Equality and football: Still a bridge too far

With football fandom and its many negative—and in the context of what has been unleashed in England over the last couple of days in the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final—downright violent aspects once again in focus, the toxic masculinity and gross misogyny that is unfortunately often associated with watching the game, has come into focus once again.

This article borrows its title from a piece of the same name written by the Italian philosopher and author Umberto Eco sometime in the ‘60s. In it, Eco expressed his exasperation about the football fan. A conversation with a football fan, he had said, was like talking to a brick wall. Eco's football fan, make no mistake, is a man.

Take away the humorous hyperbole, and one would probably end up agreeing with the essence of Eco’s evaluation of the football fan for whom everything becomes secondary to the game. In Take Us Home, the documentary about Leeds United’s long, eventful, and dramatic journey to the English Premier League, two Leeds fans passionately describe their love for the club, placing it higher than ever their family. And certainly, they are not an exception.

But for the most popular sport in the world, mere access to watching football has not been the same for everyone.

In Iran, women had been banned from attending live matches in stadiums for over forty years.

Jafar Panahi’s 2006 film Offside tells the story of young women kept in a holding pen for trying to sneak into a World Cup qualifier match against Bahrain dressed as boys. When one of the girls needs to use the bathroom, they find out that the stadium does not have a toilet for women and a soldier must accompany her to the men’s room. On their way the soldier asks the girl, who is a football player herself, why the game is so important to her, to which she replies, it is more important to her than food.

In 2019, a 29-year-old woman named Sahar Khodayari set herself on fire outside court after she was arrested for trying to sneak into the Azadi stadium disguised as a man during an AFC Champions League game in Tehran. A month later, under pressure from women’s rights organizations and FIFA, the Iranian authorities earmarked tickets for women for a World Cup qualifying match against Cambodia. More than three thousand women came to watch the match.

That same year, the women’s team of the United States of America won the FIFA World Cup. Their co-captain Megan Rapinoe made headlines as much for her performance on the field as her statements off it. Three months before the World Cup had begun, Rapinoe and her teammates had sued the US Soccer Federation for gender discrimination, citing, in particular, the wage gap and poorer working conditions compared to the men’s football team.

Rapinoe’s efforts on and off the field hark back to football’s long and complicated tryst with politics, one that transcends mere tokenism and calls for real action with real consequences.

But beyond the debate of tokenism, Rapinoe’s call for unity, performs the essential duty of speaking to the football fan – Eco’s brick wall, to whom perhaps other words get through only when it is filtered through football.

Casual sexism still making football foul

What message, then, does one get from the Ranveer Singh-starrer EPL advertisement, aired by the official broadcaster in 2019 as a promo for the league? In it, Ranveer Singh, on a video call with two other friends, calls up a third – Kaizan – who can’t join them because he’s on a date with a girl called Tanny. Clearly, the advertisement tells us, she is the obstacle in the way of this toxic male-bonding over sports.

The girl, who barely has a complete sentence to her credit in the ad, is caught off guard by an over-enthusiastic Singh who, right off the bat, thanks her for “letting Kaizu watch football with us.” He even throws his friend under the bus, saying that while he thought Tanny was very understanding, Kaizan was determined to watch the match even if his partner stood in the way. The scheme works, and date-night is abandoned in favor of the game. Tanny is nowhere to be seen.

One cannot help but wonder how the Premier League allowed the advertisement to be aired. With all its talk of inclusiveness and equality and diversity in football, (players “taking the knee before every game and literally sporting the message “No Room for Racism” on their sleeves; Premier League’s partnership with Stonewall for the Rainbow Laces campaign in the first couple of weeks of December), has it perhaps failed to overlook the gross sexism perpetuated through an advertisement for their very own league? We could give them the benefit of the doubt, but it is a tough ask, considering the fact that League merchandise is strategically placed in almost every frame of the ad.

At the most general level, this advertisement targets an Indian audience. At a more specific level, it assumes this audience to be male. Is there any data to support this assumption? A report in 2018 discusses the sexism faced by Indian women who watch football while simultaneously noting that women made up 47 per cent of the 47.3 million Indians who tuned in to watch the men’s football World Cup. This and another article on women watching the World Cup both indicate that the Indian female viewership is not limited to watching a tournament four years apart, but that they follow European leagues throughout the year. According to data provided by BARC, India, urban female viewership jumped 8 percent from 17.6 billion impressions in 2018 to 19.1 billion in 2019 in sports in India.

Premier League Ambassador Ranveer Singh.

This report from September 2020 estimates that women constitute 30 percent of the fan base of the EPL in India, but provides no data on viewership.

But if such data did indeed reveal that the number of male viewers far outweighed the women when it came to watching the EPL in India, we must also keep in mind the question of access – to the TV, to OTT platforms, to sports in general, and think of data, not as sacrosanct figures that cannot lie, but through the fault lines, particularly in this case, of gender as well as of class and caste.

Never before in the history of the sport has football played such a massive role in bringing people emotionally together. For it is being played at a time when the world demands that we stay physically apart. There are moments of transcendence – in watching players walk off the field in protest, in seeing them raise their fists in support of BLM, in seeing them kneel in defiance of authority. There is also a feeling of transcendence in watching Leeds United tearing through Liverpool’s defense, or Son Heung-min scoring the goal of the season in the North London Derby.

But every such spark is eventually doused when age-old biases and stereotypes are thrown at us from our TV screens, when Singh points at the screen and says, “A real fan will never miss Sunday night football,” and clearly a woman has no place in that category, real or otherwise.