1What comes first, the interest or the coverage?
On Saturday afternoon, Arsenal faced Manchester City in the Conti Cup final, not that you’d know it from the coverage in Sunday’s papers.
I can hear some of you already and it’s a tiresome argument. There is little coverage of women’s football, ‘you’ say, because there is little interest.
That’s simply not true.
And it’s as stupid as saying there was no interest in English football before the arrival of the Premier League. There was less, but once it was marketed properly, it became the leading league on the planet.
Two of the biggest Sunday papers in the country dedicated less than a third of a page to coverage of the Saturday’s final BETWEEN THEM.
The Sunday Telegraph at least gave us a match report, all be it one that took up significantly less space than most other stories this weekend.
The Mail on Sunday? They provided a teeny tiny box of coverage totalling 89 words, including the headline.
When you raise this issue on social media, it doesn’t take long for some bloke who has never thought about the matter to inform you the reason there is so little coverage is because there is no interest, that women’s football is no good compared to men’s, and if there was demand for more coverage, we would get more coverage.
Let me tell you a little story about why that bloke is wrong…