Women’s football is not just a sporting phenomenon; it is a social phenomenon with historical, cultural and economic consequences. The emergence of women’s football affected not only sporting activities of half of the world’s population but also the state of health and general well being of women. Women’s football is too big and important a subject to be confined to sporting historians. Gender issues and female empowerment in sports have become crucial subjects in the modern world. The educational value that sport can bring to women and girls makes it a social right and livelihood for them (Soroka, 2017). Women’s Football (Soccer) is one of the oldest sporting female activities in history. It was more than a century ago that ball games or kicking games for women became common and popular, especially in Western societies. However, unlike many other sports, women’s football developed unplanned and in an unsupervised way at first (Drury et al., 2022). Given the delay of development, women’s football is still struggling to address inequalities. Despite the phrases of “progress” or “great growth,” many gender inequities still exist in and around the sport of women’s football. This section will provide you with background knowledge on women’s football jerseys.
Women started wearing skirts that were uniformed for temperament in the late 1800s. The skirts were not only functional, but also shaped a feminine silhouette which developed attractiveness as an ideal. This is in contrast with men’s football jerseys, which were worn tight and loose until the 1930s. In elite men’s football, after this point, jerseys were turned out with identification numbers and special badges so that fans and viewers could recognize club and player. Like other matters in sport, sponsorship by commerce increased complexity introducing more types of jerseys. As sponsorship and advertisement had not developed substantially, women football jerseys continued to be made with the characteristics of women and skirt dresses longer than those of men. In the 1990s major women’s tournaments changed this. Women soccer players began to undergo changes in jerseys and other attire similar as men. With modern culture influencing international competitions, competition level jerseys were developed which were fitted for athletic performance.
Among the oldest football clubs in the world, it is widely recognized that Notts County FC, known as the Magpies, is one of the oldest. Founded in 1862, they were the first club to play in all black, having been turned down by the then-ruling Nottingham Forest owing to their colors being too similar. They are the first club in the world to register with FIFA in 1863. They are also one of the oldest league clubs in the world, having joined the football league in 1888. Their colors were briefly changed to brown and white in the 1890s, but in the end, these colors returned to black and white. Since its founding, the team has played in a variety of playing fields. It is estimated that over 200 separate positions have been used for playing, since fields are often poorly maintained. The Famous Cobden was a grandstand finished in 1878, and the first in the world to have a bar. In 113 years, the team has had several names, but they are still known to supporters simply by the name “Notts”, or as the original name “Notts County Football Club”. At the beginning of the Nineties, Notts became the first League club to install floodlighting and the first to use the new WW2 technology, the now familiar “pyramid-style” floodlights, adopted since 1991 by the majority of clubs everywhere. Near Notts County is Meadow Lane, ground of local league rivals Notts County FC, also home ground of the formation of long-started Notts LC FA.
Nonetheless, on 28th January 1921, the FA formally banned women’s football, an act led by FA president, Lord Kinnaird, and backed by the president of the English FA, Robertson. This legislation formally barred women from all FA-affiliated grounds, partnership events or competitions. The notoriety upon Notice of the law and its formal banning echoed throughout Great Britain and Europe, spearheaded by observably biased newspaper press, who branded women footballers as “a dismal sight…clumsy and too fond of spongeing” during a Women’s FA Cup match between Stoke City and Dick, Kerr’s in 1920. On 28th March 1921, the ban was debated in the House of Commons. This event had 27 MPs signing a letter, warning the FA about the rule and demanding its urgent repeal. The emergence of independent leagues catered for all levels of women’s club football (Williams, 2019). Formed in 1969 and heavily sponsored by newspapers, the Women’s Football Association (WFA) governed, until a 1990 merger, all leagues and cup competitions. The WFA’s formation compounded with the citizens’ commitments, were very traditional, as component members were club chairmen, and attempts to run a women’s section for the FA were stalled by a lack of amenities.
By 1920 the popularity of women’s football was such that on Christmas Day, the Normal Ladies and Dick, Kerr Ladies met for a match at Preston, in front of a crowd of 47,000. The game was described as “The Great Ladies’ Match” and was promoted with much fanfare, including marching bands, singers and entertainment on and off the field. Up to 250,000 more tried to get in; it was the largest female crowd at a sporting event. The Dick Kerr Ladies played in their own uniforms, made by the (male) factory workers, and played rule-tweaked games, on local parks and in front of huge crowds, for hundreds of clubs. Their fame, however, did not shield them from harassment. After the defeat of a plan to shut down a match, the referee turned his cursory attention to a barrage of violence. The WFA’s establishment was a response to both the FA ban and the commercial emphasis of the Ladies’ Federation. The WFA began organising matches at standardised venues on a four-year schedule, financed by admission charges. The WFA-level committee was adorned with aristocratic names, such as Lady Arthur, Lady Bury, and Lady Woolwit (F. Grainey, 2012). This “promotion of the game” was done at a time when female professionalism emerged in Britain for a short period.
On an amateur basis, many clubs established proper grounds and hired stadia in 1935. Players became known as “home girls” and “away girls,” and wore different uniform colours. Fixtures were announced in the press at least a fortnight in advance. The first women’s cup match took place in 1936, contested by Sunderland Ladies and Dick Kerr. A year later the two played again in front of a record crowd of 56,000. Unfortunately these actions defied the amateurism that had been the mainstay of women’s football in Britain. The Ladies Football Association was formed in 1930, but the quality of the games was perceived to decline. Visits from North America and Australia provoked a battle over the relatively more impressive display of football, and introduced the ideas of professionalism and leagues. This avoided the central question of why Australia should bother with a stopover, and effectively recalls the old-time barnstorming preparations that took place in the States.
The Women’s Football Association (WFA) was formed in December 1969 and the first women’s football match under its auspices took place in 1970. Nevertheless, the first Women’s FA Cup was not held until 1971/72, and during the early years some exhibition matches at major stadia were still played under the control of the FA. Therefore, following the ban, the question of how amateurism became so intolerably linked to women’s football in Britain implies a need to examine both institutional and cultural factors, as the rigid divisions of amateurism were never fully and consistently applied by the FA for the men’s game. The WFA held an amateur status for the game, while maintaining scanty funding. Until 1990, its principal revenue had derived from a few hundred pounds of subscription from leagues and clubs, while it was not uncommon to mention the pioneering committee’s pouring of personal funds into the game (Williams, 2019).
Amateurism can focus on a few themes, but the amateurism of sport has tended to be an old boys’ club and in Britain excluded women for a considerable time. The FA ban may have been straightforwardly analysed in accordance with the hegemonic masculine principles of amateur sport; nevertheless, the resultant myths and values were complex and even self-contradictory. This article has begun to address a much larger question, at a pivotal time for women’s football, and which arguably still shapes the phenomenon today. Until 1971, women’s football was banned from every major English ground. However, virtually all the battery of male journalists condemned loudly the FA policy of discrimination against half of the population, and to momentarily put the FA policy out of sight of the media glare the Women’s FA was made the formal governing body in August 1971 (F. Grainey, 2012).
