Representations of women's football in the news

The disparity of coverage within print media between men’s and women’s football is significant (WSFF cited in Topping, 2012). Women’s football in the last ten years has experienced growth in terms of the number of women taking part in the game, however the growth in coverage within women’s football seems to be slow to react.

This thesis analysed the men’s World Cup of 2014 and the women’s World Cup of 2015 to investigate the extent of the disparity between men’s and women’s football. It acknowledges whether women are being fairly represented within The Mirror, The Daily Mail, and The Guardian in comparison to men. To answer this question, a combination of both content and discourse analysis was applied to 911 articles.

The results show that even during times of heightened popularity women’s football still experiences significantly less coverage than their male counterparts. This shows that the disparity found in other studies historically is still being experienced today. Moreover, there are significantly less female journalists than male journalists involved in the construction of news stories creating significant problems for the ecology of journalism.

Further investigation is needed to analyse whether this exists across a greater number of institutions in the UK. Moreover, it would also be beneficial to explore whether this is indeed the case in other countries, acknowledging whether there are still high levels of patriarchal dominance within the economy of football journalism.