3 research outputs found
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