In fact, the WFA’s constitution mimicked the FA’s constitution, but the pre-conditions attached to an amateur status meant exclusion from vital sponsorship revenue. The price of that exclusion was that the women’s game was explicitly defined as a fun and harmless activity. Enquiries into different facets of the founding of the WFA, the adoption of rules to maintain amateurism, contesting the status, and the reckoning of sexism in public rhetoric are needed to tabulate how women’s football factionally perpetuated itself and still survives and thrives. With implications for the greater issue of women in and/or doing sport, but focusing on the women’s football experience and paying heed to the call for more historical studies examining grassroots sporting activities on their own terms, the challenge is to examine how the WFA and its clubs and players began to construct a self-sustaining and ultimately rival institution.
The evolution of women’s sports apparel has been, more often than not, a battle ground. In the earliest days of women competing in anything from athletics to cycling they did so in dresses, corsets, and heavy undergarments that restricted their bodies, movements, and gameplay. Over the years, in response to the ways in which female athletes and their counterparts were seen, there was a shift in the look of women’s sporting apparel. A groundbreaking moment in the evolution of women’s sports apparel was the signing of Title IX into law in 1972. The law was enacted to end sex-based discrimination in federally funded education. This included, but was not limited to, issues faced by females that centered around sports in schools and universities. Significantly biased budget allocations resulting in fewer opportunities for women and girls to participate in sports than men and boys were among the many issues that Title IX aimed to address (Verbridge, 2014). Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s well-documented strides were made in women’s sports within legislation, media coverage, participation numbers, budgets, staffing, coaching, and athletic apparel sent to female athletes.
Despite the strides made over the years there is still, to this day, evidence that suggests that in many professional women’s sporting leagues the apparel supplied or sold to female athletes is medically and physically dangerous. With the dawn of the new millennium came a new plethora of issues in female sporting apparel—many of which are still being unveiled and discussed today. In America, the initial uncovering followed a highly publicized disparity in the practice gear issued to male and female athletes preparing for the 2021 NCAA basketball tournament. The blow back after the sharing of the disparity was immediate and significant as complaints were lodged with the NCAA and responses were issued from governing authorities, sportswear companies, and women’s athletes, coaches, and fans.
The ultimate goal of sports uniforms is to unify players by club or venue. Because the earliest uniforms were mostly an item of dress rather than a necessity for sport, they remained relatively similar across nations and activities. But as the Industrial Revolution, advocates in the medical profession, and increased mass production made organized sports popular, designs were more widely disseminated, and teams customized them to fit participants better. In the 1920s, focus on aerodynamics changed the design of many pieces of sport equipment, and art deco provided an aesthetic. This evolution of the uniform design presents a terrific opportunity for sport historians to document not just individual pieces of clothing but also the events and philosophies that shaped them.
The design innovations of uniforms in professional sports came hand in hand with their popularity. From the early days of Philadelphia’s Ospreys innovation of colour-coded jerseys in 1910 to the Cleveland Cavaliers’ using a vividly, eye-catching hue of orange and yellow in 1983 (F. Grainey, 2012), the designers capitalized on the media potential. It was both comic books and a young fledgling television industry that stations sought fast-moving events, close shaves, and inaccuracies to fill air time that established these heavyweights. As the jerseys became very popular in sporting goods stores, clever advertising campaigns followed. This explosive creativity of material, cut, emblem, fixture, and modelling on Faith Hill, Jennifer Lopez, Garth Brooks, and others corralled the production of these items.
Like the uniforms of other sports – especially the noisier ones seen as elite, like football and basketball – the jersey of women’s体育 in the 1980s and 1990s was spectacularly colorful, imaginative, and varied. In the 1980s, when most jerseys were still usually of 1-ply mesh and unused sleeves to mitigate player heat and drop shocking diets, innovatively cut designs of skirts, dresses, and crop tops challenged accepted notions of femininity in sport. All of these expanded the sport’s market to every enthusiast, from quads to twentysomethings. But it is still worth mentioning that, outside the basic colour fabrics with vegetable dyes, several engineering improvements added a new lightness and more comfort for the player. Their importance in jersey design history should not be neglected. The jersey design of women’s professional sports of the 1980s and 1990s was minuscule compared with that of the present.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of major tournaments on the design of jerseys worn by female participants in professional sports. In the period up to 1990, several major events took place in women’s team sports, including the introduction of tournaments and competitions under the auspices of the FIFA, IIHF, and FIBA federations. A trend of increasing professionalization, commercialization, and the media’s attention to women’s football resulted in a significant expansion of women’s professional leagues. A breakthrough moment for women’s football happened in 1999 when women played their first World Cup tournament in the USA. The media’s engagement was impressive: the USA-China final match was viewed by over 90 million spectators, and the tournament’s broadcasts reached 55 million homes. The next women’s events solidified the place of women’s football in the world’s sports and culture (Kustok, 2010).
However, battles must be fought and won in order to reach a huge audience and in order to transform colloquial and informal practices at their base. There can be an awareness of (and access to) opportunities, as a consequence of efforts to simultaneously push for formal agreement of rights. Nevertheless, remaking an institution is a time consuming process and it is not guaranteed that change will be consistent or uniform across the landscape. The dominant values of the institution may remain, the pinnacle may still be, for women, a different variety of it, be that as spectators, team members playing in other parts of the world, or as professional footballers.
Football was more curtain than pitch for women in international sport until the end of the 20th century. Football teams began to be formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it wasn’t until the kick-off of the inaugural Women’s World Cup that women’s football became mainstream sport. This tournament was the start of a very steep football journey globally, though there remains some way to go until the game is equal in every sense. Football’s global governing body, FIFA, was a male entity. There was no knowledge among long-standing members of the FIFA Executive about women’s football, and somewhat shocking by curating standards, a short television reel of the women’s tournament was shown at the end of the first FIFA Congress attended by newly-formed confederations and by votes from England, Netherlands, and Germany all arguing against it.
The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is the governing body of football on the global stage. FIFA’s first Women’s World Championship was held in China in 1991, an event that saw the German and United States national teams emerge victorious. This historic tournament showcased an unseen competition previously underreported throughout FIFA’s long history. In 1995, with a larger budget and stricter organizational structure, FIFA decided to host the second Women’s World Championship in Sweden, a site that boasted tradition and experience. Ahead of the 2003 championship co-hosted by the United States, FIFA showed increased interest in women’s football, establishing a women’s committee and including a women’s committee head in the executive committee. In 1999 and 2003, major broadcasting networks aired the championship, marking a dramatic rise in the number of viewers (Soroka, 2017). There have been a growing number of posts in accordance with FIFA’s promotion of women’s football after the 2003 Women’s World Championship. Numerous events have been staged to further promote its long- and short-term development, including conferences and posting World Cup-related items on the FIFA website. FIFA has also begun considering the production of a World Cup history book. Following the conclusion of a second championship, sporting events have continued to receive coverage, especially regarding the venue of the next championship. However, with a chronic lack of information published in a supplement or a book about the events, most who do not have the advantage of speaking English find it extremely difficult to gain an overall understanding of the subject (F. Grainey, 2012).
