For years comparisons have been drawn between the men’s and women’s game and over the fast few seasons the gap in quality has got closer and closer. Increased focus from football clubs into their ladies academies and centres of excellence have lead to a much clearer and more professional pathway into the women’s game, helping the young players to today become the stars of tomorrow. The media boom surrounding the female side of football has also led to the introductions of role models for young women, for years boys have dedicated their entire adolescence to becoming the next Cristiano Ronaldo and now with the new exposure to women’s football girls can finally aspire to be the next Ellen White or Alex Morgan.
But how big is the difference in quality now, could the girls mix it with the boys? Over the past few years we have seen a slight introduction of mixed gender games with Katie Chapman and Rachel Yankey playing as the first women ever in soccer aid which was a huge step for the women’s game with 41,000 people at Stamford Bridge and millions more on TV seeing female players hold their own, if not excel around some of the best ex-pro mens players of all time.
To see how similar the women’s game has become I travelled to Meadow Park in Borehamwood to watch Arsenal Ladies, globally recognised to be one of the pioneers of women’s football and the current champions of the WSL. Check out my live feed below to see how the Gunners got on against Bristol City in a Women’s Super League clash.
Eleven goals scored, ELEVEN, in a league fixture. It’s safe to say that the quality on show was immense with Arsenal’s Vivianne Miedema playing only 70 minutes, scoring six and assisting four which is unheard of in football. At the time of writing Miedema has twenty six goals and ten assists in only sixteen starts this season. If we want to compare the quality of both genders of football we have to put that into perspective, a female footballer is generating statistics like that and the team as a whole is getting results like that in the top division in one of the most competitive countries against top opposition. To really compare the two in the current poll of the Arsenal player of the month, across both genders and all age groups there are two women in the top ten and both look by the voting to have a very strong chance of winning the award. This is phenomenal when you look the the opposition they have to win the award, they could potentially beat Balon D’or nominated Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, world class shot stopper Bernd Leno and teenage sensation Gabriel Martinelli to the award. For the women to not only mix it with such names but to beat them shows how much the gap has closed between the two genders and how underestimated the quality of women’s football is by society.
The Rise Of Women's Football 