England vs Germany: the Bigger Picture.

The BBC News website today has been positively gushing with reports and features around the Lionesses’ victory over Germany at Wembley last night (‘the Lionesses’ being the nickname of the English women’s football team.) I watched it myself and was glad we’d won, but there was still a hint of that ‘but it was only a game of football’ feeling nagging at the back of my mind when I saw the media going so overboard about it. I asked myself whether there was something of greater significance involved, and I believe there was.

Football, in Europe at least, has always been seen as a masculine game. Let me reprise a fact I noted in an earlier post: In 1921 the English FA banned women’s teams on the grounds that football was not a suitable pursuit for women. And so, as far as the general public were concerned, football remained a man’s game. All the famous names in the history of the game – mostly from Europe and South America – have been men. And even though the profile of the women’s game has risen over the past twenty years, it has largely remained a curio, a side issue, and one which mostly appealed only to other women. So here’s the start of the bigger issue:

Last night’s game had the biggest TV audience of any programme shown on terrestrial TV so far his year – 17.4 million, which is about 25% of the UK population. And the attendance of 87,000+ at Wembley stadium included a hell of a lot of men. The names and faces of England’s women football heroes are now etched into the memory banks of a generation, and that’s the big issue. Last night’s game was not just a national sporting victory, it was a major breakthrough for women in general.

So let’s add something which might appear to be a side issue, but isn’t. The German women were just as much a part of that as the English women were, and yet the media is ignoring their contribution completely. It was a tight game which could just as easily have gone the other way, but all the emphasis is on ‘we won.’ No one is mentioning Fraulein Oberdorf’s tears, or the naked feline aggression of Alexandra Popp. They’re certainly etched into my memory banks.

The media’s obsession with national success is understandable, I suppose, because it reflects the predominant national consciousness. But it isn’t right. We need to see the bigger picture if we are to avoid the nagging feeling of ‘but it was only a game of football.’