Women’s football: The case for reparations

Sascha: [00:00:02] From Equity Mates media. This is the dive. I'm your host, Sascha Kelly. The case for reparations in women's football. It is a big statement when my colleague Alec Renehan, who who's with me today, came across it. It felt a little like clickbait. 

Alec: [00:00:16] That's right, Sascha. The article was titled Women's Football The Case for Reparations. It felt a little clickbait, but it was the day after the euros, the English women's football team, the lionesses had just won have won a major trophy for the first time ever. And I thought the Financial Times were leaning into it as well. But I clicked into it and I was pretty amazed by what I found.

Sascha: [00:00:37] It's a pretty remarkable story. There's a whole side to women's football that we're just not aware of. So we reached out to Simon Kroupa, the author of this article and the book's economics, to get him on the podcast to understand this story. What is the case for reparations in women's football? But before we get to Simon, let's really set the scene. Let's understand the context. Alec, tell me about the first golden age of women's football. 

Audio clip: [00:01:03] Soccer has only one more world to conquer in the women's world. And in Italy, it's well on the way to doing it. 

Alec: [00:01:08] Yes, in the post-World War one years, we lived through the first golden age of women's football. Well, we didn't really live through it. But the. 

Sascha: [00:01:17] World. You're looking good for your age, Alec. 

Alec: [00:01:20] The first women's international match took place back in 1881, but it was really during World War One and in the years after it that women's football took off. 

Audio clip: [00:01:29] There's something else afoot. The electrical engineers, bright sparks. Do you have challenge the munition workers, the great guns to a football match?

Alec: [00:01:36] In 1918, an English team played an Irish team in front of 20,000 people. In the same year, the final of a women's football tournament in England was played in front of 22,000 people. In 1920, an English team played international matches against a team from France and another from Scotland. 1920 was really the peak of this first golden age. There were more than 150 women's teams in England. One match played at Goodison Park was played in front of 53,000 people, with reports that another 10 to 15000 supporters were turned away and the game ends the. [00:02:12][36.0]

Audio clip: [00:02:12] Door to a tough match at Wembley. They packed the. [00:02:15][3.4]

Alec: [00:02:16] Place. Sascha, you get the point. Women's football was pulling numbers, the equivalent of male football. It was a big league and a big sport in its own right. [00:02:23][7.8]

Sascha: [00:02:24] And those numbers are massive. They would be selling out stadiums today. [00:02:27][3.4]

Alec: [00:02:28] Well, bigger than Australia's record attendance at our age, men's football at 51,000. [00:02:33][5.2]

Sascha: [00:02:34] And as Sky has reported, for those who still like to criticise the women's game as being somehow less important or commercially viable, here's the Inconvenient Truth. Women's football in the UK was once even more popular than the men's or as the BBC have written. Ironically, it was this popularity that crowds were often bigger than the men's games being played on the same day, which played a part in the downfall of women's football. [00:03:01][27.1]

Alec: [00:03:02] Yeah, that downfall is what we're really talking about today. In 1921, it all changed with the stroke of a pen, and not just in England. [00:03:10][8.0]

Audio clip: [00:03:11] Czechoslovakia, where ladies, don't worry about bingo. They prefer to play soccer. And now. [00:03:15][4.5]

Alec: [00:03:16] After the English ban, similar bans were put in place in Germany and Brazil, two of the biggest football playing nations in the world. [00:03:23][6.7]

Sascha: [00:03:23] So let's go to our interview with Simon, who's written about this story in his book Economics and this article in the Financial Times to hear what happened next. Simon, thank you so much for joining us today on the Dive. [00:03:35][12.0]

Simon Kuper: [00:03:36] It's a pleasure. [00:03:36][0.3]

Sascha: [00:03:37] First of all, I just want you to set the scene a little bit and. [00:03:39][2.7]

Alec: [00:03:40] England have done. [00:03:41][1.3]

Simon Kuper: [00:03:41] It. Breaking news. [00:03:42][0.9]

