Equality? Women’s football needs to be run BETTER than men’s football to truly thrive

If women’s football apes its male equivalent then somebody has failed. This has to be different and that means the economics and culture must learn from mistakes…

A new day has dawned, has it not?

So this is what it’s like to win a tournament. Good, isn’t it? To say the very least it was and still is emotional. But wipe away the tears, Sunday wasn’t the end. It was the start. Whatever the future holds for women’s football, it will not be like the past.

The naysayers and cynics have been swept away by this wonderful team of inspirational, likeable players and their fantastic, understated, calm manager. We have embraced them, embraced the game and it feels like freedom from an oppressive past which crushed so many dreams for so long by saying ‘girls don’t play football’. Yes they f*cking do.

It was wonderfully, amusingly ironic that in recent weeks some have complained that the delights of the women’s game were being used as a stick to beat the men’s game with, when that is exactly what the same people used the men’s game to do to women’s football for literally decades. But the temptation to rub their noses in England’s glory can be resisted; that is a culture war we no longer have to indulge in.

Women’s football in England will never be the same again after this glorious Euro 2022 victory

Those crowds on Wembley Way said it all. 87,000 people said it all. The happy smiling faces of the children said it all. This is part of how we make a fairer, better world.

But this is where the hard work starts. Those with the power to shape the future – primarily the FA – have got to decide what the future looks like, now that it has begun to garner big crowds and TV audiences. Many issues are in play and it’s complex.

The worst thing would be to look at the men’s game for the direction of travel, certainly for economics. It is a financially unhealthy, inflated, foetid, greedy, selfish world, perpetuated by huge TV rights money from companies that radically limit the game’s audiences and cash injections from appalling people from appalling states and appalling organisations. A structure that has grotesquely hoarded money at the top, while others starved.

To walk that route is to walk the road to perdition. It must not happen. We cannot allow the Premier League’s hands, dipped as they are in the blood of innocents, stain the women’s game.

Several strands are in play. There’s the short term, medium and long term. What works…