Natasha Chahal
Emma Hayes has described the difference between men’s and women’s football as cortisol v. dopamine. Under her management between 2012 and 2024, Chelsea won the Women’s Super League seven times, the FA Cup five times and the League Cup twice. In 2024 Hayes was recruited by the US national team and they won gold at the Olympics. I was delighted when I heard that she’d be part of the ITV line-up for their coverage of the men’s World Cup this year. But – as a lot of people have been asking on social media – why did the set designers feel the need to put her in a kitchen?
On Father’s Day, after delivering her usual sharp analysis, Hayes ended with a tribute to her father, who died in 2023. ‘Thank you for giving me so much confidence to have the opportunity to do this,’ she said, ‘and so I leave you with this … beautiful view.’ She turned her back to the camera and gestured out the window. Emblazoned across the back of her jacket were the words: ‘She will change the world.’
Researchers have found that ‘listeners judge women football commentators more negatively than men, even when delivering identical match commentary.’ There’s a double bind: ‘Women are penalised both for sounding too feminine and for not conforming to expectations of how women “should” sound.’
Hayes’s colleague Roy Keane has been complaining about players’ wives and girlfriends appearing at the World Cup in shirts with their partners’ names on. In some cases, it’s the wife’s own name by marriage. ‘The wives, a year later, they’re separated, most of them,’ Keane said.
Wives, who’d have ’em? Roy Keane, for one – he recently claimed to have lost weight when his wife was away because he had no one to cook for him. He’s been complaining about WAGs for years. In 2007 he said: ‘If a player doesn’t want to come to Sunderland then all well and good, but if he decides he doesn’t want to come because his wife wants to go shopping in London, then it’s a sad state of affairs.’ The year before, when Portugal knocked England out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals (in the traditional penalty shootout following a goalless draw), some people tried to pin the defeat not on the men on the pitch but on their wives and girlfriends at the hotel in Baden-Baden.
Women in football are often blamed for men’s mistakes and too rarely celebrated for their own achievements. In Mexico in 1971, six teams competed in an unofficial (in the sense of not having been organised or sanctioned by Fifa) Women’s World Cup. Denmark won, beating the hosts 3-0 in the final. The runners-up finally got a parade in Mexico City on 13 June this year.
We’re too emotional for football, according to Kenny Shiels, the former Northern Ireland women’s manager. ‘When a team concedes a goal,’ he said in 2022, ‘they concede a second one in a very, very short space of time. It happens right through the whole spectrum of the women’s game because girls and women are more emotional than men. So they take a goal going in not very well.’ He later apologised for the comments. Ian Wright responded with a picture of himself crying on the pitch.
And let’s not forget that ahead of the 2002 World Cup in Japan, Roy Keane’s emotions got him dismissed from the Irish national team. His feelings were so big that the Saipan incident has since been made into a film.
On Monday, England’s Djed Spence was the only player not to shake the hand of Ghana’s Thomas Partey, the former Arsenal player who will go on trial next year on seven charges of rape and one of sexual assault involving four women. When Harry Kane took a knock to the head, the camera cut to a smiling Gianni Infantino and, sitting just behind him, John Terry, who stopped playing for England in 2012, shortly before the FA found him guilty of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand. The game ended in a 0-0 draw. The English press, fishing around for someone to blame, settled on a Ghanaian ‘witch doctor’ who claimed to have placed a hex on Kane.
On Tuesday, Norway’s manager, Ståle Solbakken, celebrated their 3-2 win against Senegal by running into the stands for a kiss with his wife. They aren’t all bad.
And last night Ecuador triumphed against Germany 2-1. The winning goal was taken from a corner and doinked in by Gonzalo Plata in the 77th minute. Ecuador’s supporters exploded with joy. The win sees them through to the knock-out rounds as one of the better third-placed teams. Scotland’s chances of progressing are looking slim. The only person to have kept their emotions in check may have been the referee, Tori Penso.
Source: London Review of Books