Sascha: [00:03:43] What has the reaction been like from the English community to the lionesses success in the last week? [00:03:50][7.3]

Simon Kuper: [00:03:50] There's been a lot of amounts of enthusiasm. The European Championship final against Germany, which England won, had the largest TV audience in British history for a women's soccer match and about 17 million people. And there's just been an outpouring of joy. You know, the team have done public appearances, written letters to the public about how they intend to go on and on from here. And there's also a kind of feeling that women's football has been very badly treated for a century or more, and now is the time to make amends and to promote openness, given all the opportunities it makes. England Lionesses. [00:04:23][32.5]

Sascha: [00:04:24] Everyone. Well, you've led really nicely there into what we want to talk about today, which is while women's football is captivating fans everywhere at the moment, it's not a new phenomenon. Can you take me back that whole century, back to World War One, and tell us about how women's football rose at that time? [00:04:42][18.3]

Simon Kuper: [00:04:43] Yeah. So that being organised, women's football in England and Scotland from the 1880s. But it really takes off in World War One when the young men go away to the front and women take over their jobs. [00:04:53][10.4]

Sascha: [00:04:54] We had in Coventry some of the key factories for. [00:04:56][1.9]

Audio clip: [00:04:56] Output throughout the First World War. So it seemed like an. Place for those those football teams to spring up. [00:05:03][6.5]

Sascha: [00:05:04] And they started playing against one another. And then, of course, as they began to gain popularity, there were bigger games against factory teams from other cities as well. [00:05:12][8.4]

Simon Kuper: [00:05:13] And these soccer teams play charity matches to raise money, often for wounded soldiers. And these matches become immensely popular. Very large crowds, boys and men, as well as women and girls. And the best of all of these teams is Dick Kerr. Ladies, the. [00:05:27][14.5]

Sascha: [00:05:27] Declared ladies were without doubt the most successful team of all time. They had an unbeaten run of all but 320 games. [00:05:33][5.8]

Simon Kuper: [00:05:34] Which is the factory team of a Preston factory in Northern England. And their all conquering. And the highlight is on Boxing Day 1920, they play a match at Goodison Park, which in the home ground which sells out 53,000 tickets. And this is really the kind of moment when women's football comes of age more than a century before we sort of see it coming of age again, that women's era. And so, you know, women's soccer in 19 2021 proved itself draw big crowds were paying customers. People enjoyed the quality. And so the men's or football authorities see it as a rival and the Football Association bans it. It forbids all clubs in England that belong to the FA, which is essentially every officially existing club for letting females use their fields. [00:06:25][51.6]

Sascha: [00:06:26] So what did that ruling, what did that ban? What effect did it have on the future of women's football? When did it kind of be reinstated as a game that women were welcomed back into? [00:06:37][10.9]

Simon Kuper: [00:06:37] Well, I mean, until about 1970, there's hardly any organised women's football. I mean, if they get a team together, they have to play on a muddy park pitch because they can't rent a proper football field and women's clubs organised. And so it's really not quite that big, very nearly. And then, you know, in the new wave of feminism that starts in the sixties, you have this questioning of why aren't women allowed to play football? And so around 1970, the English Football Association and around the same time, various European associations lift this bar. So from then on, from 1978, women are allowed to play football, but they're not encouraged to. In fact, they're told that if they play, it's unfeminine. Football is a man's game. Very few clubs set up women's teams. So even if you are a girl in 1970 who wants to play, where are you going to play? Even if you want to join a boys team, you might be stopped from doing so. So it goes from being prohibited to having second class status. And that second class status, I would say, lasts into the 20 tens when there's still almost no girls teams, no opportunities for girls or women to play. So. [00:07:43][66.3]

Sascha: [00:07:43] Simon, that's the story of what happened after the break. Let's talk about why some are making the case for reparations. Isn't it? Character and heart and motivation as well. Well, welcome back to the Dive where talking about the case for reparations in women's football. Now, Alec, we heard from Simon about the flourishing women's football game and how that all changed with the stroke of a pen in 1921. It took 50 years for this ban to be overturned. [00:08:17][33.5]

