Re-establishing the ‘outsiders’: English press coverage of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Abstract

Despite their success, the discursive positioning of the women's team as 'outsiders', 3 served to (re)establish men's football as superior, culturally salient and 'better' than the women's team/game. Accordingly, we contend that attempts to build and, in many instances, rediscover the history of women's football, can be used to challenge established cultural representations that draw exclusively from the history of the men's game. In such instances, the 2015 Women's World Cup provides a historical moment from which the women's game can be relocated in a context of popular culture.

A New Age for Media Coverage of Women’s Sport? An Analysis of English Media Coverage of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

“…Dunn’s (2016) study of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup offers a discussion of media coverage, but she suggests that, ‘British newspapers were limited in what they could publish from the tournament because of the time difference and the awkward kick-off times in Canada’ (2016: 64), without offering any empirical evidence to support this. Black and Fielding-Lloyd (2017: 7) have undertaken an analysis of the media coverage during this World Cup. These authors suggest that the England women’s team was positioned as inferior to the men’s team by comparing the women players against an established ‘male standard’.…”

“…Although Black and Fielding-Lloyd (2017) provide examples of negative reporting – for example, making reference to ‘political correctness’ – a very small number of examples are used to support this discussion. There is also some confusion with the negative examples cited as the titles of these articles appear to suggest that the article as a whole is positive, for example: ‘Women’s Football Is a Hurricane of Fresh Air’ and ‘Brilliant Girls Show Us How’.…”

Three Lions on Her Shirt: Hot and Banal Nationalism for England’s Sportswomen

“…We then see the nation in masculine terms and a development of a masculine Englishness (Bowes & Bairner, 2018), and this is significant in England where sport is one of the only social institutions that separates, or marks out as different, the home nations within the United Kingdom. With sport being so central to the development of an English national identity, it is obvious that women should be positioned as outsiders to this relationship (Black & Fielding-Lloyd, 2017).…”

“…These results are testament to the advances made by Englishwomen on the sports field in recent years, and have sporadically thrust England's sportswomen onto the front pages of the national press. Despite this, women are still discussed, and often presented, as outsiders in national sport, through their exclusion in academic works and their overall representation in the national press (Black & Fielding-Lloyd, 2017). While much work on sport and national identity has often analyzed media coverage, little research includes or speaks to those very national subjects.…”

Smiling assassins, brides-to-be and super mums: the importance of gender and celebrity in media framing of female athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games

“… Ambivalence -analysis of the language used to describe female athletic performances shows reporting is often lacklustre, downplaying technical skill and foregrounding factors such as hard work, luck and the role of others in a woman's successes (Black & Fielding-Lloyd, 2017;Cooky et al, 2015;Eagleman, 2015;Fink, 2015). Therefore although female athletes may often be represented in broadly positive terms, the ambiguity of these representations detracts from any favourable impressions.…”