The Lionesses, the wish and the flawed code

The Lion King musical defied industry norms by becoming a massive box office earner many years after its release in July 1997. It has since made over $2bn, making it the highest grossing Broadway production of all time, and also the third-longest running show ever.

It did this despite charging ticket prices that were lower than other, rival shows. But it didn’t always get it right. After the financial crisis of 2008, ticket sales has fallen significantly.

Instead of seeing this as an inevitable plateau, one that eventually happens to all shows, they fought back. Disney abandoned fixed pricing, came up with a new strategy and algorithm that worked, catapulting the show to number one. How they did it can get complicated but, suffice to say, it had a lot to do with knowing – or getting to know - their audience.

Which brings me to this week’s topic. I’ve steered clear of women’s football in these columns, aside from an article on ticketing policy last season, out of caution. I’ve never had a problem with having a pop the it’s justified - I do this in the men’s game all the time – but you can appear to be jumping on a bandwagon when criticising the women’s game.

But I’ve worked in and with women’s football for long enough now to know that I’m not doing that here. And there are a lot of people now also deciding to call it as they see it. And the people responsible for the women’s game in England right now are starting to be held accountable for what is going on.  

It would be easy to go there too, but not particularly helpful. I’ve seen articles criticising the FA, the WSL and even Karen Carney, but the who really doesn’t matter. It just needs to be fixed. Because right now, elite women’s football clubs are spending much more than they are making. There’s a lot being said of increased revenues, commercial deals, sponsors and the like but until the fans turn up in bigger numbers, and maybe pay more, it won’t matter.

In a recent podcast on the subject, I heard this swept under the carpet as simply being what happens in a fast-changing industry. A natural occurrence that, as the market matures, will miraculously correct itself. But this makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s just wishful thinking because - without fans - the rest isn’t sustainable.

For a while, it has seemed like women’s football is fast-going the way of the men’s version at the top of the pyramid. In the aforementioned podcast, it was even mooted that the Premier League might – one day – want to buy the WSL.

I can see the logic. The WSL have already trodden the same path the PL has, deciding to step away from the governing body and form their own league. The model looks similar in lots of other ways; a raft of overseas signings and a large broadcast deal. In some ways, replicating the PL makes sense.

Copy & Paste

But haven’t we seen how this story plays out? The clubs overspend on players. then find themselves in serious debt that keeps growing, becoming reliant on bigger broadcast deals and overseas rights to fund the growth. Eventually, while the bigger clubs can weather the storm, the smaller ones find it harder going; forced to decide between financial fair play and a huge game of risk and reward.

To follow the trajectory to this point, the men’s game has introduced spending caps and all kinds of financial regulations to try to somehow get the genie back in its bottle and even then, clubs are falling foul of them all the time. But the debt remains, and continues to grow. People, it turns out, don’t really like taking pay cuts.

But the women’s game should have been okay, given that the had the benefit of seeing what had happened. In case they missed it, everyone told them not to copy and paste. Walk a new path they said; one where all the mistakes the men have made in the last 150 years are either avoided or better solutions found.

Even those in charge said they would do things differently. But now, as almost all women’s clubs in the WSL are in debt, and relying on money from their parent, it’s beginning to look a helluva lot like a copy and paste job.

The argument that it will be alright on the night; that the investors and sponsors will not only plug the current financial gap but make the game profitable in future feels like pie in the sky because the maths simply don’t add up.

A lot has been made of Arsenal’s attendances, for instance, and rightly so. They make up over 40% of the WSL as a whole and this makes them the benchmark when it comes to growth. But the average attendances, without Arsenal (cue involuntary shudder), isn’t growing fast, if at all, and not even consecutive Euro wins by the Lionesses did the trick.

