It is difficult to argue the Women’s World Cup has been anything short of an overwhelming success.
The quality has been high, the storylines captivating and the viewership figures recording breaking. England’s semi-final loss to the United States, for example, became the most-watched broadcast of the year in England, attracting 11.7 million viewers.
But while the women’s game has reached unprecedented echelons of public interest and support, many of those watching don’t realise that away from the stadia of France the sport still has a lot of progress to make up, according to the Sunday Times’s Rebecca Myers.
Speaking on Friday’s OTB AM, Myers said that just yesterday Gilly Flaherty, an England international and the captain of West Ham, had tweeted that she had no boots for the coming season due to a lack of sponsorship.
“And you saw in her replies some people tweeting back saying were like: ‘Are you joking? Are you having a laugh?’” Myers recounted.
Seeing that tweet, Myers said, was a wake-up call that beyond the success of the World Cup many don’t “realise the type of level that a lot of the women's game is at”.
“This has been fantastic. It's amazing. It has been game-changing. I think we will look back at it as a tipping point but unless we work properly and seriously at issues like that – basic issues like that – and grassroots issues then we've got ages before we are going to resemble anything like equality.”
How progress can be achieved is admittedly for Myers a “difficult one”.
“I think the main thing is that TV rights of some kind are secured. So historically the women's league [and] the tender that is currently coming to an end, the rights were essentially given away for free. The arrangement was that the broadcasters, which were BBC and BT, would pay production costs but nothing else so the rights were kind of gifted in a way.
“That is fine to get it out there but actually it’s not turning a profit and it means that there is this unsustainable model where the women's teams need to rely on the money from the men's teams and we can't have that going forward.
“It doesn't work for anybody it doesn't work for the women or the men it doesn't work for the club and it will, I think, jeopardise the future of the league.”
Many will be pointing to the news that the Premier League are edging closer to taking over the women’s domestic league from the FA as a sure sign that progress is coming, but Myers notes that amidst the positivity there will be the contrast too.
“There will be negatives and there will be things people who have long loved the women's game will not like about that.”
“But it adds huge weight to say that the Premier League are investing in the women's game or care about the women's game enough. It is a huge, huge stepping stone. You can argue both sides but if it happens then we need to look at all the positives and embrace that.”
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