Standards and separatism: the discursive construction of gender in English soccer coach education

Affirmative action is a problematic, but common, organizational approach to redressing gender discrimination as it fails to address discourses underlying organizational definitions and practices in highly masculinized sites like English football. Unstructured interviews with 27 key personnel and participants in coach education in the north of England within a regional “division” of the organization regulating English football (“The FA”) were conducted to explore the gendered construction and enactment of football and coaching, and the framing of women-only (separatist) coaching courses. Critical discourse analysis identified the deployment of discourses concerning the undermining of standards and the privileging of women as strategies used to neutralize the significance of gender and previous gender discrimination, while re/producing the centrality of masculinity for key definitions and identities

‘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

‘Get back to the kitchen, cos u talk s*** on tv’: gendered online abuse and trigger events in sport

Research question: Online abuse is prevalent in sport and can be the by-product of trigger events–reactive social media posts that motivate online hate. Little is known about what triggers online abuse, types of content, and how this impacts certain groups. The current research examined how online behaviour emerges, and evolves during a trigger event, through a gendered lens. Research methods: This research employed a two phase, mixed methods approach of a digital netnography with participation observation through social network analysis and thematic content analysis of 1332 (N = 1332) tweets in the United Kingdom. The trigger event examined abusive content toward Karen Carney following post-match football commentary on 29 December 2020. Results and findings: Results identified 590 individuals who formed two distinct groups. Directed network visualisation indicated Carney was the focus of the trigger event. Thematic time series analysis revealed emotional maltreatment (i.e. ridiculing, humiliating, belittling) progressing to overt gendered discriminatory maltreatment. Implications: Findings support the need for safeguarding policies for target groups, as trigger events escalate quickly, and group affiliations impact abusive content. From a theoretical standpoint, in-group and out-group affiliations resulted in rhetoric highlighting persistent, gendered socio-normative issues within sport, amplified in an online environment

‘I don't think I can catch it’: women, confidence and responsibility in football coach education

Whilst women’s participation in sport continues to increase, their presence remains ideologically challenging given the significance of sport for the construction of gendered identities. As a hegmonically masculine institution, leadership roles across sport remain male-dominated and the entry of women into positions of authority (such as coaching) routinely contested. But in powerful male-typed sports, like football, women’s participation remains particularly challenging. Consequently, constructions of gender inequity in coaching were explored at a regional division of the English Football Association through unstructured interviews and coaching course observation. Using critical discourse analysis we identified the consistent re/production of women as unconfident in their own skills and abilities, and the framing of women themselves as responsible for the gendered inequities in football coaching. Women were thereby strategically positioned as deservedly on the periphery of the football category,whilst the organization was positioned as progressive and liberal

Re-establishing the ‘outsiders’: English press coverage of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

In 2015, the England Women’s national football team finished third at the Women’s World Cup in Canada. Alongside the establishment of the Women’s Super League in 2011, the success of the women’s team posed a striking contrast to the recent failures of the England men’s team and in doing so presented a timely opportunity to examine the negotiation of hegemonic discourses on gender, sport and football. Drawing upon an ‘established-outsider’ approach, this article examines how, in newspaper coverage of the England women’s team, gendered constructions revealed processes of alteration, assimilation and resistance. Rather than suggesting that ‘established’ discourses assume a normative connection between masculinity and football, the findings reveal how gendered ‘boundaries’ were both challenged and protected in newspaper coverage. Despite their success, the discursive positioning of the women’s team as ‘outsiders’, served to (re)establish men’s football as superior, culturally salient and ‘better’ than the women’s team/game. Accordingly, we contend that attempts to build and, in many instances, rediscover the history of women’s football, can be used to challenge established cultural representations that draw exclusively from the history of the men’s game. In such instances, the 2015 Women’s World Cup provides a historical moment from which the women’s game can be relocated in a context of popular culture

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

The production and maintenance of gendered discourses in football coaching

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Responsibility and progress: The English Football Association's professionalisation of the women's game (First)

Launched in 2011, the Women's Super League (WSL) has raised the media profile of women's football in England, benefitted from greater sponsorship investment and signalled, for the first time, a more co-ordinated effort by the Football Association (FA) to develop the game from grassroots to international level. However, whilst the FA's insistence that the WSL's future is best secured by clubs aligning themselves with male ‘parent’ clubs has led to more buy-in from English Premier League (EPL) clubs, some historically established women's clubs have been excluded from the highest echelons of the sport or even folded. Clubs' heavy reliance of volunteerism has been retained and salaries, even for internationally capped players, remain modest. There have been criticisms of player welfare (Taylor, 2018b), inadequate support for players' facing racist and sexist abuse (Gornall & Magowan, 2019), poor support for competition structuring (Wrack, 2018a) and a marketing strategy that is centred on heteronormative notions of family (Fielding-Lloyd, Woodhouse, & Sequerra, 2018). Popular discourses have heralded the professionalisation of women's football as evidence of significant progress in gender equality in the sport and as signposting an unequivocally positive future for the game. This chapter will critically assess the FA's conceptualisations of WSL as a neo-liberal project that has not consistently worked in the best interests of all players, clubs and fans and examine the FA's commitment to, and responsibility for, the development of the female game at elite club level