Shropshire Star comment: Still some marketing left to do

The millions of viewers who are new to watching top flight women’s football, having been brought up on an exclusive diet of the male game, will have been struck by how similar they are.

Plucky little England fell when on the brink of glory, in echoes of the men’s World Cup experience last summer.

The temptation to say “it’s just like men’s football” – which is perhaps a somewhat dubious intended compliment anyway – misses the point.

It is not men’s football. The FIFA Women’s World Cup has marked a sea change in perception of the game. The huge viewing figures are proof.

It has naturally been a factor that the BBC has gone out of its way to ensure the tournament has been given proper coverage, but if the matches and the standards of play were rubbish, then the viewers would soon switch over.

Women’s football has in the past been ignored or considered a novelty. Now it has been normalised to join the ranks of sports women play without the constant refrain that they are entering “male territory”.

The same is true in the field of commentary. Female commentators and pundits have analysed and assessed the matches and it has been entirely natural. There has been no sense that they are striving to prove that they are “as good as men”., They have simply been doing their job, and doing a good job.

What we shall discover in the wake of this tournament is whether the raising of the profile of the women’s game that it has achieved feeds back to the grass roots and the league levels. At these levels the crowds are small when compared with the men’s game.

For girls and young women, the Women’s World Cup has given them role models and heroines, and a dream.

This event could be the inspiration for new generations.

While we patronisingly think the Americans don’t really get what they call “soccer”, in fact they are way ahead in the women’s game – a record 90,000 attended the Women’s World Cup final held in America 20 years ago and there were 40 million television viewers in the US alone.

No wonder they beat us this week.

So, while women’s football in Britain has well and truly arrived, we now have a lot of catching up to do.