The WSL could solve Premier League fans' problems – if it weren’t for sexism.

There’s a complaint you hear constantly around English football now: the game has become too expensive. Princes creep up every season, season tickets cost as much as a used car, away days feel like luxury purchases and long-time supporters talk about being slowly priced out of the sport that once belonged to working-class communities. Top-flight football has become strangely aspirational, what was once a weekly habit for many now feels like a special event (that costs a day’s wage).

But there’s a contradiction I keep circling back to. At the exact same time people say football has become inaccessible, many of those same voices resist engaging with the one version of elite football that is still relatively affordable, still intimate, still recognisably connected to fans: the Women's Super League. WSL tickets are often a fraction of the price of men’s matches and the experience can stretch across the entire spectrum of what people claim to miss about the game. If what you crave is scale, you can sit inside Emirates Stadium with more than 60,000 people for £15 and feel the roar roll around the stands. If what you miss is the intimacy football once had, you can stand at Broadfield Stadium, where the crowd is small enough that you hear the impact of a ball. The women’s game can hold both experiences at once: the spectacle and the closeness. And yet when women’s football is suggested as an alternative, the reaction in some corners is instant dismissal. “The pace isn’t the same” “The quality isn’t the same”. The arguments arrive pre-packaged, repeated so often they’ve almost become instinctive. It becomes difficult not to wonder how much of that resistance is habit – and how much of it is misogyny.

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Spend any time in the comment sections beneath clips from women’s matches and another dynamic becomes obvious. Women’s football is constantly judged through appearance. If a player doesn’t meet the internet’s arbitrary standards of attractiveness, the sport itself becomes the punchline. Suddenly the conversation isn’t about tactics or technique but about mocking the athletes themselves. The implication is quietly brutal: if the women on the pitch aren’t aesthetically pleasing enough, the entire game must be inferior. But the treatment isn’t kinder when a player does fit those standards, the focus simply flips. Instead of discussing goals, assists or relentless pressing, the conversation drifts somewhere else entirely. I recently found myself caught in one of the internet’s stranger algorithmic rabbit holes, where TikTok served up compilation after compilation of players doubled over after heavy tackles – moments of physical pain repackaged, disturbingly, as “goon bait”.

It’s an exhausting paradox. If a player isn’t considered attractive enough, she becomes a reason for critics to dismiss the sport altogether. If she is considered attractive, the football itself disappears from the conversation. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Men in football rarely exist inside that equation. A male player might occasionally be described as handsome, but it rarely shapes how his performance is analysed, no one edits his worst moment on the pitch purely to examine his ‘ass’ instead of his game. For women, athletic achievement often has to compete with something else entirely: beauty as currency. And when that lens sits over a sport, it inevitably shapes how seriously the entire game is taken.

This is why the conversation about women’s football sometimes feels slightly misdirected. When people ask why the women’s game still struggles for recognition, the answers usually focus on money, infrastructure or broadcast coverage. Those things matter, of course. But culture matters just as much. If a sport is constantly framed as something to mock, sexualise or trivialise, it becomes harder for people to approach it on its own terms. Which brings us back to that first contradiction. Football fans say they want the game to remain accessible. They say they miss the closeness between players and supporters, the feeling that the sport still belongs to ordinary people. Yet right now, women’s football offers many of those qualities (tickets that don’t require a second mortgage). A rapidly improving league where players are becoming stars because of what they do with a ball at their feet.

Photo Credit; Getty Images

The growth of the women’s game suggests plenty of people are recognising that opportunity. Attendances continue to rise, broadcast audiences are expanding and a generation of young girls are now growing up with footballing role models that didn’t exist even twenty years ago. But the cultural resistance – the jokes, the dismissive comments, the fixation on appearance – still lingers around the edges. Sometimes I think the most interesting question isn’t whether women’s football deserves the same respect as the men’s game, the quality on the pitch has already answered that. The real question is whether football culture is ready to move past its own biases long enough to see what’s already happening. Because the future of the sport might not be disappearing, it simply might just don a ponytail.