By Peter Dawson
For the second summer in succession football fever has again gripped the nation. This time the women’s football team, aka the Lionesses, contested a second consecutive World Cup semi-final. As in 2015, when they lost to Japan, heartbreak was again the order of the day following a narrow 2-1 defeat to USA. This post is not about controversies and the merits (and demerits) of video assistant referees of which there have been several in this tournament (I will be exploring this in a separate blog later in the summer!), but about the impact the (continued) success of the women’s team might have in terms of demand.
The match against the USA was watched by a peak audience of 11.7 million, with an average of 10.3 million watching the entire match. To put this into context, England’s crucial match against India in the men’s Cricket World Cup, which is currently being played in England and Wales, attracted a peak audience of just 1.78m. Whilst this is largely about the audience reach of terrestrial versus satellite coverage, since the Women’s World Cup is being shown live on BBC television whereas Sky have exclusive rights to the Cricket World Cup, it also perhaps says something about the overall demand and interest in the respective sports.
So what impact might the Lionesses latest success have? To consider this it is informative to analyse the impact following England’s success in the previous, 2015, tournament. In 2016 I was commissioned to do some work looking at demand for women’s football. Whilst the focus was more about the potential demand in the East of England, the report found evidence to suggest that attendance demand for domestic football matches, especially at the elite level, was on the increase. For example, in the Women’s Super League average attendances doubled from an average of 550 in 2011 to nearly 1,100 by 2015. The season after the 2015 World Cup saw average attendance reach a peak of 1,128. The last two seasons however have seen a decline, which can be partly explained by the move from a summer season to a winter season from 2017-18. The key challenge is to promote demand when competing directly against the men’s game as well as other popular winter sports such as rugby union whilst at the same time avoiding too many one-sided contests. Rather worryingly, declines have also been observed in Germany and France, the hosts of the current tournament.
Watching the Lionesses – whether on TV or in the stadium – can also inspire participation. But does sporting success lead to greater participation in sport? Here I briefly draw upon some work I have carried out recently in this area, entitled “Participation and Demonstration Effects: Couch Potatoes to Runner Beans”, which is due to be published in the Sage Handbook of Sports Economics in September. The chapter explores whether elite athletes and sport events provide inspiration to the general public. In general simply relying on high profile events such as the World Cup and Olympic Games alone to increase participation is not enough. In order to encourage behaviour change events must be combined with other initiatives, education programmes and campaigns which raise awareness of the benefits of participation. In this respect marketing campaigns such as “This Girl Can” have helped increase the number of women participating in sport and physical activity and have reduced the gender gap between men and women who exercise regularly.
Arguably the biggest barrier remains attitudes towards women’s football and women’s sport in general. A survey undertaken by Insure4Sport in 2018 found negative attitudes towards women in sport not only based on the responses of men but also women too. This appears to be especially the case in football. Continued sporting success and increasing media exposure will eventually change this. The Lionesses must continue to roar.