The ordeals offered to women in the realm of sports have been numerous throughout history. Male leadership in sports stated that women should not partake, arguing that it was unsuitable and presupposed a danger against the health of the reproductive system. Some grounds were taken to consider elite women sports unworthy or silly. The fact that women would participate presupposed a challenge to a competitive culture from a physical and athletic point of view, and society held a number of prejudices or biases against women. It was thought that their sole purpose on Earth was to provide children, aggressively disappearing mental or physical capabilities, and staying at home was the best way for their satisfaction. Even those females who enjoyed running, riding a bike, or playing tennis were seen as hoers, sick, or second-rate. The excluded events were diverse; for example, croquet was avoided by men because it was deemed comical to hit with a bizarre stick a ball which was practically motionless (Mateos et al., 2010).
In contrast to the modern Olympic criteria for the number of women athletes to be at least one, no agreements towards inclusive sports were present either in Athens or in London. The 1900 Paris games were the first ones where women were offered the chance to participate. With 22 out of the 997 athletes taking part in sailing, tennis, croquet, and golf events, the Olympiads were ridiculed as being too ridiculous for their eagerness to open competitions for women. The 1908 London games were conducted as men-only sporting events, an informality session open to females for the swimming gala where men had organized a male swimming contest overlapping that of the women. The Olympiads developing on their own terms to men, the French athletes had to enter in separate heats or swim to the outer course of the better lanes on the excuse of being female swimmers. Although women began to be more engaged within their sporting federations at every step from gloomy dart-jets in Wales, stake-hose marionettes in London theatres, heavy-skating in reek-concealing fur coats in Saint Petersburg to cool cycling chic, it was impossible, inconceivable, or unnoticed how it could be done for women to run in shorts.
Prefabricated seamless knitted designs, their technologies, knitted structures, and detailing used for athletic apparel, with an emphasis on the sports bra category (C Gorea et al., 2018). Could it be this emphasis on reinventing, refining and perfecting the bra has made them notoriously underwhelming to the public? The utilitarian discourse lost its charm long ago, and fitness industry aesthetics have bled into athleisure, further muddling things. The surrounding debate has exposed a glaring blind spot in contemporary fashion. What about the piece of kit wedged between athletic wear and leisurewear? It is well known as the most intimate garment in a woman’s wardrobe, oftentimes the most experimental too; its covert but omnipresent capacity to disturb the aesthetic/ethical essence of modest attire and/ or accommodation of shape and form, and the misnomer of supporting feminism through sexualisation. And yet in a fashion world inspired and mediated by Instagram women’s football jerseys, quite blatantly, do not (or more accurately will not) exist. It begs the question, “What is happening behind-the-scenes?” The provocations surrounding gender inequality in women’s football had an immediate effect on all corners of the industry: the players, media, sponsors, and (of course) governing bodies; they were required to make the switch from primarily pre-perception to immediate reaction. By contrast, it was RFC who had been quietly questioning the ethics of a marketplace that neglected half the world, albeit on an entirely different system of currency, relevance and scale. But they too were fortunate to have been dealt a pre-conceived card: an agency tailored for a sophisticated audience guaranteed to respond. In the first weeks of this galvanising moment for women’s football, all effort was on the surface; everything existed above and outside. This narrative of amplification was no exception, as protests, press releases containing plain-spoken truths, satire, invocations for change all rear their heads.
Throughout its history, women’s football has been subject to social and cultural factors that have dictated its development. Gender stereotypes could be seen as a significant instrument in the women’s disenfranchisement and detraction from the football industry. However, during the last decade, women’s football leagues around the world have developed tremendously, gaining popularity, credit, record attendance, and stats that would have seemed impossible a couple of years ago. Cultural aspects are one of the most pivotal factors in driving the women’s game forward. Media representation does have an impact on cultural perception, and cultural perception does impact growth across leagues and nations. However, through investigating the cultural impact of women’s football jerseys, a new dimension is added that could start to explain trends quicker and allow for possible prediction on future events (Kustok, 2010).
The intention to forge cultural links around women’s football teams is translated best through jerseys. The attires that embody the culture, history, and narrative of a team build connective tissue between teams and their communities and are needed for growth and retention. Within women’s football, jersey commercialisation is comparatively recent and has only taken off in the last five years. Even recent launches within the last twelve months would have been unthinkable years ago. While jersey commercialisation is considered a breakthrough, there exist important marketability dimensions that nearly all jerseys share factors in geographical proximity; nation, city, region or club size; and disparity, including rivalries and context. This highlights that prior to a player’s ability, there are uncontrollable variables that affect opportunities. By understanding the cultural impact of women’s football jerseys, leagues and clubs stand to benefit in their growth opportunities.
Football jerseys are as culturally consequential objects as they lead a team’s narrative. Jerseys embody a tribe’s history, folklore, battles, rituals, symbols, and tenuous link between sport and culture. Jersey meaning is linked to phenomena such as crowd identity, expressions of community pride, expressions of support for a shared cause, emotional attachment, heritage, and sport totems. When wearers are disconnected from a jersey’s design, changes often manifest as team skepticism, disengagement, and ostracism. A study on club allegiance and identity showed that outside attendance, there exist opportunities to forge links across broader notions of identity through club jerseys. At the distance of newly formed clubs, these ties can be mistakenly ignored, differentisation can be seen as dispossession, and deliberation ideally omits testing whether allegiances can be maintained as clubs grapple with the difficult task of broadening club identity (Drury et al., 2022).
Understanding women’s football is vital for raising its profile yet the sport has been under researched from a European perspective. Football’s governing bodies have noted the financial potential of women’s sport and by gathering academic insights, women’s football can benefit from knowledge developed with men’s football. With the global success of the women’s game fatigue could set in: viewing figures may drop, sponsorship may dwindle, and children might ignore instead of emulate their golden generation heroes. (Fielding-Lloyd et al., 2018) cites an urgent need for understanding how situated factors help build, sustain and grow the women’s game: “What is most needed are in-depth tensions, gaps and trajectories”.
Until recently, women’s football’s success until very recently meant something very different to men’s football. The earliest headline grabbing successes were usually mired in controversies reflecting wider sociocultural attitudes. The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a far cry from the media bonanza which heralded the completion of Brazil 2014. The quotidian binaries of local cultural understandings could be galvanizing or galling: peak exposure and closure or persistence and neglect.
In the relatively media friendly time zone of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup youth engagement was more relevant than gender labelling. The narratives of miseducation addressed at worst weeks or months previously, some nuanced complexities and contradictions. Other branding re-uses images, fonts and colours from past campaigns, exporting already established meanings but may reflect a hesitancy to embrace the wider narratives of the women’s game. The direct address to emerging audiences allows them to pitch banter aged somewhere between the contemplative and the absurd at the expense of the officials.
