The Women’s Super League contributes £37.5million less to the UK economy as a consequence of the historical 50-year ban on women’s football in England, a new study has estimated.
The Football Association banned women’s matches from its venues from December 1921, calling football “quite unsuitable for females”.
The decision was not reversed until 1971 and The Play Gap report sets out to quantify where the women’s game would be now without the ban.
It showed WSL figures “closely resemble attendances historically in (men’s) League One” and modelled a range of growth scenarios.
Estimating the rise in attendances, supply chains, TV revenue and a projected £24.5m overall increase in wages produced the conclusion that, without the ban, the WSL would now be worth £123.2m in wage contribution to the economy, compared to the current estimate of £85.7m.
Co-author Dr James Reade, a sports economist at the University of Reading, told the PA news agency: “We tried to position where the women’s game is and felt it is something like 20 years behind (men’s football).
“You can look at that on a very positive side, because of course that shows the progress in a very short time since the Women’s Super League was formed (in 2010).”
The most optimistic projection mirrored a mix of the Premier League and Championship’s growth over the last 20-30 years, with the lower end matching the lack of growth in League Two.
“Given these different scenarios, what would we expect the women’s game to look like?” said Dr Reade. “Of course we can say it would just have grown exponentially – but the men’s game didn’t over that 50-year period, it had a big dip before the Premier League came around.
“In the women’s game, using 20 per cent per year growth in attendances, TV deals have grown significantly as well – still nothing like the Premier League, but then most of football is nothing like what the Premier League has. But the women’s game’s had incredible growth.”
60,160 💫
— Arsenal Women (@ArsenalWFC) February 17, 2024
Emirates Stadium sold out for the first time in @BarclaysWSL history.
Another league record. Another historic moment.
Thank you, Gooners ❤️ pic.twitter.com/kfnk65c6rM
The ability to switch matches to Premier League grounds, with Arsenal repeatedly selling out the Emirates Stadium for WSL matches, was identified as a unique advantage over even the most upwardly-mobile men’s teams.
Dr Reade said: “Wrexham are great example of a team with investment and going places but they’ve had to expand their stadium, that’s taken a long time and constrained a lot of their potential. Whereas women’s teams like Arsenal, Man United, City can switch to the men’s stadium and they’ve got a huge increase in capacity.
“Over five years, the average (attendance) has gone from below 1,000 to over 7,000. The men’s game never showed that kind of growth because it couldn’t, they had to build the stadiums and that takes time.”
The report is accompanied by a survey for Three’s #WeSeeYou Network and an interview with an AI recreation of Lily Parr, the highest-profile player affected by the ban, by England star turned broadcaster Karen Carney.
Remarkably, 44 per cent of survey respondents could not name a single professional female footballer while 65 per cent believed female players are not promoted as role models like their male counterparts.
“We’ve talked about an economic imprint but it’s cultural as well,” said Dr Reade.
“The men’s game isn’t profit-making – they pat themselves on the back for losing only £105m over three years – so why would there be any expectation of the same for the women’s game?
“But it is about investment. There’s something wonderful about seeing the women’s teams selling out the Emirates and the big stadiums and having put on great games. This is often talked about in financial markets, ‘what’s the sentiment like?’.
“It’s fantastic now that there’s always a female presenter or pundit, where you go back only five or 10 years and there was none of that. And yes, there’ll be some criticism of that, but this is raising the profile.
“We all know who Gary Lineker is but a kid today, why does he know who Gary Lineker is? Because of his media profile. So why don’t we help these women also gain those profiles and become the role models we want them to be?”
