By Neil Coupe
The recent Women’s World Cup has thrown up several interesting issues.
There are the positives around the popularity of the Lionesses, demonstrated by the huge viewing figures and the brief furore when the kit manufacturer decided not to sell any England goalkeeper tops, before performing a screeching U-turn.
The most important positive is probably the promotion of positive role models, showing that success in football is equally possible for both boys and girls.
There are the negatives around the management of the Spanish team, with the manager inspecting the players’ bags when they had been shopping and leaving the bedroom doors open so he could check that the players were asleep when he wanted them to be.
This is before we touch upon the notorious kiss, which has prompted a huge debate on the rights of women in a seemingly patriarchal country.
One subject touched on briefly was whether a woman could ever manage a top men’s team. The Chair of the Football Association hinted that the manager of the Women’s team could be a candidate to manage the Men’s team, but it all sounded a little half-hearted.
There are 92 teams in the top four divisions of English football and another 900 or so in the National League System (effectively Division five to 10). One team, Arlesey Town of The Spartan South Midland Premier Division (Division Nine) appointed a female manager, Natasha Orchard-Smith in 2018, but there have been no other permanent female managers since then.
Forest Green Rovers, the world’s only vegan football clu,b appointed a woman as an Interim Coach during the summer. She had been working as Coach in various other guises at the Club and had the qualifications to be a full-time manager, but there was, at the time, a feeling that this was something of a publicity stunt. In the event, a few weeks later another male manager was appointed, which reinforced that suspicion.
Does every manager of a men’s football team need to be male? There are women owners, CEOs, doctors, physiotherapists, pundits, referees, journalists, and every other job imaginable, apart from football manager.
Does this really need to be the case any longer?
Some 30 years ago Channel 4 ran a TV series, The Manageress, which depicted a female manager of a professional football club, and was shot at Elm Park, Reading’s previous home ground.
At the time when women’s football barely registered, it was an amusing and slightly far-fetched idea, that played with people’s preconceptions, turned them on their head and showed what was theoretically possible.
Thirty years ago, the archetypal football manager ruled through fear and generally had a homogenous group of players hailing from the British Isles, who will have been coached by Sergeant Major types throughout their careers.
Young people are different now. Footballers are different now and come from all sorts of different backgrounds and from all over the world.
It is perfectly normal for young players to have had female coaches at grassroots and academy level. The skills around motivation, planning, tactics, recruitment, dealing the media, dealing with irrational anger, managing diversity etc have never been uniquely male preserves, so it seems totally bizarre that football management remains a preserve of the ‘old boys’ club’.
Communication is no longer one way; motivation is not always purely through fear. We are living in a world where difference can be harnessed and celebrated.
In the 30 years since The Manageress, the internet has been invented, sat nav has replaced A-Zs for incompetent navigators like me, what was previously considered a third-world country has sent an astronaut to the moon. Yet we have not managed to have a permanent female football manager any higher than the ninth level of English football.
Hopefully, it will take less than another 30 years for this to change.
