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
