To understand the significance of football clubs turning their focus to stadia designed specifically for their women’s football teams, first, we must detour to the late 2010s, and the trend of housing one-off women’s games in clubs’ main grounds. Women’s teams, including Juventus (39,027 v Fiorentina, 2019) and Atletico Madrid (60,739 v Barcelona, 2019), broke attendance records. In England, derby matches staged during the men’s international break enjoyed similar success. In that era, clubs who
Women’s teams, including Juventus (39,027 v Fiorentina, 2019) and Atletico Madrid (60,739 v Barcelona, 2019), broke attendance records. In England, derby matches staged during the men’s international break enjoyed similar success. In that era, clubs whose women’s teams shared facilities with their men’s or academy sides were lauded for bringing their female players in-house when the prevailing fashion was to regard women’s teams as an afterthought.
In the season after England won the 2022 European Championship at home, 40 Women’s Super League (WSL) games were played in main stadia, compared to eight in the 2019/20 season. A novelty became closer to common practice.
“Infrastructure is going to change this game,” said Paul Barber, chief executive and deputy chairman at Brighton Women, during an event hosted by private wealth and real estate law firm Boodle Hatfield, planning consultants Quod, and planning lawyers Town Legal.
“Half the world’s population, give or take, is female, but a relatively small percentage consume football versus the male population,” he said. “What a market opportunity we have. Would women and girls interact with our sport more if it were better designed for them to do so? (If we) make them feel welcome, make them feel as if they belong? Suddenly, that market opportunity is huge.”
This season, the picture across the WSL is mixed. Arsenal, Aston Villa and Leicester share grounds with their men’s teams, but more commonly, clubs share with lower-league men’s sides, often some distance from their parent club. Brighton Women play at the home of League Two’s Crawley Town, Manchester United and Liverpool play at grounds shared with men’s rugby league clubs, and Spurs, London City and West Ham share grounds with Leyton Orient, Bromley and Dagenham and Redbridge respectively. It poses logistical challenges, as well as questions about identity and supporters when the team’s geographical anchor differs from the boroughs its men’s team represents.
It has led women’s teams to consider building their own grounds to cater to female players and fans alike. To do so is a complex proposition in a league whose clubs command varying levels of financial support, but to say the idea has legs is an understatement.
It has such increasing merit that several clubs from the WSL and below this week attended the aforementioned panel. Joining them were consultancy firms specialising in planning and advising WSL clubs across the UK on training facilities and grounds.
There is a growing consensus about the issues groundsharing with men’s teams poses, including the obvious fixture clashes and calendars already packed with concerts. But what about the ratio of toilets to urinals? Are there enough sanitary bins? Are there areas in the changing rooms to house male members of staff and places to breastfeed?
As such, Brighton plan to have theirs built by 2027-28 (they had proposals approved by the council in October 2023).
“The most important thing is respect for the female athletes,” Barber said. “The Amex Stadium (where the men’s team plays) is a world-class football stadium, but everything — the surface of the pitch; the dressing rooms, which have open showers and urinals, not cubicles; our food and drink offering for fans — is primarily designed for men.
“When we first moved our women’s team into what used to be just our men’s training ground, we thought we could share the facilities quite easily. We thought that would be the best way to do it, to accelerate the process of integrating women’s football. But what tends to happen in those situations is, regardless of how you set out to be equal in the way you think about things, it’s always the money earners, at that moment in time, that take precedence.”
Barber described how the men’s team gets first priority when it comes to things such as the weight room. When the women return, the machines are “set up for the 6ft 4in guy that was just using it, not the 5ft 3in woman who’s just about to.”
“A lot of time gets wasted by elite athletes and their strength and conditioning coaches (on) adjusting equipment, making sure it’s safe for the female athletes to use. Very quickly, you realise that actually you’re not treating the female athletes with respect or giving them the best chance of getting the best results.”
Many existing grounds also do not have room to store prams and pushchairs. Toilet ratios are mismatched, and seat sizes and sightlines are based on male bodies. Families have different food preferences, but existing catering facilities are often built to serve beers and meat pies (the Emirates infamously ran out of hot dogs for one of its women’s matches). Much of this is detailed in the world’s first design guidelines for women’s stadia, published by WSL Football last year as non-mandatory recommendations. The suggestion is that clubs must invest in a more tailored, thoughtful matchday experience to open up new revenue streams, both via the fan economy and sponsorships inspired by improved attendances.
Dawn Airey, chair of the Barclays FA Women’s Super League and Championship board, visited Angel City FC in California to see how National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) teams approach hospitality. She was directed through a Nike merchandising experience to reach her seat, from which she could order food and drink, and fans were treated to entertainment before the game. The team shares the facility with Los Angeles FC in Major League Soccer. Kansas City Current’s CPKC Stadium, the only purpose-built venue in the NWSL, includes sensory spaces, breastfeeding facilities, and family provision.
