3 Female fandom at the World Cup
In March 2022, Iranian authorities prevented female fans from entering a men’s World Cup qualifying match against Lebanon. Video footage shared online showed women allegedly being pepper sprayed, despite having bought a ticket (Dollimore and Bezants, 2022). The incident came two months after Iran had permitted a limited number of women to watch Iran secure their entry into the 2022 World Cup. Admittance to stadiums had been off limits to women shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 (Motamedi, 2022). Despite this alleged pepper spraying incident, football has become an increasingly popular spectator sport for females around the world.
Activity 3 How do female football fans experience World Cup tournaments?
Timing: Allow approximately 25 minutes
Listen to the two audio clips of conversations between Steph Doehler and Dr Carrie Dunn and answer the questions.
- Do you agree with the differences Dunn identifies regarding how fans engage in women’s World Cup tournaments compared to the men’s?
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 2
Transcript: Audio 2 Steph Doehler and Carrie Dunn on fan engagement in women’s football
STEPH DOEHLER
So I think most people would agree that the general engagement in women’s football has increased over recent years across the globe, but how is female engagement in World Cup events more broadly developed particularly over the last couple of tournaments?
CARRIE DUNN
It’s a really interesting one. So my research hinged on the 2015 World Cup in Canada. And I think if I did a similar project with a European tournament, I might get slightly different results because being in Canada it was very, very easy for the American fans, huge numbers of American fans, to travel to support their team. But what I’ve seen in the travelling fans in women's football, international football tournament is it’s not necessarily just women travelling, and it’s people making a deliberate choice to support the women’s team over their male counterparts.
There’s qualities associated with women’s international football that aren’t necessarily associated with the men’s game. And again, I think particularly in England, this might have changed a little bit in recent years because the England men’s team, I think, have a different public image than they might have done 10 years ago. But at the time in 2015, there was this idea that men’s football was very kind of money-driven, the players didn’t really care about the fans or playing for their country, it was a very mercenary kind of sport. Whereas women’s football, they played for the love of the game, they’re kind of enthusiastic, they’re kind of a throwback to a more kind of Corinthian era.
And I think that’s kind of fascinating because obviously in recent years, obviously there’s been this drive towards professionalisation of women’s football. The women are playing football because it’s their job, just as the men do. But I think there’s still this kind of link between amateurism and women’s football in a positive way, but men’s football just doesn’t really have anymore. And so we see the fan engagement with tournaments, and we don’t have necessarily the same kind of strict division between fans outside the stadium like you would have kind of home pubs and away pubs in men’s football. We don’t have that kind of clear demarcation in women’s football.
We also see it’s not necessarily people don’t pick their own country to support in women's football, they might be following a particular player that they like or a coach or for some other reason that they’re supporting that country. There’s less kind of nationalism I think, circulating around it. So as I say, I think that’s changing a little bit now as we see this push towards professionalisation across the world. But 2015 as the kind of sea change of women’s football, particularly for England. I think those were the kind of key aspects that we started to see in the fan engagement with it.
Audio 2 Steph Doehler and Carrie Dunn on fan engagement in women’s football
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- Dunn conducted extensive research into fan’s experiences at the 2015 women’s World Cup, hosted in Canada. What political motivations did she notice in supporter’s fandom at the event?
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 3
Transcript: Audio 3 Steph Doehler and Carrie Dunn on the 2015 Women’s World Cup
STEPH DOEHLER
You focused your own research on the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada, and you were actually there for that event. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the key findings from your investigation?
CARRIE DUNN
Yeah. So when I was in Canada for the 2015 World Cup, I was there partly as a journalist, but also partly doing my research project. And the work that I do tends to be more qualitative. I’m interested in people’s experiences rather than necessarily being able to nail down something that I can say is going to be empirically true across a broader supporter range.
But things that I found particularly interesting coming up repeatedly-- I spoke to mostly Anglophone fans, so it would be Canadians, Australians, Americans, and English fans who had travelled. And they were talking quite a lot about their engagement in terms of seeing their football fandom as political, almost.
So we see with the USA team, particularly, I think they are a great example of this, being happy to talk up on various topics. So whether that’s going to be equal marriage, Black Lives Matter, equal pay, all those kinds of things. And American fans talked quite eloquently about choosing to support the US women’s national team was also a political choice of saying, I also support these values.
With the England travelling supporters, obviously, if you’re taking time off to travel to Canada to follow the England women’s team around there, particularly - you know, Canada is really big. You’re going from East Coast to West Coast as well throughout the tournament. It’s a huge commitment. And a lot of the England fans were talking about - they had some kind of traditional ideas about fandom in the loyalty, and going home and away, and that kind of thing.
But we also found some people who had started out as fans of men’s football, and they had stepped away from it. They’ve become very disillusioned with the way that men’s football operated with some of the scandals in the game as well, the money orientation of it. And then they made a deliberate choice to support women’s football instead. So it was their first time following the women’s team and it was a huge and major experience. And so it was more of a refreshing change, I guess, for some of the English fans. So I found that quite interesting also.
Audio 3 Steph Doehler and Carrie Dunn on the 2015 Women’s World Cup
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Discussion
- Dunn infers that despite the move towards professionalism in women’s football there is still a Corinthian, amateur mentality to the sport where she argues, players represent their nations for the love of the game, which is well received by fans. This is in contrast to what she claims is the more mercenary perception of male footballers and fewer nationalistic ties by women fans during women’s World Cups, i.e., sometimes fans follow an individual or nation other than their own. Certainly the commercialism of the men’s game is far more developed and with 60 years more history behind it the men’s World Cup may be more nationalistic, but this is very difficult to measure and judge.
- Dunn noted that many fans engaged with teams for non-nationalistic political reasons connected with symbolic causes. The USA was used as an example given their general ethos of speaking out about social issues, and therefore supporting them has become a way of fans saying they also support these causes.
Research suggests that the 2015 women’s World Cup provided a historical moment from which the women’s game was relocated in popular culture, moving away from the established dominant male standard (Black and Fielding-Lloyd, 2019). However, unlike the men’s game where engagement in football remains relatively stable at different points of a World Cup cycle, women’s football tends to experience peaks and troughs depending on when tournaments take place.
In the women’s game the Olympics offers women further opportunity to increase their profile as, unlike the men’s Olympic football tournament, it is not constrained by the U23 rule (men’s squads can only have three players over 23 years of age). Therefore, the women’s game has a distinct biannual rhythm of World Cup and Olympic Games tournaments which is not evident in the men’s game.