Increasingly and unintentionally cruel juxtapositions of headline gaffes with the latest male football sartorial triumphs are likely to draw the begrudging curiosity of slumbering fans. Women’s football requires conditions to flourish and so formulating relationships with the media and establishing family while negotiating corporate realities and financial concerns are pertinent issues facing the game. These new narratives are constructed in general terms rather than fixed performative articulations of point-of-view. As women’s worlds of football widen both outside and inside the pitch, pleasantries will change.
Women’s jerseys in the early 21st century followed contemporary trends in the sporting apparel market. Women’s Football Jerseys designers found inspiration in pop culture—as fashion trends often exist within siloed, past-due trends so did jersey fashions. As notable influencers wore garments on-screen and commercially shouted about celebs kicked during their teenage stupidity, the jerseys and products worn became fashionable while simultaneously increasing followership and status within sport and culture. Jersey styles had changed quickly since the long sleeves and color patterns from the 1990s but as brands attempted to push jerseys forward they plunged towards lower-quality designs. The square/box cut of the late 2000s could only be described as the same boxy fleece worn to school gym class. The jarringly off-center team logos mimicking “I love me” wall hangers at youth sporting leagues overshadowed the subtlety of the 1990s. Advertisement-flooded jerseys looked like duct tape for skin that had been stretched, enough to cautiously remove from the roll but left inflicted with pain as the wax-like adhesive tattooed the surface of “real sports” fandom. The thigh-shorted, high placket jerseys were the desired shape in 2020. The sleeveless, open-sided jerseys, with stitched stripes from shoulder to lower hem, led to complaints about under-exposed skin and revealing cuts while avoiding winners of unspoken design awards. The contemporary jersey landscape exhibited a historical split along the two distinct threads of the world’s most successful women’s professional leagues and otherwise notably grateful clubs leveled resource-wise only a year or two apart (J Cook, 2018).
The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) jerseys received extensive (Drury et al., 2022). The front left chest immediately fell back to a common motif—the circular badge. No longer was the crest stitched deep within the thick foam of the sports bra; it now punctured through the jersey over the heart. Team colors filled team advertisement deals into the waistband of the shorts—the formerly simple logos now rotated in tandem along the shorts’ length, twisting dynamically as players ran. A drawn-from-corporate checklist of features was checked off throughout the season—colored slogans hung seamlessly on household white bodies.
Colorful jerseys that promote an athlete, club, or nationality have a long history in sports, as they serve to symbolize a belief system and foster social cohesion. For the Canada 2015 Women’s World Cup, the organizing committee deliberately decided not to divide the teams into tournaments and groups according to their continent or region and to oppose the two dominant football nations historically. At a grassroots level, actions have emerged, such as Brazil’s women’s national team refusing to wear their 1970 men’s version jersey with the number 10 and a burst of joyous yellow, since that jersey is a symbol of a bygone era of glorious men’s football. Arguably, the short number is no longer valid for a women’s team. In contrast with the men’s team, Canada had a better record than the US and Germany: four years of glorious men’s football; and team sentiments flowed into a jersey design that by all accounts was decidedly cool. The jersey was half red with the white logo in the middle, symbolizing Canada’s national colours. This example highlights that jersey design can reflect the current sentiment of the nation and, in turn, affect the performance of the nation’s team.
Social media has become the primary tool of institutions in reaching audiences in today’s globalized world. Facebook has over 800 million users, while Twitter has over 200 million. Match statistics can rapidly reach anywhere with the aid of the Internet, primarily via subjective commentary. These are different from traditional media coverage and, with instant editing, the unpredictability of discourse grows since both key players and supporters can communicate their views. Notably, however, social media coverage has not always had a positive effect. Just 24 hours after the March 11th earthquake, as Japanese sports fans were still trying to comprehend the catastrophe, a racially discriminatory tweet was sent out by a prominent media figure and set off a cascade of outrage. Football was still an alien sport to many in 1994, at least in comparison to ice hockey, curling, Canadian football, and basketball, which all have long histories in Canada, but there were hopes that the hosting of the Women’s World Cup would help Canada nurture a bigger football culture. A concept map could be constructed utilizing social networking software. Although it would be pragmatically significant to quantify the disposition of Twitter discourse, various limits would accompany such attempts. Women’s football and the Women’s World Cup were certainly inescapably prominent, but their coverage was always highly negative (Jill Silverman, 2012).
Fan engagement in professional sports is an important part of the overall marketing strategy of professional teams. Fan apparel allows fans to brand their allegiance to a team through the use of team colors and logos. Fan engagement has been examined in male professional sports but has not been extensively explored in female professional sports such as the WNBA or women’s professional soccer (Shane-Nichols et al., 2016). As recognition of fan engagement, the National Women’s Professional Soccer League (NWSL), which is the United States’ major professional women’s soccer league, holds a “Jersey Week” to introduce the team jerseys of teams. Due to the popularity of apparel as a means to generate fan engagement, the NWSL Jersey Week serves as the preliminary event to build engagement with the league.
Participation in fan engagement activities is important to the success of the league and teams, as higher levels of fan engagement have been shown to lead to an increasingly loyal fan base. But, the absence of a deep understanding of the Baldwin-Wallace College Fan Engagement Framework specifically related to fans’ personal branded jerseys in the context of fan engagement in the NWSL may lead to the failure to meet the needs of fans and fans not getting the full benefit of the engagement activity. Sessions designed with knowledge of the framework can guide a deeper understanding of the thoughts and emotions of fans. A deeper understanding of the Baldwin-Wallace College Fan Engagement Framework in relation to branded jerseys is needed for the betterment of engagement season activities and analyzed through a qualitative study involving participatory observation and semi-structured interviews.
This study aims to provide a better understanding of the League’s and teams’ strategies for fan engagement through personal branded jerseys. To understand how the League’s and teams’ approaches to fan engagement via personal branded jerseys fit within the Baldwin-Wallace College Fan Engagement Framework, the study focuses on two research questions: (1) How does the NWSL use engagement season opportunities related to personal branded jerseys? (2) How does this create fan engagement in relation to the Baldwin-Wallace College Fan Engagement Framework?
It is commonly suggested that women’s professional sports are entering a new era characterised by unprecedented growth, investment, and media coverage. In professional football, strides towards equality have been made in the quality of facilities, pay structures, recruitment, investment, and specifically as it relates to the purpose of this paper, the availability of women’s team merchandise. Certainly, provision has expanded from a small collection of generic club clothing in the early 2000s, to a dedicated range of team specific jerseys, shorts, scarves, jackets and other items in line with their male counterparts. Women’s football has entered a new and exciting period in which it has most certainly outgrown its previous kitsch form, frequently appearing alongside the men’s game across a number of high profile global broadcasts and events.