“We know that a lot of fans only go to one match and they don’t come back,” explained Airey of WSL matches. “How you make it more than just going to see a football match is absolutely critical. Suddenly, your matchday revenue is so much more expansive. That’s a really big part of the overall economics of the women’s game. I see the broadcast revenues, in terms of the percentage of the total revenues for women’s sport, will be lower; commercial revenues will probably be higher.”
This is one of the most significant points at which men’s and women’s football audiences diverge, Airey and Barber explain. Premier League matches effectively sell themselves. Match-going habits are ingrained through generations, a media machine fuelled for decades by global coverage ensures demand and the match itself is the core product. The women’s game is still working towards what marketers call product market fit: when its product (or, more comfortably here, offering) satisfies its specific, identifiable target audience.
WSL newcomers London City Lionesses have two distinct markets that require different approaches.
“Our matchday audience is really family-focused,” explains managing director Sarah Batters. “Our real growing audience, and our social audience and our online audience, is 18 to 34-year-old women who see football in a completely different way. Football isn’t necessarily the destination of the day; it’s part of the whole thing. Brunch, match, drinks. We’re held back in being able to deliver that experience to that audience when we’re constrained to our stadiums.”
Bromley and London City’s Hayes Lane does not have hospitality settings. Millwall’s Den, the backup ground at which London City will play Chelsea later this month, will play host to London City’s first bottomless brunch. “To keep growing, we need to be able to innovate,” said Batters, “but we’ve got a lot to develop in our club infrastructure.”
The goal is to give fans reason to arrive earlier. Batters’ data from London City indicates that fans tend to arrive right before kick-off. “Most of our matches, we’ve had some kind of live music,” she said. “We kicked off our Championship campaign last season with a half-time show, which raised some eyebrows, and we’ve recently had a brass band in the stands. We keep thinking of these things to get fans to come earlier. You spend more in bars and in our retail shop, which then helps our revenue.”
After nearly quadrupling in the first two seasons following England’s 2022 home Euros win, WSL attendance has now reached something of a plateau, leaving clubs in a quandary about not only where to stage matches, but how to sell them out.
Chelsea Women, for instance, welcome an average of 3,368 fans to Kingsmeadow. That leaps to 18,389 for Stamford Bridge — a figure someway off its 40,000-plus capacity.
Brighton enjoy improved attendances at the Amex, which seats 32,000, compared to in Crawley, with a capacity of less than 7,000, but are still left with in excess of 20,000 empty seats, Barber said. “We’re trying to say this is the best women’s league in the world. We can’t put our product in front of an empty stadium.
“We’re trying to sell this sport. We try to attract sponsors. When cameras pan around 25,000 empty seats, it diminishes the product, and the fans who are in the stadium feel like they’re not getting the best experience,” he said. “Those who were thinking about going say: ‘That’s not a very elite event — it’s empty’. In my opinion, you actually do quite a lot of harm by putting women’s games in men’s stadiums if that stadium is only half-full.”
Brighton’s chief executive says they are planning to build a 10,000-seat stadium with the focus of creating an atmosphere.
“It doesn’t sound a lot, but if that stadium is packed for every match, it’s going to look and sound a hell of a lot better than a three-quarters-empty, much larger stadium. We need to make sure that we don’t get ahead of ourselves and build too big,” he said.
When they outgrow that ground, they can move to the Amex, Barber explains, “taking all the learnings from operating a purpose-built women’s stadium. That would be a success story, not a failure. I suspect, sadly, that probably won’t happen in Brighton’s case in my lifetime. It will happen — it will just take time. In the meantime, our best way of growing it is to build facilities that are right for our audience, team and right for the fans and supporters.”
Of course, this also requires significant investment.
Some clubs are understood to be waiting to see who moves first; others are intrigued by multi-use possibilities, including sharing with other sports teams. In any case, stakeholders, as is often the case in women’s football, must invest significantly ahead of revenue returns. The pay-off, Airey says, could be enormous. Recalling her recent visit to the World Economic Forum, at which the global sports economy was valued at approximately $2.3 trillion annually, Airey said Women’s football accounted for $800million of that.
“The costs of purpose-built stadiums are immense,” says Airey. “You’re only going to make that investment if you really think there’s a commercial reason for supporting your women’s team. We’re still, in some ways, building out that case. It’s not just: ‘We support women’s clubs because we have to, and it’s a bit of corporate social responsibility’. It makes commercial business sense.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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