Alec: [00:08:18] It wasn't until January 1970 that this ban was overturned. In 2008, the English Football Association issued an apology for the 1921 rule. But at that point, the damage was done. [00:08:30][11.9]

Sascha: [00:08:30] They recognised the irreparable harm it did to the women's game, which raises the idea of reparations. So before we hear from Simon about this idea and the case for reparations and what it could look like, can you actually define that word for me and what it means? [00:08:47][16.3]

Alec: [00:08:47] Yes. So reparations are basically the help or a payment that someone gives you for the damage, the loss, the suffering that they have caused you. The general idea being this help or payment is intended to restore you to the position you would have been in had they not caused that damage. Now, Sascha, I don't know the etymology of this word, but I imagine it comes from repair. You know, repair reparations. You get. [00:09:12][24.7]

Sascha: [00:09:12] It. I think you're on the right track with that with that guess on the etymology there. And this is really important to this story. Restoring you to the position that you would have been in had they not caused you injury. All right. Let's go to Simon. I want to move now to the Case for Reparations, which in your book, Soccer Nomics, you argue there should be reparations for the women's game. What do you think should be done to repair the damage? [00:09:40][27.4]

Simon Kuper: [00:09:40] I wrote economics with the sports economist Stefan SHYMANSKY. We just updated it as the World Cups and the new edition coming out ahead of the World Cup. We have this argument for reparations to be paid by men's football, to women's football for the banning and the damage done to women's football that prevented it growing to what should have been. And so the audience is most definitely in mind, but I'll lay it out, which is it's completely anti-competitive. It breaks all competition law to ban your competitors. If you're the regulator, like a football association, you say, well, some teams can play football men's team and some women's team. It would be like saying, well, some people can set up a fast food restaurant, but other people can't because they have the wrong gender or the wrong colour. And so in any court nowadays, the judge said said what's actually anti-competitive, you can't do that. And moreover, if you've done that, we're going to find you and you have to pay damages to the competitors who you close down. And so in a court case now, women's football would be granted large damages. Now we're an estimate of how much that would be. It would run into the billions a year. A benchmark is women's tennis. [00:10:47][66.8]

Audio clip: [00:10:47] We live off of the shock. You wouldn't find that in the coaching manual. [00:10:53][5.4]

Simon Kuper: [00:10:54] Which was never banned, is now all known by women. Women's tennis sport had been allowed to flourish mostly. You know, some equal pay issues, some discrimination. But it's done pretty well. And so we say, well, a 1921 women's football was popular, growing for a century. They would be popular around the world like women's tennis is now. Football is bigger sport. And using what judges typically award, we'd say, look, we're talking about billions of dollars a year that men's football owes women's football. And this is for damage that started a century ago and is still ongoing. And so I don't think this is ever going to come to court. And it might. But I certainly think it's a way to think about what should happen, which is that, you know, men's football in Europe generates about €30 billion a year. A large chunk of that should be paid into women's football to help set up women's teams to have enough fields for them to play on good facilities, better coaching at the top level of the game fund, more full time professional women's players and bigger coaching staff so that their game improves and so on. So I would like to see men's football, the leagues, the clubs, the international associations take this step voluntary that haven't yet at all. I mean, FIFA, the Global Football Authority, and recently was spending more per year on its museum in Zurich than it was on developing women's football. The outside may be grey and drab, but inside the colourful world of football comes to the fore. [00:12:22][88.9]

Sascha: [00:12:23] Yeah, I think the number you said is they've got 14 million earmarked for women's football in 2020, which is just 2% of the total allocated to development and education. [00:12:33][9.9]

Simon Kuper: [00:12:34] Yeah, I mean, women's football is still very, very much treated as an afterthought. Now every tournament pushes it forward. So in Europe, we've just had the euros. In Africa, they just had the Women's African Nations Cup in Morocco, which drew the two largest crowds in African women's football history, mainly chimpanzee museums on the 18th. And next year, we've got the Women's World Cup in New Zealand. So, you know, because there was a lag during COVID, there were no tournament. Now we're having a succession of big women's tournament that I think are going to move the game forward very, very quickly and increase these kinds of calls for redress. [00:13:09][35.1]

