Paper Presentation VI:
The Organization of Women’s Elite Football
Saturday, April 10, 14.15–16.15

C. Dunn
UK

This paper assesses the ways in which English professional football clubs market themselves to females, and how the English football authorities (the Football Association and the Football League) perceive women in the game – as fans, officials and players.

In my ongoing PhD research, I have assessed the possible future of female football fandom in the UK. In this paper, I look at two clubs, Charlton Athletic and Brentford, demonstrating how the clubs market themselves to women and see how their female fans perceive their marketing, examining the supporting life stories of some of the respondents to examine how their own fandom began, but also examining how they think the club’s marketing operates, whether it successfully targets women or not, and how they think more fans will be attracted to the club in the future. I then compare this experiential data with the data I have elicited from executives within the club, looking at the ways in which clubs look to attract and retain female fans, and their own thoughts about sexism within football.

I go on to speak to key figures in the national game, to discover if they already promote the game to women, or if they have future plans to do so, and if they have strategies in place to overcome some of the obstacles to fandom mentioned by my respondents. It appears from my research that the football authorities, though not unconcerned about the issues of sexism within the game, are and always have been more presently concerned with issues of prejudice and abuse that directly affect players in the top echelons – who may be black, Asian, gay or bisexual, but are not women. Female officials may exist but they are outnumbered by male colleagues; female fans may go to games but they have made that particular choice and could remove themselves from the sexist environment if they chose to do so. Playing football is now an option for women, and indeed a very popular one, but this is under-marketed by the authorities and under-represented in the media.

I conclude with the ideas of fans, executives and the authorities on how to promote female involvement in English football in the future.