I've mentioned it in this thread before that a family member is involved in community sports football and coaches a number of under 13 teams both girls and boys. When it comes to girls teams he has noticed that the interest in the game seems to drop off when the girls hit the ages of 15-16 because from the ages of 8 to 14 there are 9 girls teams but from the ages of 15 and above there is only one girls team and even that team struggles to find girls willing to play the game. So for a smaller country, it must be even harder to get enough girls interested into the sport and even more harder to keep them interested for them to make a career out of it.
Ah, this is where we crash into the uncomfortable realities of puberty.
Now, this is an area where the differences in the resources - such as changing rooms, with privacy, access to hot showers, decent facilities - good quality and above all, safe, changing facilities, that are made available to kids whose bodies are changing rapidly in ways that can make them uncomfortable - can make an enormous difference.
If you want girls to continue to feel confident and comfortable with engaging with (and playing) sports into their teens, you need to provide the resources that will facilitate this; otherwise, there will be an enormous - and precipitous - decline (as there is, at present) in the numbers of girls willing and able to maintain an interest in sports.
Plus, the resources to have several changes of sporting gear, of the team kit, - this matters at that age - and not having to carefully mind the one set you may have been issued with at the start of the school year.
And here, to be blunt, in this case, I am discussing (what can be considered embarrassing) accidents with the menstrual cycle (for, one cannot "hold it in", unlike with contents of the urinary tract), rather than the need to have frequent changes of kit for reasons of fashion.
And the fact that one can be made to feel embarrassed and ashamed when such accidents occur, not to mention just how difficult it can be to remove such stains (which is where I used to praise powerful chemical compounds, irrespective of how detrimental they may have been to the environment, that were equal to this challenge).
There is a very good reason that a number of women's teams have chosen to change the colour of the shorts they wear as part of the team kit to a dark colour.
Any one with football in their mind and lives in a small country needs to look at the history of the men's San Marino football team. The team officially recognized by FIFA in 1988 and to this date has not won a qualifying tournament game. They have only won ONE game since their existence and that was a friendly game in 2004. A country with only approx. 33,000 people it shows that it's football pool of talent is severely limited. San Marino's men's national team is evidence of what happens when a country has limited number of people willing to play the game, the talent pool is really really small. This is why the same principle can be applied to the women's game in countries that are small, the number of women playing the game is small meaning the number of talented players would be even smaller.
That is when you widen your search, and you take a look at recruiting from the diaspora, or from players or sportspeople from that country who have won sports scholarships, (and thus, must be good), and ply their trade, or are successful, elsewhere.
The girls/women's game of football is still fighting an uphill battle to be taken seriously.
Yes, but matters are improving.
Many parents do not want their daughters playing football because they believe football is not for girls.
I would expect that this - while I don't doubt that it exists - may be decreasing.
Rather than active opposition, my concern would be indifference, or parents that are so busy and stressed that they haven't the interest or the time (or the energy) to show interest in the sporting activities of a daughter.
Moreover, as being able to make a professional career from sport (though, that, too, is slowly changing) is harder for talented girls than for boys, parents may not feel the need to encourage their daughters in this area.
Above all, - and, above all, for girls - I would still expect for parents to try to ensure that sporting activities did not interfere with academic pursuits (and results). The old "well, what will you do if this doesn't work out?" still applies, especially to girls who may be talented at sports.
The girls that do go on to play football are ridiculed by many boys and men because they perceive football as being a boys/man's game, and then when these girls become women and advance into female adult teams, they get ridiculed again and passed off as a joke by members of the football press, football commentators and even FIFA and UEFA officials.
That has improved - especially over the past few years.
Twenty years ago, media coverage of female sports was disgraceful, and, on the rare occasions when it did occur, (about 3% of all coverage in the sports pages dealt with women's sports), focussed on publishing images of female sports stars that emphasised how attractive they may have been, - shots as potential models rather than sportswomen - rather than how competent and skilled they were at their sport.
In other words, incredibly skilful sportswomen were reduced to being judged on their appearance, (and sexual attractiveness) - on the rare occasions when they actually appeared in the sports pages, and the published photographs emphasised this, not their skill, not their confidence, not their competence.
Take the recent Women's world cup and the debacle over TV rights. The men's world cup the TV companies are prepared to spend billions to get the rights to show men's world cup games but for the women, none of the TV companies was prepared to pay over $50 million. I remember reading somewhere that a German broadcaster had submitted a bid of $20 million so the country could watch the game in Germany. FIFA spoke out about this saying they were disgusted with all the broadcasting companies from countries around the world putting in extremely low bids for the rights to watch the games in their own countries. This is 2023 and women's football is still having trouble getting to be taken seriously and this coming from a stage where a number of countries have professional women's football leagues.
A very long way to go, but, at least, the Women's World Cup was televised and watched by millions.
www.thesun.co.uk
en.wikipedia.org
