February Bonus Issue — WSL Growing Pains

For this month's bonus issue for paid members, I'm sharing some thoughts about professionalization in the women's game—including the problems of frequent weather-related postponements and uneven marketing/promotion across clubs. There's a grab bag of missed opportunities to discuss, so let's dig in.

Frozen out

It may be nearly spring now, removing the possibility of postponed WSL matches due to frozen pitches for the rest of the season, but the threat will return next season—and only become more problematic as climate change makes winter weather more extreme in the future. The league and clubs definitely need to be proactive in addressing this issue.

Weather postponements should not be affecting a top-flight, fully professional league to this degree. Sure, we know that the Men's Premier League has occasionally had to move match dates due to weather (Spurs fans may recall the postponed match against Burnley last season), but not anywhere near the frequency we've seen in the WSL.

It puts certain teams who play at less sophisticated grounds at a competitive disadvantage as their fixture schedule starts to pile up with rescheduled games, while teams who play all their matches at a top-class facility get the benefit of a more consistent schedule (as consistent as any WSL team's schedule can be—that's a topic for another day) and the ability to gain and maintain momentum across a series of games. In the case of Spurs Women, a recent postponement of the match against Leicester City prevented Spurs from having the benefit of a less difficult matchup in a stretch of very tough league fixtures. The lack of such a "circuit breaker" can make a huge difference in the morale of a squad. There is also the psychological factor of having "games in hand" to consider; depending on which opponent that game in hand is with, it can often feel like a team has fallen hopelessly behind the teams above them who already have "points on the board" before the rescheduled match has even been played.

Stability is greatly needed in a league where the season already has too many stops and starts. Increased adoption of undersoil heating at stadiums has been floated as one potential solution, but can be unrealistic for teams currently playing at a stadium that also hosts lower-division Men's teams—there won't be much appetite for cost-sharing from those clubs. And while undersoil heating solves the issue of frozen pitches, it does not address the other major weather-related issue, waterlogged pitches.

My preferred solution would be to revisit the conversation around playing most—if not all—WSL games at a club's main stadium. Of course, this really only applies to the clubs who have a Men's team competing in the PL, as Spurs do, and could be an obstacle for up-and-coming teams hoping to gain eventual promotion from the lower Women's divisions if license requirements are raised to specify a certain caliber of stadium. But at the same time, the WSL is the top flight of the Women's game; players deserve to play in the most professional stadiums. Notably, two WSL clubs already share their stadiums full-time with their male counterparts:  Reading, and Leicester City. Reading's Men's team is only in the Championship, but their joint stadium meets PL standards.

And it's not just the players themselves who deserve a top-class pitch for a top-class league; fans also deserve the best possible presentation of the WSL "product." As it is, I hear rumblings all the time, even from across the pond, of season ticket holders getting fed up with frequent postponements and the lower quality of amenities offered at clubs' smaller grounds for their Women's teams. Not only will the player performances benefit from being able to play a consistent schedule on a decent pitch, but fan attendance levels will also improve and eventually even out. It's easier to grow a fanbase at a stadium that a club's fans are already familiar with from going to Men's games. That brings me to my next topic.

Growing (and sustaining) a fanbase

The main argument against hosting a Women's team's matches at the same stadium as the club's Men's team (without getting into the scheduling logistics, which are challenging but clearly doable, with Reading and Leicester serving as evidence) is that it can be expensive to open a stadium for a smaller-than-usual crowd. Unfortunately, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when clubs don't put the full weight of their marketing power behind their Women's teams.

Take Spurs Women's recent match against Manchester United at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for a case study. There is an important caveat that this game had been rescheduled after originally being slated for the opening matchweek, prior to the Queen's passing halting all football that weekend.

It's therefore likely that many fans who had purchased tickets for the original date were unable to attend the new date in February. However, more could have been done to facilitate those fans exchanging their tickets for another date or selling them to someone else so that the seats were not tied up with no intention of being used. There were many reports of fans visiting the ticket office on the day of the match to attempt to secure tickets, only to be told it was sold out. This only applied to the limited number of sections that had been opened in the first place, so there was also an opportunity to open further sections to meet demand. Either way, the ticketing situation was badly handled.

The "butts on seats" cliché exists for a reason; the more fans you have at matches, the more funds there are to further invest in the team and keep those fans coming back thanks to good performances on the pitch. The level of fan support correlates directly to the level of investment a club is able to give the team. Therefore, the process to attend a match should be made as smooth as possible for fans, particularly with ticketing. Having commonality with the matchday experience for fans attending a Men's game would be useful and perhaps encourage more overlap between the Men's and Women's teams' fanbases.

Then there must be a concerted effort to convert new fans into actual supporters who will attend week in and week out. It was good to see a decent crowd at the Manchester United game despite the ticketing issues, but what was done to encourage newcomers to come out and watch a game at the team's regular ground, Brisbane Road? Not much, according to a few people I've spoken with who were at the game. That 21,940 attendance figure for the Manchester United match at THS was followed up after the international break with a mere 572 fans attending the FA Cup match against Reading at Brisbane Road.

Tottenham as a club simply has to take more responsibility for marketing and promoting the team, because unlike some of the other clubs in the WSL, we don't benefit from free word-of-mouth. Pundits and other media often treat Spurs like an afterthought in coverage (when we're mentioned at all), while teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, and the Manchester teams have benefited from plenty of cheerleading and publicity from outlets with the biggest platforms, who were happy to remind prospective fans that those teams are chock full of stars from last summer's Euro tournament. Of course, if Spurs had been able to bring in Beth England in the summer rather than in January, we could have experienced some of that Lionesses-related boost, too. A desire to be seen as ambitious must be met with actual ambition.

From an American perspective, it can be baffling to see a team like Spurs Women struggle to grow its fanbase despite having the name brand of a club with a top-6 Men's PL team, while expansion clubs in the NWSL are already outpacing Spurs Women's average attendance. I do think some of it has to do with the fact that soccer remains a less-established sport here amongst the major sports leagues (although it's apparently on track to outpace Major League Baseball soon), so it helps that the game itself is still in a growth phase overall.

There's also the simple fact that since the fanbases are often being grown from scratch for NWSL teams in certain markets, they aren't having to convert fans from a longstanding fanbase of a Men's team. It's not fun to acknowledge, but I genuinely think pure sexism and misogyny are huge obstacles in getting fans of Tottenham's Men's team to get behind the Women's team. The sad truth is that for some of those fans, there is no way to make them care, and unfortunately, they tend to voice that dislike loudly and frequently, potentially dampening enthusiasm amongst fans who would otherwise be interested in supporting the Women's team. This isn't to say that those issues don't exist in American sports, but the reality of having Title IX in place for so long means that our country is farther along the road of acceptance for women's sports in general.

There are other, less depressing differences between the WSL and NWSL that explain some of the disparities in fan attendance, including a more balanced sports media landscape in the US as well as greater parity between teams in terms of finances and squad quality. But I think it's worth pointing out that NWSL clubs are very proactive in attracting and retaining new fans, whereas WSL clubs often seem to take their fanbases for granted and do the bare minimum in engaging with them.

This is all focusing purely on the matchday-going fanbase, of course. I could also talk at length about how the club and the league are both failing fans who live farther afield, but that is definitely a topic for another post.

At some point, the WSL and its clubs are going to have to make a decision about how ambitious they want to be in growing the league. There have been too many half-measures up until now, and it feels like the potential momentum that could have been gained from an exciting summer of international tournaments has already been lost. I would like to see Spurs try some new and innovative ideas to engage fans around the Women's team and keep them feeling enthusiastic. The current status quo is not cutting it.

COYS

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