Commercial With Women With Blue Umbrella and Armor
Opinion's Editor Erin Davies speaks with former professional player turned sports business academic, Dr. Alex Culvin, about the commercial direction of women's football and how to make the game more sustainable.
Football is the most popular game in the world and one of the most profitable games of the 21st century. In fact, the Premier League contributed £7.6 billion to the UK economy in the 2019-20 season despite a quarter of games being played behind closed doors. However, women's football is still in its professional and commercial infancy with its top flight becoming semi-professional in 2011, and fully professional in just 2018.
The Blue Bird spoke to Dr. Alex Culvin, ex-professional women's footballer turned academic, about the commercial future of the game. Culvin noted that "women are just participating in male defined structures". Owing to the gendered landscape of football, women's football struggles to become commercially sustainable, "the fragility is so great that people are just worried that the professional game one day will be here, and the next day it will disappear".
Recently, Tracey Crouch MP's Fan-Led Review of Football Governance was published. In light of the European Super League scandal and Bury FC's collapse, it recommended tighter regulation on governance and finances by the establishment of an independent football regulator. This was deemed important as "football clubs sit at the heart of their communities". In terms of women's football, it merely recommended a further independent review therefore leaving the commercial issues within women's football unaddressed.
In light of this,I asked Culvin what a fan-led review of women's football may unearth in terms of governance.
"What would be uncovered is primarily the lack of female representation in leadership positions. It is a very old-aged critique of governance set ups, not just football and sport. We are unfortunately still operating in a male dominated institution" said Culvin.
This is highly problematic when women rely on parent clubs, whose money comes mainly from the men's team for financial backing. We risk club investment in women's football remaining a commercial responsibility exercise, and thus when times get rough, we risk significant or total withdrawal of funding to the female arms of the club. This was seen recently with Coventry United LFC, a team in the Women's Championship who had become fully professional at the start of this season. Players turned up to work to find that they had lost their jobs with the women's arm of the club entering voluntary liquidation after being impacted by Covid-19 and having issues finding sufficient sponsorship. Goalkeeper Olivia Clark tweeted "To come into work and to find out that you no longer have the job that you've always dreamed of is heartbreaking".
" the fragility is so great that people are just worried that the professional game one day will be here, and the next day it will disappear"
Culvin works for FIFPRO, the worldwide representative organisation for professional footballers, and wrote a chapter of her PHD on the new reality of football as work for women. She therefore understands the importance of more player representation in decision making:
"Centralising the voice of the player is crucial as they understand. They are living the experience so they probably have really good ideas about how to improve or what needs improving".
This could help protect the jobs of players, as well as improve working conditions, as seen in the USA, Denmark and Ireland where national team players rallied against their national governing bodies to improve working conditions and pay.
"Working conditions are only ever really improved by players themselves pushing it. The problem we have in England is that the players who have the most capital are employed by the FA so they don't have the opportunity to speak out. The FA also own the rights to the league. This power dynamic for me, is something that needs to be examined, it needs to be unpicked. A regulatory review is one way to do that".
Should women's clubs strive to be independent from men's clubs?
"Whilst I would advocate for teams being independent, I've also played for a team, Bristol, when we weren't tied to a men's team. We were really lucky as we had some really good players in that team in 2012 and we finished 2nd in the league and got to the FA cup final. That wouldn't happen now in the FAWSL because of the way players are being hoarded by the top teams, so I think whilst independent women's football teams away from men, getting to define their own rules and structures, would be idealistic, in the realist sense, I don't think that could happen. One because of the control of the FA and the advocation of the absorption of women's teams, and in its essence it makes sense because how else is women's football going to be funded if it's not coming from the juggernaut which is men's football?"
"how else is women's football going to be funded if it's not coming from the juggernaut which is men's football?"
"Whilst there are benefits to it, there are drawbacks as well".
Culvin notes the example of Under Armour approaching the FA with an offer to sponsor the women's national team. The FA declined the offer reasoning that they were sponsored by Nike and they could not have two separate sponsorships.
"That money could have been given straight to the women's team and redistributed however they saw fit but because they are under the umbrella of men's and women's football, there is no separation. Independent sponsorship is not possible. This is problematic as the women's growth is stunted by being under 'one badge'".
With football reportedly being the biggest participation sport for women and girls in England, and therefore an important area of female empowerment, it is unfortunate that we must depend on men for our preservation. Whilst we can dream of a time in which women's teams are not financially dependent on men's teams, this is unfortunately no near reality. The game is not yet commercially developed enough for women's clubs to self-produce the balance needed to run a successful women's team. In the top two flights, parent clubs foot the bill, and below the top two to three leagues, talented players training two to three times a week and even facing the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool in the FA Cup, often have to pay hundreds per season to play.
What can we do to develop the lower levels of the game?
