The FA women's super league : framing developments in elite women's football

In 2009, the Football Association (FA), the national governing body of football in England, announced its plan to introduce the country's first semi-professional women's elite league. Launched in 2010 as the FA Women's Super League (FA WSL), its introduction provided both an opportunity to research whether this evidenced a change of position for the women's elite game within footballing narratives and also to examine the place of the FA within these. This study adopted a critical sociological feminist approach to deconstruct the assumptions, values and practices that frame the female game and the introduction of the FA WSL, while providing new insights into the role of the sport's governing organisation in defining elite women's football. Through observations at matches and interviews with people working within the women's game, an examination of the development and introduction of the FA WSL was undertaken, with valuable early insights provided into the first three years of the new League. The study identified that the introduction of the FA WSL was impacted upon by the complex, closed and gendered nature of the FA's organisational structure. The new League adhered to traditional societal concepts of hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity and liberal approaches to gender equality. The study also found that the new elite women's structures required the clubs who gained entry into the FA WSL to adhere to commercialised, spectacularised and commodified values which dominate the men's game and neo liberal societal narratives. The increased inclusion of females into elite football structures did not profoundly disrupt traditional discourses or provide evidence of a fundamental challenge to gender inequality in the game

‘More than just a game’: family and spectacle in marketing the England Women’s Super League

The Women’s Super League (WSL) is the first semi-professional women’s football league in England and the Football Association (FA) is central to reproducing its values and practices. This study employed observation at WSL matches and interviews with personnel involved in the League to identify how the FA conceptualised the WSL as a product in its first 3 years. The study found that the elite club game’s existing audience was alienated by the FA’s articulation of a heteronormative family target audience of young girls and their fathers. An overriding concern also appeared to be providing a commercialised matchday experience that goes beyond the game itself, situating the match at the periphery of broader entertainment. We argue that in positioning the WSL as a niche and new entertainment product, thereby eradicating the pre-WSL history of the elite club game, the FA has constructed women’s football as inherently distinct from, and inferior to, men’s football, negating any perceived threat to the wider gender order within the sport

Big brother’s little sister: the ideological construction of women’s super league

This article explores the structure and culture of the Football Association (FA) in relation to the development of England’s first semiprofessional female soccer league—Women’s Super League (WSL). Through observations and interviews, we examined the planning and operationalization of WSL. Drawing on critical feminist literature and theories of organizational change, we demonstrate the FA’s shift from tolerance of the women’s game, through opposition, to defining and controlling elite female club football as a new product shaped by traditional conceptualizations of gender. The labyrinthine structures of the FA abetted the exclusion of pre-WSL stakeholders, allowing the FA to fashion a League imagined as both qualitatively different to elite men’s football in terms of style of play, appealing to a different fan base, yet inextricably bound to men’s clubs for support. It concludes by providing recommendations for how organizational change might offer correctives to the FA approach to developing WSL

Feminising Football and Its Fandom: The Ideological Construction of Women's Super League

This paper explores the structure and culture of the English Football Association (FA) the governing body of soccer in England, in relation to the development of the FA Women’s Super League (WSL). In doing so, it examines the organisation’s journey from banning the sport in 1921 to establishing the country’s first semi professional female soccer league in 2011. As the FA has a virtual monopoly on defining the structures of the elite game, we attempted to understand its behaviour in the context of broader issues of power, control and resistance by giving voice to the experiences of those affected by its decisions. Observations were carried out at 39 matches over three years. Semi structured interviews with 17 people involved in the women’s game, identified via snowball sampling, were also carried out. Transcripts accompanied detailed field notes and were inductively coded to identify themes. What emerged was the governing body’s desire to create a new product, jettisoning the long history of the women’s game in order to shape and control the sport in a way it is no longer able to with the elite male club game. The League created was also shaped by traditional conceptualisations of gender, in terms of the portrayal of its style of play and target audience, setting increased participation and spectatorship targets as measures of ‘success’. The national governing body has demonstrated pseudo inclusion and a lack of enthusiasm for the implementation of equity reforms, driven by a belief that the organisation is already representative, fair and accessible. Despite consistent external pressure, the Football Association is still dominated at its most senior levels by males. Via claiming to hold a monopoly on expertise around the sport, maintaining complex committee structures and procedures, and with membership rules rooted in the amateur game, it remains a deeply gendered organisation, resistant to structural and cultural change. In WSL, the FA’s structure and culture have created a franchise over which it retains almost complete control, dictating the terms of conditions of entry and marginalising alternative voices. The organisation presents a feminised version of both play and spectatorship, portraying the sport as a distinct, and lesser, version of soccer. Keywords: Football Association, organisational culture, soccer, Women’s Super League