Women’s football

I don't follow golf. Others may not follow rugby union. Some may not even follow cricket. And some including yourself don't follow women's football. But they all get coverage on Sky.

But many do follow these sports and I have never seen Sky being accused of forcing these other sports on people. Is there something else in play here to warrant your view that women's football (rather than golf or RU or cricket) is being forced on Sky customers by some unspecified force?

If my memory is correct, it isn't long ago when you were criticising Sky for having the temerity to include details of women's transfers for a few minutes in their day long Transfer show on deadline day which suggests to me that there is a deeper issue here.

 

That's a very interesting statement. Who do you speak on behalf of?

The broadcaster of the programmes, Sky?

Sky's programme sponsors?

Sky's advertisers?

Sky's 13 million subscribers?

The more you post, the more it appears you have an issue with women competing in professional football. It may come as a surprise to you that in the 21st century women also compete in many other sports and broadcasters even televise these sports.

 

It is ridiculous that they don’t learn from the past. Over in the states they spent billions on trying to make the WNBA a thing and no-one benefitted from it because they tried to make it a thing too early, the game wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be a spectacle it needed to be to take off. It just created a stigma around it which they have never got over.

And that’s what we have with women’s football. Technically the level is pretty good for the outfield players but they are so hell bent on proving women are equal to men they make the sport a complete and utter joke. Keepers specifically are a major problem. Studies show that woman have slower reactions than men which is a problem for keepers and their lower physicality makes that worse, at the Olympics for example almost all the goals in the women’s matches came from the keeper being poor. Right away if they made the goals smaller it would make things much better by giving the keeper more of a chance. I would also make the whole pitch smaller, physically it’s always going to look worse so make the pitch smaller, focus on the technical skill where there is a much greater chance of the women being close to the men’s level and you have a sport that’s easier to market

 

Your problem with my comment is what exactly?

 

So it's misogyny to acknowledge that men and woman's differing hormones result in differences? Men will always be faster and stronger as that's the benefit of the higher testosterone levels bring. And studies have shown consistently reaction times of women aren't as good as men. You actually see it in sprinting where the average reaction time for the woman is much higher. Reaction times are actually important for keepers more than any other football position.

If you are trying to make a product that is appealing to watch you have to account for that, you tailor it to the strengths to make the best product. It's why gymnastics don't see men and women do the same events and even some of the ones that are the same are different (The floor, for example, Women have music and the artistic merit is just as important as the tricks but for the men, they don't have music and it's all about focusing on their strength to pull off big tricks)

With football it doesn't matter how good woman players get technically if 99% of goals are scored because of what would be considered a mistake by the keeper in the men's game it undermines the technical skill the woman have because when taking a shot they know they can play safer and still score. You want mistakes to be a rarity with the attackers skill being what gets the goals most of the time.

It's like when I was growing up playing Junior football, we played on full-sized pitches and I'm pretty sure the games weren't a good watch. We didn't have the physicality to cover the pitch properly and the keepers who were obviously fairly smaller and lacked the physicality had a massive disadvantage. Its probably why for my Cub side our main striker scored over 120 goals in a 30 game season and he missed a couple of games going to interviews for private secondary schools. They would have been better games and probably developed us better if there were smaller pitches and goals.

I would also add that one of the best players in my school was a girl and this was in the late 80's early 90's where girls playing football was pretty rare let alone them being on the school team so I know full well technically females can be really good. I also saw how she started struggling as the boys started hitting puberty and even when she reached the age she wasn't allowed to play on the team anymore if we were on the playground or school field playing on smaller fields or were playing 5-a-side inside she was still as good as anyone.