The Women's FA Cup Final

They've done it for the last three/four years now. The BBC give it more respect than the FA does (there still isn't a date for the Arsenal Fulham title decider).

Monkey tennis.

I liked it when Radio 4 weatherman called it the distaff FA cup final. it reminded me to use the word distaff more.

Despite the flippant question, has womens football become more popular? There were reports of the game in all the national papers, highlights on Sky, player interviews etc.

In terms of the quality, it varies much more throughout the team than the mens game (in my opinion). I guess it's still in its infancy relatively speaking.

It's probably a mixture of Public service philosphy and it being a cheap two hours of sport. Whatever the reasoning it's great that it is shown on national television and that 2 million people watch it. I've no opinion on the football though, Fotball's boring, innit.

Womans football in general is becoming more and more popular, although mainly as a participation sport than as a spectator one. I doubt it will take that long before there is a professional or semi-pro league and I'm sure there will be decent TV coverage after a while. There's more and more hours of TV to fill on more and more channels.

The fully-professionalized "WUSA" league in the US is hanging by a thread. The teams have essentially disbanded, though they're coming together for two sets of friendlies at different locations this summer. The lavish attention women's soccer got following USA 99 was not channeled productively into a league set-up, and the whole operation felt and looked cut-rate at a time when the new men's league was finally getting its shit together, particularly by building stadiums. (The founders of the women's league rejected any sort of partnership with MLS, feeling that the success of the world cup justified high expectations and no revenue-sharing.)

For whatever reason, club loyalty in the women's league never materialized. The only strong bond was between the fans and the players from the 1999 world cup winning side, and this fact may have brought the league down: the American equivalent of the FA brought in an inexperienced and ultimately incompentent manager. Her primary qualification was having played with the older generation of the US squad before a career-ending injury (think Chris Coleman, but stupid), and accordingly she picked a bunch has-beens over much more talented, younger players. The team looked piss-poor in group play, but somehow got to the semifinal before getting absolutely dismantled by Germany. This really miserable performance apparently not only discouraged the front-running fans of the team from following through and supporting WUSA clubs, but also resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship that would have sustained the league for a couple more years.

But anyhow, the basic problem is that no one who ran the league figured out a way to get the fans to show a loyalty to the clubs. Maybe it could have been accomplished through consolidiation with existing men's teams in the USA. Maybe the popularity of the women's sport here was the "wrong" sort of popularity, a fad.

Women's football was massively popular in the UK in the years following WW1; Dick Kerr Ladies - a Preston factory team - played St Helens before a crowd of 53,000 at Goodison in 1920. They toured internationally (with a record of W3, D3, L3 in nine friendlies vs US mens' sides in 1921) before the FA clamped down on the women's game, effectively banning it from their grounds for decades.

I get the impression that the standard of women's football here now is some way behind that of continental Europe, China, the Americas.

I was talking to Carsmile about this yesterday. Apparently post-war the FA banned women from playing on any ground used for senior mens football. This, as Mike sez, effectively destroyed teh game in the UK.

I would imagine we are behind much of the rest of the world as UK schools, on the whole, do not do football for girls.

Mikey's general question (is women's football good to watch?) is a tricky one. I've never watched any English clubs play, but I've seen good international matches, and pretty fair league matches in the US.A. It's hard to get accustomed to the much slower pace of the women's game. Maybe it's the result of watching too much mediocre football, but I expect the slower pace of the game to be accompanied by less technical competence. And you don't get that. Good women's soccer is tactically interesting, the passing is precise, and the games can be exciting in a way that transcends the whole "whose mistake is going to be punished most meaningfully" problem that the men's sport at its lower levels is plagued by. I mean, it's a version of excitement, but poor play detracts from the thrill you get from watching two closely matched sides.

In the English league, there are still some very high scoring games. I guess this illustrates a gap in ability throughout the division. Yes, I know it happens in the men's games too, but with less frequency.