An abiding perception though is that as passionate and loyal as their support may be, if one had both at one time to watch the match or purchase the merchandise, the match would win. That is, there remains a degree of embarrassment associated with being a zealous fan for women’s football, a legacy of its history as a trivialised male encroachment known primarily for pies in the upper west stand rather than for performance and prowess, or perhaps of being seen as flying a standard on behalf of poorly dressed, thoroughly unattractive teams. This reality begs for further exploration in order to ascertain where the balance between the club’s accrued impact from growth may tip into stagnation and decline as women’s football becomes more embedded and expected, how this exists within a wider upper hierarchy of interest and coverage, and how this translates to the specific example of inequality in merchandise distribution and production.
Following the establishment of Women’s Football in the FA Women’s Super League competitions in 2011, a ballooning of interest in the game and its players led to the establishment of clubs, some professionalised via affiliation to previously long-established men’s clubs. Notable, in terms of jersey marketing and design, is Manchester City LFC (established in 2014) whose garb was not only designed but marketed differently to their men’s team. It featured a more fitted silhouette, with the designers describing that both on-pitch and training attire was softened in a palette broadening from darker navy blues to softer sky blues (Woodhouse et al., 2019). Like City’s LFC arm, arch-rivals Manchester United also took the opportunity to integrate into the women’s game via their men’s kit designer, its influence seen from its 2018 formation. Like City, the marketing accompanying its uniform referenced as much aspirational lifestyle designs as sport. Yet while tackling the constraints of the previous decade, United’s women’s gear remained unembellished and gadget-like in comparison. For fans of both teams, situating these uniforms among their clubs’ women’s teams history and accomplishments, or any previous works, is impossibly distant.
Lyon’s recent eBay-acquired Eider jersey is a replica of the jerseys worn by the club’s groundskeeper in the 1950s, a season where OL’s women’s squad in front of roaring crowds broke league attendance records across Europe. The revolution in its jersey design took the form of an inspired homage to that design, one with intricate ribbing, touches of tricolore details, and with its crest and sponsor embroidered instead of sublimated. Owing to the signs of wear after a single season of use though, this design needs to be rectified before much of the fixture rematches the history of Lyon away. Elsewhere though, clubs ranging from the likes of Berlin or Chelsea FC have adopted a Do-it-Yourself approach, a practice indicative of its origins and yet determinedly modern (Drury et al., 2022).
Today, the pink and violet jerseys worn by some players on the U.S. women’s national team are recognized as banal artifacts of early twenty-first-century women’s football, if they are recognized at all. It is shocking to see women’s sports uncomfortably robed, even, at times, sexualized, as they were during the ugly early years of this era. In an arena in which the male game receives sustained attention and investment, the female game can be newly infantilized and made nonthreatening. At times in this period, the misguided implications of sex roles return to women’s games with a vengeance (O. Braciska, 2018). Most glaringly in the jerseys of the U.S. women’s national team, but also, at times, in the garishly bright jerseys of several of the female clubs that play against them, on occasion it is tempting to agree that it is time for the years of pandering, insulting garishness and indelicacy to end. More recently, the jerseys have become modeled anew, this time along a more subtle line. Feminine style and sophistication has been emphasized in the design of some jerseys worn by English and Chinese women and most jerseys worn by U.S. women. What a remarkable difference! Certainly they reveal none of the ugly and gross defects in femininity which animated so much of the earlier clothing. But they are startlingly visible in their otherwise unprecedented bangles, bows, scarves, and lace. A new style stage has been reached but the aesthetic sensibilities of women are again treated as alien to mundanity or respectability in a way that is entirely novel for men. Amazingly, even models have reached an ugliness not seen in men’s sports. Some recent and current female models, the two leading stars of England’s national team perhaps most of all, have been styled to appear ugly, stupid, or untrustworthy.
The Three Lionesses had believed it was imperative to preserve the traditional feel of the shirt. The issue was the number of colours that the crest had and whether white as well as gold could be worn. Out of the blue Patrick Barbour dropped her a line saying that it was possible to limit it to just two colours. Therefore, everyone scrambled to get new badges embroidered on shirts that had already been made. Five days before the opening match against Scotland, they were sent to Australia with the shortened crest which, simply put, did not suit the shirt at all (Fielding-Lloyd et al., 2018).
The date was set for the launch – 12 days before the tournament was due to start – and this brought the issue of the size of the replica shirts. Most of the retailers had only ordered sizes S and M. As the launch was for new performance wear, it was vital that these shirts were in the same size range as the team’s shirts to showcase the differences in technology. With only ten days to go this looked impossible, but a consortium called the Great Britain Squad had a 60xxL shirt in stock. Kelly Smith, a famous forward, was given the shirt for the photograph but she could scarcely button it. Nonetheless, the press loved it. To counteract fears that this was a mere marketing stunt Kelly was asked to come to the launch, and surprisingly agreed. Consequently, she flew three hours back from Spain to attend this day-long meeting. However, as she was in the late match, England had stayed at an inland hotel. Kelly and plasticine had to arrive on stage after a ‘mad’ taxi ride in which they chanced to catch sight of Cook Island A Black Fern Edwick, who had been down in the dust behind a medal and a motor boat, at a childcare centre with injury to her left eye.(Women’s Football Jerseys)
In 1993, for the first time in Germany’s official football history, an official women’s national football team entered the rotating system of national teams and took part in qualifying matches and tournament matches. This national team trained by Gero Bisanz subsequently qualified for the finals and made its debut at the Women’s World Cup 1995 in Sweden. After a 3:3 draw with the USA and a 0:1 in the match against the Scandinavian hosts Sweden, the German team came third in the group and did not take part in the knockout stage of the tournament. A year later, the newly introduced U-19 and U-16 competitions of UEFA were welcomed around the world. The German U-19 national team won the European Championship title for the first time in 2002. In the year of the 2003 World Cup in the USA, the local media called Germany the “proudest queen” of cities about to overtake the German men’s national team. Once again, the form of national coach April Heinrichs’ team, which lost 1:3 to the German team in the final match, was followed with great excitement in Germany (Soroka, 2017).
Women’s football really boomed in Germany after the 2008 European Championships held in Finland. Nina Hoss was cast as a ghostwriter on behalf of journalists. Kristalis turned out to be a visionary as he invented a female footballer, Kelly, who played for national champions Birman. He wrote commentaries for her same national championship matches, turned in football scrolls at seven o’clock in the morning, and taped smaller local championships. An opportunity was taken for the first time to present football as women’s football, a body whose discovery could encourage enthusiasm for women’s football. In terms of numbers, however, female football was ten times more poorly represented than men’s football, and sponsorship was also barely available. Nevertheless, the purely economic success factors, as usually coordinated and put into the display skeleton of the big world sport industry, turned out to be valid also for women’s football, namely television rights, sponsoring revenues, and ticket sales.
When it comes to marketing women’s football jerseys, several areas are worth investigating. The national federations, leagues, and clubs of women’s football could learn from the best practices of their male counterparts (Valenti et al., 2018). The relationship between demand for women’s football jerseys and participation and viewership in women’s football matches should be examined. This would require understanding the geographical dimensions and the socio-cultural factors that drive or inhibit women’s football participation. Research should evaluate how women’s football jerseys were marketed in cases where considerable demand was generated.