Culvin opines that developing lower levels of the women's pyramid, for example the FA National League which sits at the third and fourth stages of the pyramid, is difficult.
"Trickle down economics doesn't work in society or in football. I think it is very utopian of us to say 'how can we help these women's football teams in the lower pyramids' because it doesn't happen in the men's game so it's certainly not going to happen in the women's game".
Whilst the Fan-Led Review of Football has pushed for redistribution to lower leagues of the men's game and the professional women's game by mechanisms such as the introduction of a transfer tax (solidarity transfer fee), the women's professional game is not yet commercially stable, or professionally developed enough to redistribute to its own lower levels: "nobody wants to rock the boat as it's so fragile". For example, Culvin notes that "when clubs come to the FAWSL, they are nowhere near the standard required".
Thus, focus must remain for now on sustainability and development of the professional game. However, Culvin recognises that "grassroots football clubs are the lifeblood of football, and if those clubs don't survive, we won't have any feeder clubs for players going into the top clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester City".
"What needs to happen is the FA needs to take control and help all football clubs, not just put all the money in the FAWSL as that is the flagship league, and not care about what happens outside of that".
Fortunately, in early December, Barclays announced that it was extending its sponsorship of the FAWSL and would also become the first title sponsor of the FA Women's Championship to help develop the women's pyramid. The £30 million pound investment from 2022 to 2025, will also help increase investment to grassroots development. However, despite Barclays' £15 million investment in the FAWSL since 2019, the women's professional game remains delicate and teams still remain dependent on men's revenue streams to survive. More steps need to be taken to ensure its durability.
So how do we make women's football more sustainable?
"Firstly, there needs to be a set of protections in place developed specifically for women's football that the Players Football Association as a union need to get a grip of and incorporate FIFPRO and other unions across the world and say 'how can we best protect women's football?'. This needs to be a collective action. Manchester City alone cannot say 'we are investing £15 million in our women's team this year' and Chelsea invest £20m, and then Bristol have £100,000. That is where the problem lies."
During Culvin's PHD research, she tried to find financial information about different women's team's turnovers to discover the financial disparities between the teams at the top and bottom of the Women's Super League. However, she found that "the funding streams going into women's football are not recognised or documented". Therefore, we don't know how much money clubs are putting into women's teams, and we can't compare financial investment within the league.
This is troublesome as the higher the disparities, the less competitive leagues become as the top clubs hoard the best players (think Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea for example). With the development of the WSL and influx of top international players, such as Sam Kerr of Chelsea WFC, this needs to be monitored.
"What is important, is football is a business, but it is a very different type of business. Football clubs need competition, they need the other teams. Football thrives on competition, in fact, it survives on competition.Chelsea need Bristol to be able to have a nil-nil draw with them."
"Football clubs need competition, they need the other teams. Football thrives on competition, in fact, it survives on competition"
"These discrepancies show there needs to be financial regulation of women's football". Then, we can understand the imbalances between clubs. However, what do we do with that information?
"There needs to be some creativity around it. For example, all clubs putting a fixed sum in the pot. and the FA rather than giving £100,000 to each club, giving £500,000 to Bristol and £100,000 to Chelsea. There needs to be a collective agreement on that because at the moment it is so disparate and everyone is just doing their own thing. For a sustainable game moving forward, there needs to be more collective action".
With the money coming from the men's system, and those within that system making the decisions about a collective action in the women's game, do you think that collective action might be difficult to achieve?
"Fundamentally, football is a competition so Chelsea are not going to say 'okay, let me help Arsenal'. However, this goes back to the first point. If you had women who had expertise around women's football in the room with data to support it, so if you had an independent review and all the books of the top clubs, you could see what was happening in a very transparent way and I then think there would be justification to have those conversations, have meaningful dialogue between clubs and bring the FA, FIFA, UEFA and Unions in".
"It is important for us to ask 'how can we meet in the middle here?' to ensure our game doesn't end in 10 years, and this is a career path for women in the future. With player voices, collective action and women in leadership roles, I think you could have meaningful dialogue".
"Would we be able to get all the top teams around a table and have this discussion? I think yes, it's something that needs to be floated, otherwise football becomes boring. I don't want to watch the same few teams in the Champions League final every year (Lyon, Barcelona and Wolfsburg). That's why the Premier League is the most watched league in the world, because Wolves can hold Liverpool to a draw until the 80th minute. It keeps you on the edge of the seat, it's entertainment.
"If we want to continue down the sustainability route whilst also simultaneously managing the commercial entertainment (the very capitalist component), collective action needs to happen".
burnhambotinquiered1951.blogspot.com
Source: http://www.bluebirdnews.co.uk/the-commercial-future-of-womens-football-in-conversation-with-alex-culvin/
0 Response to "Commercial With Women With Blue Umbrella and Armor"
Enregistrer un commentaire