Sascha: [00:13:10] Hmm. Do you think that these reparations unnecessary? You did say that you laid out this argument, not thinking that it will go to court, but to have a way of thinking about the effect that these bans from a century ago had on the prosperity of the sport. [00:13:24][14.1]

Simon Kuper: [00:13:24] I think that whether the money is paid as reparations or just as voluntary help, a kind of admission of failure by the men's game. The money needs to come. And top class professional men's football has enough funding and they don't always spend it. Right. So the net result might be a fall in men's salaries. But, you know, the men's game can flourish at much lower levels of salary, and it did in the past. So I don't see a problem there. The women's game needs to flourish. Now, sometimes we get these kind of male trolls and say, Oh, women's football isn't good. Well, the technical quality will be lower than of the top men, because far fewer women have the chance to play and to be coached well and to develop their game. So if the technical quality is lower, that is mostly to do with lack of opportunities. You know, you can say, okay, women don't on average run as fast or kick as hard as men with sport is about much more than that. We understand that male and female bodies are different. People still really enjoy watching women's tennis. Women's tennis is very popular, even though the very best women's players don't hit the ball as hard. They're wonderful players that are technically complete, just like the minute. [00:14:29][64.9]

Sascha: [00:14:31] Yes. That's why she's number one in the world, isn't it? So where do you think women's football can end up if this money comes? What what does the future look like? [00:14:41][10.2]

Simon Kuper: [00:14:42] Well, again, if you use tennis as a benchmark, approximately 40% of the Chinese economy, the money spent is for female tennis and 60% for motels. Now, female tennis wasn't given quite as many opportunities as men's tennis. But let's say that soccer could end up there. So you'd have 40%. Now, even if you were eating from the same market as men's football, so, you know, the pie doesn't grow, I'm sure the pie would grow. But if we presume the pie doesn't grow with women, get 40% of it. Then right now you're talking about in Europe, 14 billion a year in euros. So that, you know, would completely transform the women's game. You'd have thousands and thousands of full time professional. These have academies coaching the best girls for the top. [00:15:20][38.6]

Sascha: [00:15:21] Footballers coming home. [00:15:22][1.1]

Simon Kuper: [00:15:23] And I think more importantly, you have facilities and space for millions of girls around the world to play football. I mean, the thing about football, this is hugely enjoyable. [00:15:32][9.0]

Sascha: [00:15:32] But we still see that tackle by. And when. [00:15:36][3.3]

Simon Kuper: [00:15:36] Nikita Scott. It's a joy that almost all women of my generation were excluded from. They were never allowed to experience that. And I think it's beautiful that six year old girls today are going to experience that joy and you'll have that with youth life. And then, you know, having played football, you can watch the best players, male and female, and appreciate them and get that as well. [00:15:56][19.7]

Sascha: [00:15:56] I think that's such a wonderfully positive note to end on. SIMON So we might leave it there for today, but thank you so much. 

Simon Kuper: [00:16:02] Thank you very much. 

Sascha: [00:16:03] That was a fascinating conversation with Simon Kuper. Simon, together with his co-author, Stefan Szymanski, wrote Soccer Nomics Why European Men and American Women Win and Billionaire Owners Are Destined to Lose. The new edition with the chapter on their Case for Reparations will be available in October of this year. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend about it. It really is the best way for a podcast to go and if you're listening because you've been referred. Welcome. We have a growing back catalogue that is well worth checking out. Remember, you can follow us on Instagram at the Dive Dot Business News. You can contact us by email, the dive at Equity Mates wsj.com. And you can subscribe wherever you are listening right now. So you never miss an episode. Alex, thank you so much for bringing this story to my attention today. It was absolutely fascinating. 

Alec: [00:16:52] Thanks, Sascha. I don't think you should be thanking me, though. Simon did most of the heavy lifting here. I will say the credit.