It is also worth examining the media coverage of jerseys and merchandise on women’s football, as well as the perception of these items by fans. However, existing data is quite limited, with the case of the French Federation’s merchandise policy being studied. The kind of discourse that suggests female players’ jerseys are “less marketable” and thus less newsworthy should be assessed in studies of the media landscape and content of women’s football coverage. These assessments may identify systematic differences between coverage of women’s and men’s football, which would indicate a biased treatment of women’s football and illustrate how the media view women’s football assets.
The sustainable, responsible production and consumption of clothing is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set within the United Nations’ 2030 agenda for sustainable development. This research outlines a capability framework for addressing the sustainable manufacturing of clothing. The framework is then applied specifically to the sports apparel and footwear sectors where compliance with environmental regulations is a particular concern. Responses from sports apparel manufacturers to an online survey of design and production capability are collated and used to assess capability in sustainable manufacturing. Sport apparel manufacturers rated many capabilities poorly. The findings indicate that to progress the sustainable manufacturing of sports apparel companies need to ensure that their workforce is properly educated and motivated.
The sporting goods industry has successfully influenced suppliers to improve product quality and social compliance. Sustainability is gaining significance in establishing apparel and footwear as quality products but ensuring sustainable manufacturing is more complex. This paper outlines a research program aimed at developing a pilot version of a framework for sporting goods manufacturers to assess manufacturing capability in sustainability. By specifying improvement benchmarks, the sporting goods industry can create incentives that will lead to more sustainable manufacturers and sustainable products (Subic et al., 2012).
The sports apparel and footwear industries rely on tiered supply chains associated with large multinational companies, located worldwide and in particular in developing countries. The environmental impact of these industries depends on how they can influence suppliers to adopt more sustainable technologies and practices. Reducing waste is of strategic importance in sustainable manufacturing of sporting goods. Regular measurement of key performance data enables companies to monitor their environmental performance, identify trends, set benchmarks and identify potential savings. Reducing energy and water consumption, and eliminating volatile organic compounds in sports products are some of the environmental objectives in these industries of Women’s Football Jerseys.
From personal expression to a canvas of opportunity, athletes are given freedom and exposure through the platform of sports and fashion. Athletes frequently amplify their identities, experimenting with their clothing and personifying their team spirit. They offer imaginative input and occasionally create a style trend in the new look on the platform.
Athletes occasionally model clothing that has a powerful cultural significance or is on the cutting edge of the fashion scene. As a result, sportswear has evolved into a widely embraced lifestyle brand that often disregards fashion’s traditional gender specifications. Given its widespread appeal and cultural significance, it’s conceivable that a sport could be considered a performance text, and that the clothing would integrate various dynamic and multifaceted individual identities (J Cook, 2018).
Sports wearwear—like any type of apparel—serves a utilitarian role. The fit and function of clothing, the textures and perceptions of fabric, the patterns that comprise them, and the ways of adornment in sporting events and rehearsals comprise a performative chronology. The choices of clothing tied to this chronology are tied to the identity of the athlete and inextricably linked to the culture of the sport. This shift along a continuum of physicality, performance, playfulness, eroticism, and fetishism occurs in different contexts throughout the sport, and textiles and accessories bring out the desired character (Kustok, 2010).
Women athletes and their fashions were often not taken into consideration in mainstream analyses. Clothes were primarily examined through the lens of gender roles, while current scholarship fan the flame for post-feminist understanding and deconstructions of the binary. The question is whether the solution lies with female athletes or within the broader social structures that encase and restrict them. Elite female athletes, whose lives outside the sports field are quite separate from their athletic identity, are both entrepreneurs and commercialized public property; they are both in control and constrained by clothing choices.
The jersey design utilized for male and female professional soccer players is noticeably different and has undergone a transformation over the years due to changing times and social conditions around the world. The latest design of the jerseys relates more to common commercial items. Therefore, it seems reasonable to compare the earlier designs of shirts, shorts, and socks worn by male and female soccer players and find the essential differences.
The essential structural elements of both men’s and women’s jerseys in professional soccer have remained the same for over 100 years and have not been changed, except for the sponsorship logo applied mostly to the front side of shirts and shorts. In October 1918, the first women’s match took place between two teams, and identical jerseys were prepared for the players by the teams. On the jerseys, the team name was written in a few centimeters high letters on the front side. Just below it, nicknames and the numbers of the players were sewn on with wool threads in different colors. At that time, players wore jersey shirts with buttonholes at the neck and long sleeves. Just as on the men’s jerseys, trimmed to fit the body around the shoulders, the shirts were drawn up slightly in the middle to obtain a puff that fell naturally over the body.
The socks of the players were hand-knitted woolen goods, knee-high, and in width. On the top side of each sock, the initials of the players were embroidered in different yarn colors. The socks were drawn up with garters, which were fastening straps over socks. There are wide differences in sock lengths in terms of male and female jerseys. The fabric of the shorts was the same as that of professional men’s shorts in shape and thickness. With care for hygiene and comfort, players wore white woolen underpants with length just down to the knees, not shown outside. In today’s jerseys, the socks come in generally similar lengths. The shape of shirts and shorts has hardly changed in general but varied a lot in fashion and thickness of fabric, sponsorship textiles, designs, crests, and numbers.
The last decade has represented a real turning point for women’s football globally. The increased visibility afforded by the introduction of professional leagues in countries ranging from the United States to England, Brazil, and Australia, has propelled the women’s game in journals, newspapers, and social media timelines. These players have become commercially viable and culturally relevant in a way never seen before. The rise of women’s soccer has turned it into a global mass product. It has undergone revisions of aesthetics, roles, and practices to make it a commercially viable product for Broadcasting and Sponsorship discussion about the German Women’s National Team on social media after their less than desirable results at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The use of alternate platforms and their specific social media stylings, deemed necessary as a result of toxic fan cultures in women’s sports.
The increased visibility afforded by the introduction of professional leagues such as the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States, the Liga F in Spain, the FA Women’s Super League in England, and the Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany, coupled with the success of global events such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup, UEFA Women’s Euro, and the AFC Women’s Asian Cup, has propelled the women’s game into and across mainstream male-dominated journalistic spaces, newspapers, broadcasters, and social media timelines. A lexicon of European club footballing culture has been borrowed and reproduced in the coverage of women’s soccer. The predictable, constant, and uniform repetition of lexicons and formats used for men’s football in the coverage of women’s football has resulted in the transnational standardization of narratives surrounding its rise across different national contexts.
Consequently, women footballers have first been granted visibility and the position of cultural relevance and commercial viability in a way never seen before in history. This has resulted in self-representational efforts and discourses of defiance by women footballers brandishing agency over their visibilities and the narratives of these visibilities (Drury et al., 2022). The women’s game itself has been discursively and representationally reconfigured, and its aesthetics, roles, and practices revised and mouled, so it may further fit logics of a commercially viable product within global broadcasting and sponsorship negotiations.
