The fourth season of the football drama Ted Lasso has taken a surprising twist, with the show’s writers deciding to have the hero coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Three episodes in, the early signs are promising: the series has already touched on substandard facilities, initial disinterest from the club’s fanbase, and the criticism Coach Chilton receives for showing the same qualities lauded in the men’s coach, Roy Kent.
A structure coded as male
The classicist Mary Beard writes in her book Women & Power: “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.” Although she was writing about women in public life, her words could apply to football, which remains stubbornly male-dominated.
The typical men’s football club is loss-making, and more than half of fans feel that high ticket costs have made the game less enjoyable. Karen Dobres, author of Pitch Invasion: My Story as a Woman on a Football Club Board, discovered this reality when she visited Lewes FC in 2017, as the small East Sussex club became the first in the world to equalise resources and facilities between its men’s and women’s teams.
A culture of community and inclusion
Dobres went to watch Lewes FC Women for the first time, drawn as a feminist and local by the club’s pioneering closure of football’s gender resource gap. In a safe, joyful, inclusive environment, she experienced an “a-ha moment”. She later managed Lewes’s Equality FC campaign.
The women’s game has a markedly different history to the men’s. In 1920, there were around 150 women’s teams, and they frequently drew bigger crowds than men’s clubs, until the FA banned them from playing for 50 years. The women’s game has developed a rich culture of community, accessibility and inclusion, precisely because it had to survive outside traditional football structures.
Financial pressures and fragile pyramid
That culture is now colliding with the fast-track “professionalisation” of women’s football, accelerated by big Premier League clubs subsidising their women’s teams. The financial chasm between the big four teams of WSL1 and all other women’s teams is causing some owners to conclude that the cost of becoming competitive is escalating faster than revenues, leading to a fragile football pyramid.
In June, Durham, the only independent second-tier women’s club, were just days from being wound up, though they secured last-minute investment. This summer, nearly all of Plymouth Argyle’s women’s squad found out via email they were being let go after the club decided the venture was “unsustainable”. Forest Green Rovers have scrapped their women’s team for this season, and Southampton have cut their women’s team’s budget.
Reimagining the game for female bodies
A female-centric future for the game hinges on players and fans no longer being treated as “small men”. That means reimagining facilities, medical support, childcare, sports science, kit, training and match-day experiences around female bodies and lives, rather than retrofitting a male model. This is happening, but sporadically. Despite money at the very top, the experience of most women’s teams is characterised by chronic underfunding.
Dobres argues this isn’t about handouts, but a wider distribution of revenues from TV money and league sponsorships would enable development across a much wider base. Increased FA Cup prize money, shared more evenly to smaller clubs, would be a gamechanger. Women’s football offers distinct audiences and values that should be attractive to sponsors, such as match-day experiences combining sport with music, food, art and community.
That is the approach Dobres hopes Ted Lasso will ultimately showcase. By switching to women’s football, the series can help raise the game’s profile more than any individual club ever could. Women’s football, sidelined and kept humble for so long, may finally get some of the respect it deserves on and off screen. But ultimately, women’s football needs its own identity and ecosystem, and that requires radical thinking.