This is partly because the Euro’s successes has helped to create fans to attend events but not necessarily attend matches every other Sunday. But this failure to realise this was exacerbated by an internal focus on big games – and this hasn’t worked at all. It’s just created big game fans, who only go to them. But a ‘big’ game – by definition - takes care of itself. Clubs should have focussed on the other games, the bread and butter, instead. They are the games where fans need to be enticed to, and they need to enjoy them too, otherwise they’ll just stay at home, possibly watch on TV and wait for the next big game instead.

My arithmetic is fairly ropey but using my calculator, if a club has an average of attendance of 5,000 (higher than most actually do) and charges a tenner per ticket (higher than some actually do) then the income per home game is about fifty grand. With eleven home league games, the maximum ticketing revenue (assuming that all tickets are purchased at full price – they aren’t – and none are given away – they are) the club can make from league games per season is around half a million quid.

Yes, that’s only league games, but domestic cups tend to be sparsely attended in the early rounds, while the Champions League games help only the clubs who need the least help.

Budgets for WSL clubs, and some WSL2 clubs, far exceed their income. We’ve seen the first £1m transfer fees, while average wage bills for a club were around £3m a season or two back and are constantly increasing even though the number of people paying to attend games is not.

Unless someone fills it (and currently its sponsors, parent clubs and broadcasting who are taking the strain) this gap will only get wider unless clubs begin to significantly increase the  numbers of people who are paying to watch their matches.  

Good is the enemy of great

We’ll come back to fans, but the broadcasters aren’t paying that much for the women’s game either. While Premier League deals are the envy of the world, that also means they are fairly unique. For other leagues, the congestion and competition makes it hard to get sufficient airtime or to grow a global audience quickly.

The current TV deal (£65m over 5 years) roughly divvies up to an average of about half a million pounds per club per season, and some people think that this number will rocket when it’s next up for negotiation. But why? Are Sky - or the Beeb - going to pay higher for games played at stadiums that look half-empty? On what basis? That it’s the right thing to do? Not likely. They will want to see the numbers of people there go up too, even if live-football on TV might be one reason that fans don’t attend in the first place.

The simple fact is that more fans are needed. Not just of the game, or the clubs, but of the match-going variety. In 2024, it was calculated that fans of women’s football in England attend an average of 1.3 games per season. That’s simply not enough. It’s way, way too many casual observers who go to one game. But why aren’t they coming back?

The matchday experience is getting better, but it’s still not great – not at many clubs anyway – and that doesn’t help. An article I posted months ago outlined one issue: I saw dozens of emails and social posts from a club that told me I could buy a ticket for a club, but not one that told me why I should, let alone provide some evidence that might compel me to.

The constant changing of kick-off times probably doesn’t help either, and nor does an obsession with the Lionesses and creating more players for the national team. Fans, the ones they really want, will be more club than country anyway. They need to feel the love for the club, not individual players who – let’s face it – will move around with impunity anyway as salaries and signing on fees continue to rise.

We seem to be ready to also accept that fans support and follow players in a way that doesn’t really happen in men’s football. Except it’s not that simple. Younger fans, of men’s and women’s teams do follow players more than previous generations, but it’s not quite as literal as some believe.

A young fan who adores Beth Mead doesn’t stop supporting Arsenal and switch allegiance to Manchester City just like that. Not if they live in North London anyway. They aren’t going to convince their parent(s) to take them to the Joie Stadium every other week. And nor should we want them to. Football fans are nothing if not tribal. We might not have the same anti-social attitudes in women’s football (thankfully) but we do want fans to display some of the rivalry and partisan behaviours that are seemingly hard-wired into fans of the men’s game from birth.

Rather than think of it as a given, we need to understand why fans stick with their club through thick and thin, and not run off the moment the head of their favourite player is turned. Clubs have to build a fanbase, not players. If they don’t, they might not make it.

But it’s an example of some current flawed thinking that hinders growth rather than help.

There is plenty more of it, and some solutions, in Part 2.

Next: Part 2 – Getting new fans to games, and to come back.