The women’s game is said to be experiencing rapid growth at elite level worldwide – players, supporters, sponsors, governing bodies, sports media rights holders, and media publishers, the audience for women’s football nationally and internationally at top clubs and tournaments, etc. – pointed to a phenomenal surge in the players of women’s football globally from 11 million in 2000 to 40 million in 2011. It was again said to have grown from 175,000 referees in 2000 to over 1.3 million in 2017. The World Cup was suggested as being the stage upon which women’s football displays its authenticity.
Yet, few will argue against the proposition that women’s football has recently experienced some remarkable events of noteworthy significance: the three weeks of glorious summer brought to Canada in the summer of 2015 by the Women’s World Cup, the woeful handling of the controversial decisions at the games triggered by the We Care petitions, petitions that ultimately secured a refund for viewers and spurred the creation and promotion of the player-led initiative, and the creation of the Women’s Super League (WSL) in the UK. These matters have placed women’s football in a new spotlight – for both good and ill (F. Grainey, 2012).
Maintaining the level focus for a moment longer, it would arguably be possible, with a modicum of careful crafting, to recreate a compelling account of the opinion-making aspect of women’s football’s recent history. In contending that a new golden era for women’s football is dawning throughout the world, this has been suggested. It seems unlikely that a version of the women’s football story capable of properly countering the charge of ‘disconnected, uneven, imbalanced, and haphazard mess’ can be delivered by anyone, in any discipline, in the near future. This is notwithstanding our current dispositional proclivity to focus solely on women’s football (Soroka, 2017).
In terms of in-game memorabilia, although largely neglected by museum curators, there is increasing academic interest in the topic of jersey collecting by fans in sports museums. Women’s football jerseys from the past ought to be subject to the same kind of inquiries as those from men’s football. In men’s football, a sport in which shirt sponsorship took commercial precedence over others which had waiting lists for advertising space in the 1990s, collecting jerseys at any level became an obsession for some match-going fans, and fake home and away shirts could be bought for a fraction of the cost for the authentic strip or substituted at half-time or full-time for a hefty outlay. Collecting used match shirts by supporters has a certain romance to it, although much of that romance is lost when a signed and worn shirt is sent for auction or attached to a case under a museum spotlight. At the same time, replicas produced for clubs’ official stores tend to lose their appeal when worn in public. The same sexed distinctions seem to pertain to jerseys worn by female players, and the ability to gaze in wonder at jerseys worn by Hope Powell at the national stadium gives way to something akin to cringing at seeing the last pair of shorts worn by the Girls FC.
Museums in the United Kingdom and North America have assembled whole exhibitions around objects that resonated personally with players, but jersey memorabilia from women’s teams remain lesser-liked despite their importance, clippings prior to 1920 match reports. While actions over player movement has much to say about gender norms and trafficking in the contest between the leagues, jerseys traded or hoarded point to much wider issues around the very idea of professionalism in women’s football. It is safe to say that sports jersey collecting has received some academic treatment, but jersey collecting in women’s football has yet to receive any serious study. With the general public unaware that jersey collections and hoarding of women’s football shirts even happens, we only have vague evidence of their prevalence among football fans and worries as to why these phenomena might emerge. With respect to jerseys traded or hoarded in women’s football, the items themselves seemingly acquire a new dimension once worn to even the most devoted collector/appreciator, and that is how memories become indelibly stitched to the act of materiality (Williams, 2019). So long as the jerseys remain housed safely, there can be mystery in what they carry that transcends historical documentation, for example, time and space taken up in shed dubbed ‘The Stadium’ or deep in the homes of the former players.
The 1990s brought with it an explosion in both interest and coverage of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team. This can be attributed to a number of factors, but none more so than on-the-field success and celebrity appeal. The daily national coverage of their matches and achievements mirrored that of their counterparts in the men’s game, proving the fact that soccer could and did thrive on American soil. The attention increase alone in just the five-year span of the initial championship is notable. In the wake of the 1991 World Cup win, the team had coverage by one media representative. Yet, just five years later, in the 1996 gold medal victory, 2,000 plus media members were in attendance (Kustok, 2010). Mia Hamm, the team’s top scorer and, effectively, ambassador, was offered endorsements and a media attention normally reserved for athletic stars with much more proven credentials. Already an incredibly popular spokesperson for Nike, Hamm was featured in commercials for Pert Plus Shampoo, Power Bar, Pepsi, and Earth Grain breads. Hamm appeared on David Letterman, Regis and Kathie Lee, and was featured in such magazines as Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Shape, and even voted one of People magazine’s fifty most beautiful people. However, Hamm is not alone as a focal point on the subject of jersey popularity. Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, Kristine Lilly, and Shannon Higgins-… all framed a new era in American sport and human interest story potentially able to eclipse anything in the men’s game. An era where a more independent and athletic image of young women could potentially be popularized.
Women’s sporting events have proliferated in the past two decades, becoming part and parcel of the global sports mosaic. Older sporting institutions have made room for women’s equivalent leagues, while new franchises and custom formats have been developed that offer a multitude of opportunities for women to engage in sport as players, coaches, broadcasters, administrators, and employees. Increased participation has been reflected in the corporate sponsorship of women’s leagues and events, broadcast coverage of women’s sport, the branding of women sportspeople, and girls’ online participation through social media platforms. However, even in flagship women sporting events, coverage is severely overshadowed by the male equivalent events. Network executives and broadcasters, having erected the infrastructures through which women athletes’ competition and performances can be circumscribed, subjugated, and fundamentally made for men (L Hand, 2007), exercise mysterious control over what gets shown and what is excluded or partially visible. The tensions and compromises embedded in their fragmented coverage of female athletics have intensified anxiety over the future of women’s sports on both the part of rights holders and media commentators. Although it may be possible to criticize those who remain faithful to mainstream sporting format and discursive practices, it is difficult to imagine any competing understanding of sport that could satisfy so many disparate interests.
The parochial coverage of women’s sports and their athletes stands in stark contrast to the lavish coverage of their male counterparts. Legendary sporting events such as the Women’s World Cup and Olympic Games, which have received extensive coverage by the rights holders in the past, continue to be relegated to disparaged time slots on less influential commercial channels. The standards that have been achieved in dubbing and enhancing the coverage of male sports, from rack shots to panning sweeps, are applied to the secondary and tertiary properties of women’s sports. In response to calls for change, rights holders and broadcast networks seek to restore credibility by pledging additional coverage of female athletic achievements. In what is possibly the most elaborate attempt at increasing the visibility of women’s sports to date, ESPN recently devoted a day-long marathon to its Women’s Sports Center. Despite concerted efforts on the part of rights holders and networks, the changing atmosphere in which women play sports casts its pall over hopes for increased visibility (Kustok, 2010).
Several important questions remain to be addressed: First, what type of broadcast discourse has been furnished by those responsible for the media presentation of women’s games? Second, what perceptual and ideological operations are performed by this broadcast discourse to produce a particular view of women’s sports? Third, how has the coverage of women’s World Cups evolved through the passage of time? Do rights holders and networks currently present coverage that holds women’s sports and their events in low esteem, or has the passage of time brought increased respect and legitimacy? These questions are vital to the analysis and understanding of the invisibility of women sports and should, therefore, be under investigation.
