Yes

by Brendan O'Keeffe

Created on: February 10, 2010   Last Updated: February 11, 2010

Passion, competitiveness and huge emotional investment form the cornerstones of quality sport. From the highs to the sickening lows, sport has that uncanny ability to emotionally exhilarate, or decimate. The key factor in determining emotional investment for most fans is quality - high quality sport results in high levels of popularity. And in soccer its no different - both men's and women's soccer has the potential to draw large audiences in equal numbers, when played at high quality. Certain people find this difficult to believe, so if you subscribe to the delusion that men are better than women at most things (including soccer), and that the fairer sex should stick to washing dishes and minding babies, then perhaps you should stop reading now. Or better again, perhaps you should keep reading. You never know, you might actually learn something.

In terms of popularity, over forty percent of people who play soccer in the USA are women - a staggering statistic which bodes well for the popularity of the women's game in the country that represents the fastest growing football fan-base in the world. In another generation there may be as many women soccer fans in the USA than men, potentially leading to the men's and women's games being supported in equal measure.

Apart from this however, it may be worth drawing parallels between the soccer and tennis to determine where the popularity of the women's game may lay, as tennis has suffered from comparisons between the sexes in the past. In the 1960s and 1970s the merits of men's and women's tennis were debated at length, with some protagonists dismissing women's tennis as being nothing more than a curiosity. Most notably, in 1973 former world champion Bobby Riggs goaded female tennis players, and challenged Billie Jean King to a 'Battle of the Sexes' match - a match which saw the women's champion defeat Riggs in three straight sets. This landmark match was a defining moment in tennis, and paved the way for a deserved respect for the women's game. Thankfully, these days men's sports are not the yardstick by which women's sports are measured - nor should they be. The need for men to play women to determine who is 'better' is pointless, as the games differ in a number of key areas - physicality being a major one.

The women's game is regarded as less physical than the men's game. This is often construed as a weakness, however tennis again provides some interesting parallels on this point. In the 1990s, technological advances in tennis resulted in better rackets, faster tennis balls and stronger, athletic male tennis players. On a fast surface like grass, these developments were counterproductive - so much so in fact that the men's Wimbledon Final often had few rallies when the big servers met in the final, and invariably ended in a Pete Sampras win. Contrast that with the women's finals of the 90s which had great rallies, and multiple winners including Graf, Martinez, Novotna and Hingis and its easy to understand why the popularity of 90s women's tennis was at least on a par with that of men's. A similar scenario could easily arise in soccer.

Some people dismiss women's soccer because the surmise that it is probably played at a slower pace than the men's game. Men may on average be faster than women, but soccer is not a race - its a game of skill, precision and experience. In soccer, skill trumps speed, and there is no reason to believe women are less skillful than men. To say the men's game is better by virtue of the fact that men are faster than women is simply untrue. Quality is key in soccer - and the most fundamental element in quality is skill. And if there is one player in today's game that knows about skill, its Wayne Rooney.

Every year Rooney judges a competition in the UK called Wayne Rooney's Street Challenge, in which Rooney and his team devise a fiendishly difficult set of soccer challenges for contestants to compete in. The challenges range from controlling a ball dropped from the top of a block of apartments, to controlling a ball while dodging car tyres (google 'Rooney Tyre Challenge' if you have not seen it before - it is truly amazing to watch). Thousands of hopefuls compete in challenges of skill, and accuracy in order to win the coveted title of Street Striker. In 2009, Arsenal striker Ashleigh Goddard fought off stiff competition from both sexes to be awarded the Street Striker title by Rooney. The seventeen year old was highly praised by Rooney, and stated that her victory was wholly deserved.

Finally, if you're in any doubt about the quality and skill level in the women's game, take a look at this goal scored by Marta Vieira da Silva for Brazil against the USA, in the last World Cup. There simply is no doubt that skill like this deserves to grace the biggest stage in the football world, and as long as women continue to play at this level, the future fan-base of women's soccer is assured.

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