth. The draw descended into chaos, marred by lewd sexual innuendos and a ball mistakenly being placed back into the bag. WSL Football, which runs the top two professional tiers of women’s football in England, apologised to Tottenham for Barry’s comment.

The condemnation online has been swift, but also accompanied by an increasingly familiar stomach drop of disappointment. Maybe it is our fault for expecting wholesale change a mere nine days after such a triumphant win: women’s sport’s collective takedown of Sky Sports’ Halo, a woman-focused brand and social media channel canned just three days after its launch because, well, it turns out successfully marketing to women and girls involves more than just selling them girl boss matcha superimposed on Erling Haaland’s face.

We clearly edged too close to annihilating the scourge of women’s football: no one taking it seriously.

Of course, neither of these incidents was isolated. They were continuations, the latest examples of a desperate, gnawing urge to grow the audience, to grow the game. But grow where, and how and what, exactly?

And this is the real starting point — our obsession to stop the exponential growth of the last five years from wavering, ignoring that sustainable progress is organic, non-linear, a little imperfect. Instead, we keep force-feeding this liver with all things cool and hip, footballing foie gras, until all that’s left is an unrecognisable buttery slab of flesh.

It’s appropriate that it was the League Cup at the centre of this, a competition that feels bound to a leather Freudian couch, fielding questions of its personhood — what are you, really, League Cup? Or more pertinently: women’s football, where do you see yourself in five years? Instead, we’re asking whether the League Cup’s trophy is big enough to hold your preferred quantity of prosecco (three bottles, according to GK Barry).

What about that next generation? How do we know they’re being thoroughly inspired if 9.7k aren’t confirming their inspiration via the comments section of TikTok? After all, only a couple of thousand are actually packing out the stadiums, a mere 71,000 TV viewers watching the showpiece between Chelsea and Arsenal, according to Sky Sports’ recent viewing figures, a head-spinning uptick from the pre-Euro 2022 era but not the same sharp incline that followed immediately after.

To be clear, the concepts behind the League Cup draw and Halo were not hideous, nor was the way the draw unfolded an act of malevolence on Barry’s or Rutherford’s part.

There’s merit in wanting to strip away the formality and straitjackets around football, in striving to connect a new, young audience. The ‘Taylor Swift effect’ is compelling for a new league attempting to establish itself in an ecosystem already facing an identity crisis, desperately straddling the ever-growing fault line of legacy and needing to innovate, to gamble, to take risks and experiment, to cut through the crowded noise. 

Yet, according to a 2023 Football Without Borders report, 63 per cent of teenage girls still couldn’t name any of the England women’s internationals a year on from their 2022 triumph. 

There is opportunity, but there is also risk that, in yoking oneself so flagrantly to one audience, you abandon the very one that has loyally built your foundations. Because really, who could’ve predicted that recruiting an influencer with a self-confessed limited football knowledge or draw expertise might inadvertently conspire to be a terrible idea for imbuing a competition already struggling to be taken seriously? Probably the same people who could’ve predicted creating a new social media brand hinged on sparkly pink letters was better left unattempted. 

This is the moral here, one that seemed so uncomplicated 10 days ago: women’s sports fans actually just want to be respected as sports fans. It risks becoming a refrained cliche, an Aretha Franklin desire purged of meaning.

The social media backlash can deceive, suggesting that we’re all secretly enjoying feasting on the entrails of WSL Football and Sky’s errors. But the anger is becoming more exasperated, bleary-eyed.

And that is the real shame: the response from many match-going and match-watching fans repeatedly spurred for something more sexy, trendy, bathed in Dubai chocolate. Until, potentially, all that remains at the centre of women’s football’s mass congregation is just flashing white noise, a hole where the soul once was.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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