Women’s football matches began to emerge from the anonymity of public parks as early as 1920 when England played the first international match against France. In the years that followed, it became a considerable crowd puller with attendant match day publicity and souvenir programs circulating. In narrative terms, the reception of the girls’ game was like many other sporting pastimes in the early 20th century. Dominant societal stories were told in newspapers amid wider formats for an engaged public mass gaze, ranging from humorist cartoons through photo narratives to serialized scouting reports and machinations around transfers and finances, alike a more mundane narrative, all the rungs below the great national obsession. The increasing globalization of football brought with it the colonization of mainstream metropolitan fashions and the desires of young women, today replicated endlessly by social media. The picturing of women’s football first on the periphery of this world and latterly at its very center is the rationale for this collection.
As fashions contemporaneously diverged, global girls’ games increasingly reflected and created distinction in a flowering of narratives invoking particularity of place and local adherence to a wider transnational sisterhood. Looking for lost solids in record collections, memorable branches from flowers still conveying scent decades on in the creations of scented oils, rediscovered relics of childhood echo only faintly now in avatars. The analysis proceeds from the very specific to the more abstract while placing women, sport, clothing and youth culture in shared co-constituted narratives. The growth and success of girls’ sports played a key role in the professionalizing of women’s football jerseys with corporations eager to expand corporate visibility across female- and family-centered down-mounted sports and burgeoning cultures. Girls’ games revealed other facets of their participants, such as global cities’ hopes and aspirations for the fruits that must descend from economic migrants into the heart of commerce.
Women’s football is viewed in a worldwide context, including its history, its present and future development all around the world and national variations. In England, specific attention is paid to women’s football in the context of the discovery and development of the Women’s Super League (WSL) and issue that affects its intended audience, which is people interested in football. Attention is also paid to the main idea the WSL was conceived and marketed as a niche product that was inherently different from male professional club football, particularly by the Women’s Football Association (WWFA), the Football Association (FA), and pundits involved in the WSL.
Women’s football in England had been termed ‘the beautiful game’ long before initiatives promoted the women’s game in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It had arguably been professionalised since the launch of the Women’s Premier League in 1990. However, by 2010, women’s club football in England was still attempting to forge an identity distinct from the men’s game and still struggling for legitimacy in the face of men’s football discipline, investment, and media footprint.
Being aware that these incentives could keep the WSL distinct from a powerful men’s competitor, key players involved in the conception and formation of the WSL were specifically asked about the league’s target audience, how it was to be marketed and how to draw attention to it. Responses demonstrate a developed marketing strategy that was founded on the niche nature of the league (Fielding-Lloyd et al., 2018). A need to ensure a suitable league in keeping with marketing goals intended to present women’s football as distinct and unthreatening to the gendered order of sport was evident. In asking about media interaction, the need to ensure a small, family-orientated production was stated. In discussing marketing communications, an avoidance of direct invocation of the media-constructed men’s league was made clear.
Data showed that genders do exhibit different supportive behaviors of teams in terms of types of product interests and purposes of purchase. Wearing team apparel is an important aspect of being a fan and is associated with team loyalty for both genders. Men are more inclined to buy clothing than women due to men having more interest in supporting teams through apparel purchases since they typically engage in more supportive behaviors associated with wearing apparel than do women. To be successful in recruiting women and other types of customers, retailers must provide ‘just right’ as well as unique products to set the teams apart and foster a stronger connection with their fan base (Shane-Nichols et al., 2016).
This research aimed to assess the development of women’s jerseys in professional football from 2010 to 2022 by analysing the kits worn by Arsenal Women. The club is over 50 years-old but only recently did it garner mainstream media attention, which it continues to rely on in order to attract growing commercial interest. Similarly, the club’s women’s kit history, one that has become intricately tied to the evolving fortunes of the women’s game as a whole, has been overlooked. Historical research is key in understanding attitudes towards women’s football jersey development. Such research establishes the important life of a kit language rarely explored in research or trade literature outside of the men’s game. This knowledge will contribute toward an incompletely understood history that is scarce even on major sites housing football heritage.
By studying jerseys worn between 2010 and 2022, an emergent pattern is established with respect to manufactured designs, influences exerted on them, and responses. These jerseys were designed with reference to their predecessors, male jerseys, and each other. Compromises were made between oppositional parties (the club women’s department, manufacturers, sponsors, and governing bodies) to produce jerseys demonstrating distinctive influences whilst still broadly conforming to established codes. Moreover, jerseys were designed in consideration of, and as responses to, the domestic and European success of the team. This knowledge will be useful in informing teachings on an essential knowledge gap, and in providing practitioners clarity on the motivations of jersey manufacturers and teams with respect to upcoming competitions (Drury et al., 2022).
References:
Soroka, A. (2017). HISTORY OF WOMEN’S FOOTBALL WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP IN 1991–2007. [PDF]
Drury, S., Stride, A., Fitzgerald, H., Hyett-Allen, N., Pylypiuk, L., & Whitford-Stark, J. (2022). “I’m a Referee, Not a Female Referee”: The Experiences of Women Involved in Football as Coaches and Referees. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Williams, J. (2019). ���We���re the lassies from Lancashire���: Manchester Corinthians Ladies FC and the use of overseas tours to defy the FA ban on women���s football. [PDF]
F. Grainey, T. (2012). Beyond Bend It Like Beckham. [PDF]
Verbridge, S. (2014). Equity in the Impact of Title IX on Officiating in the United States. [PDF]
Kustok, S. (2010). REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN ATHLETES IN THE MEDIA. [PDF]
Mateos, C., González-Molina, A., María Sánchez-Mosquera, A., Martínez-Vidal, A., & José Martínez-Patiño, M. (2010). An approach to the historical development of female athletics in the Olympic Games. [PDF]
C Gorea, A., Baytar, F., & Sanders, E. (2018). Seamless Knitted Sports Bra Design: A Responsive System Design Exploration. [PDF]
Fielding-Lloyd, B., Woodhouse, D., & Sequerra, R. (2018). ‘More than just a game’: family and spectacle in marketing the England Women’s Super League. [PDF]
J Cook, K. (2018). Uncovering the Evolution of Hijabs in Womenu27s Sports. [PDF]
Jill Silverman, S. (2012). Twitter takeover: an examination of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team twitter during the 2011 World Cup and recommendations for the 2012 Olympics. [PDF]
Shane-Nichols, A., McCrohan, D., & Chung, T. L. (2016). NFL Fanatics Communication of Identity through Apparel and Merchandise: A Gender Comparison. [PDF]
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Valenti, M., Morrow, S., & Scelles, N. (2018). Women’s football studies: an integrative review. [PDF]
Subic, A., Shabani, B., Hedayati, M., & Crossin, E. (2012). Capability framework for sustainable manufacturing of sports apparel and footwear. [PDF]
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