The rise and lucrative rise of women’s football in the creative industries

Change is, thankfully, afoot. 2023 is now remembered as a turning point, although some would argue that you can trace this all back to FIFA launching a new strategy to revitalise women’s football in 2018. In any case, the Women’s World Cup easily breezed past existing viewership and attendance records, capping off a steady increase in the visibility of the game. TV viewership alone is estimated to have hit 2 billion – almost doubling 2019 figures. Just as institutional support can hobble a sport, the inverse proves true: anything is possible if gatekeepers and key stakeholders focus their minds and efforts on uplifting players and teams.

But this isn’t just happening at a professional level. In England alone, the number of women’s and girls’ football teams has more than doubled over the last seven years. Almost 1,500 new teams were registered after England hosted the UEFA Women’s Euros 2022, in which the Lionesses stormed to victory against Germany and became the first England team to win a major championship since 1966.

Several entries to the D&AD Awards exemplify this cultural shift, including What the Football, W+K’s joyful Women’s World Cup global campaign for Nike celebrating iconic female players, and Marcel’s innovative VFX-assisted ad for Orange – WoMen’s Football. It features a gender-swapped Les Bleus that tricked viewers into thinking they were watching a compilation video of the men’s team’s best moves.

“It's not enough just to say to people, ‘Well guys, women's football is really interesting. Please believe us,’” explains Marcel CEO Gaëtan du Peloux. “People think women's football is less technical, less entertaining, less spectacular. The idea was just to find the best way, so that millions of people can enjoy the greatness of women's football, gender bias-free.”

Peloux’s comments point to one of the more entrenched problems facing the sport – the soft bigotry of low expectations, in which women’s football is socially accepted but never given equal kudos due to mistaken ideas about female players’ ability and skill. The New York Times’s elegant The Long Fight / Gender Gap ad from the 2019 World Cup (which won D&AD Awards in 2020), comprising headlines drawn over their years of covering gender bias in sport, shows just how ingrained these views have been historically, and how the fight to overturn them has unfolded over the decades.

“Football for women was not always accepted,” England manager Sarina Wiegman told The Independent. When she was growing up, she had to cut her hair short and pretend to be a boy to join her twin brother’s team in the Netherlands. “Now, football for women is cool, and what you see is little girls and boys having shirts with [England forward Lauren] ‘Hemp’ on their back. I’ve lived through that change and it’s really incredible.”

That public enthusiasm has spilled out across cities and encouraged women who might have otherwise shelved their boots into rejoining the sport as keen amateurs. In my neck of London alone, I can point to no less than five grassroots football clubs for women and nonbinary people, including Baesianz, Hackney Golddiggers and Peaches FC.

The level of investment and interest from sponsors started rising to meet it, and the spirit of women’s football – inclusive, boundary-breaking and creative (you’d have to be, in a sport that was historically disenfranchised and written off) – has encouraged brands and businesses not typically associated with the game to get involved. Another D&AD entry, William Morris Gallery, the museum dedicated to the English Arts & Crafts artist, teamed up with Walthamstow FC to design a new kit for home and away matches. It is the first ever collaboration between a museum and a football club, with sales going towards establishing a new women's team.

So what’s holding women’s football back? There is, admittedly, still less money in women’s sports as a whole and a lack of support at the school and training level for girls. But it’s worth examining just how the legacy of that 50-year ban plays out in pubs and pitches everywhere. If it was just about being let back onto the physical pitch, people still wouldn’t have had to correct breathless pundits this summer saying that the men’s team might win the Euros for England for the first time in decades. Female players wouldn’t have to call out the inadequate support, poor management, shoddy facilities and unfair bonuses in their sport. It’s also about the psychological and cultural space that women’s football has inherited. While nobody would dream of declaring the game “unsuitable for females”, a pervasive dismissiveness still lies underneath comments you regularly hear about women’s football, like “they're pretty good for a women's team" or "they've inspired a nation of girls" (why not just a nation of people, full stop?).

There’s an assumption that some people support the women’s team just because they’re women – when in fact many people also support them because they are just as capable of thrilling hat tricks, bicycle kicks and heart-in-your-mouth penalty saves as their male counterparts. That level of genuine public interest has sometimes escaped the realisation of brands, including Nike, who had to swiftly U-turn after misjudging the appetite for the replica kit of England goalkeeper Mary Earps. (Don’t feel too bad for Nike – the jersey sold out twice in a matter of minutes once they caved to public pressure).

As the work in this year’s D&AD Awards proves, that shift in public awareness and brand consciousness is already underway. Part of that shift must also speak directly to the tortured history of women’s football and its long struggle to get to where it is now while celebrating its many wins and triumphs. But if nothing else, it also goes to show just how – regardless of your gender – resilient the drive to win is, and just how far it can lead you both on and off the pitch.