UK Edition
For only the second time in its 122-year history, Villa Park will host an Aston Villa Ladies home match. Later this month Villa will welcome Leicester City Women in the Championship, the second tier of women’s football in England, for their first home game of 2019, and aim to break the league’s 2018-19 attendance record.
History suggests they may just do it. Staging women’s games in a club’s main stadium almost always increases attendances – that was the case when Chelsea hosted Wolfsburg at Stamford Bridge in 2013, and when Derby faced Nottingham Forest at Pride Park this year.
The audience, after all, is there: Villa have offered free entry to the men’s season ticket holders. It is not a new strategy for a sport whose biggest dilemma is how to boost attendances to match its growing media profile. Fran Kirby, the jewel in Chelsea Women’s crown, has 56,000 Twitter followers; Chelsea Women’s Twitter account has 175,000. A crowd of 3,221 watched them host Everton at Kingsmeadow but evening games have seen attendances slip into three figures.
It would be foolish to expect all 175,000 of those followers to turn up to a ground with a capacity of 4,850 – and for a global club such as Chelsea, a sizeable chunk of that virtual fan base will live abroad.
But it does hint at a missing link. Something is preventing this audience, willing to engage with women footballers online, from seeing these players live.
There is no single solution to the spectre of meagre crowd sizes that has haunted women’s football since the FA banned it in 1921. It cannot be insignificant, though, that a Women’s Super League team play their home games an average of 12.8 miles from their club’s main stadium.
The worst offenders? Reading play at Wycombe’s Adams Park, 26.3 miles from the Madejski; Yeovil at Dorchester Town, 23.7 miles from Huish Park; Brighton at Crawley Town’s Broadfield Stadium, 21.3 miles from the Amex. For context, the distance between Coventry City’s Ricoh Arena and Northampton’s Sixfields, to which the Sky Blues were temporarily relocated in 2013 after a rent dispute, is 33.9 miles. Many of the “home games” in women’s football feel more like away trips.
Arsenal Women play in Hertfordshire, in a ground 12.5 miles from the Emirates, and Chelsea at Wimbledon, 7.4 miles from Stamford Bridge. Chelsea would be reluctant to uproot from the town where they were founded but, with no direct Tube link, it is a harder ground to get to than Stamford Bridge. Trains from King’s Cross can take you to the vicinity of those two grounds, but those socio-economic barriers have the potential to render matches inaccessible.
In the Championship, the worst culprits are Manchester United, the club with the highest match-day crowds. They play home games at Leigh Sports Village, 15.9 miles from Old Trafford. It could be worse – as United’s Jess Sigsworth pointed out in the programme for their game against Tottenham, “at least the seats [red] are the right colour”.
United drew a crowd of 4,835 to their first home game this season. Although it feels churlish to question those kind of figures, one cannot help but wonder if there is an even bigger fan base closer to Old Trafford still waiting to be tapped into.
Playing women's football matches at club's main stadium could tap into far bigger fan base