A new era? How the European ESPN covered the 2019 Women’s World Cup online

Abstract

This study is a content analysis of Eurosport’s football coverage on its French, English, German and Spanish websites during the 2019 Women’s World Cup. It examines the place given to women’s football by leading sports news websites in Europe and explores cultural differences across those four countries while limiting corporate differences (as all four websites belong to the same company). Analysis found the women’s game represented up to 20% of coverage on two websites, much more than the usual 5% or less usually dedicated to women’s sports, but the tournament still took a back seat to offseason men’s club football. The production value also showed some sex differences with Eurosport’s staff resources seemingly more directed toward coverage of the men’s game – despite the Women’s World Cup being the only Europe-based senior tournament played by European nations during the study. Differences in coverage among the four countries studied suggest Spain is embracing women’s football more than its neighbours, and the vast colonial histories of France, Spain and the UK, and the international relations they shaped, are profoundly affecting the sex gap in football coverage.

Keywords

content analysis football framing media online coverage sports media Women’s World Cup

Introduction

Women’s sports receive little media coverage compared to their male counterparts. Both longitudinal (Cooky et al., 2015) and short-term (e.g. Coche, 2015; Dziubinski et al., 2013; Godoy-Pressland and Griggs, 2014; Kaiser, 2018; O’Neill and Mulready, 2015) research shows that female athletes receive very little sports media coverage (often less than 5%) in western media, including European media. But the 2019 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (WWC) was particularly prominent in the media compared to past tournaments. A massive 1.12 billion viewers watched the 2019 WWC across all platforms (FIFA, 2019), and the event got more coverage than ever before in Western Europe, according to English forward Ellen White (Clare, 2019).

This study explores how Eurosport, a major European sports broadcaster akin to the American giant network ESPN, covered the WWC. Eurosport, owned by Discovery, is headquartered in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the suburbs of Paris, the capital of the 2019 WWC’s host country. It was chosen as the medium to study because, for years, it was the only sports media outlet present throughout the continent (Qatar’s beIN has since expanded to cover most of Europe) and because it is, at this time, still the main European sports broadcaster, having recently acquired the rights to broadcast the Olympic games from 2018 to 2022 in two major European markets: France and the UK. Besides its international broadcast operations, Eurosport manages sports news websites in most European countries, which is where the data for the present study was collected. This study focuses on how Eurosport covered football during the WWC on four of its websites: eurosport.co.uk (England), eurosport.fr (France), eurosport.de (Germany) and eurosport.es (Spain). The data will give us insight into the ‘new age’ the global coverage of women’s football is entering (Talmazan and Bailey, 2019).

A brief European history of women’s football

Women’s football goes back more than a century and its popularity grew tremendously in Western Europe in World War I (Pettus, 1998; Petty and Pope, 2019), but the English governing body, the Football Association (FA), banned women in 1921, thus causing an inevitable weakening of women’s football (the ban was lifted 50 years later in 1971). Because of England’s vast influence on world football in the early 20th century (as the modern sport’s founding nation), the FA ban affected not only England but also other nearby European nations (Delattre, 2019). In France, the sport also grew among women during World War I and about 200 women still played football in the early 1920s, but the newly formed Fédération Française de Football (FFF) forbade women from joining, and society – from doctors to journalists – discouraged the participation of women in football with success as the number of female players decreased in the 1920s and 1930s (Prudhomme-Poncet, 2003). The Vichy government officially prohibited women from playing football in 1941, an official ban that lasted for almost three decades (Prudhomme-Poncet, 2003). Across the border in Germany, some reports openly condemned women playing football in England and France during World War I and the 1920s (Pfister et al., 2001). In 1955, the national federation unanimously banned women from playing the game and the ban lasted until late 1970 (FIFA, 2020). The Spanish federation recognized the women’s game even later, in November 1980, likely as a consequence of the Franco dictatorship, which heavily promoted women’s roles as wife and mother in a way that was incompatible with sport (Pfister et al., 2002), and perhaps even more so with the ‘virile’ game of football (Martínez Calatrava, 2011).

As a result of these bans, most Western European nations did not become prolific in women’s football until recently. Three of the four nations included in this study could be considered pioneers because they participated in the non-FIFA-sanctioned World Cups in 1970 in Italy (West Germany) or 1971 in Mexico (France), or both (England). Yet these three teams recorded only 2 wins in 10 games during these tournaments, and both victories happened when they played each other: England eliminated West Germany in their first game of a play-off format tournament in 1970, and France defeated England in a game that determined who finished last in the competition in 1971. More importantly, the tournaments celebrated women’s football with large crowds – as many as 50,000 attended the 1970 final in Torino (Brus and Trangbaek, 2003) and the same game in 1971 brought more than 100,000 spectators to the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City (Wilson, 2018), but the teams’ return home was less festive. Worse yet, the English FA originally banned those who had participated in the 1971 World Cup when they got back to England (Wilson, 2018)

Though unofficial continental and international tournaments continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s with more or less success on the field and in terms of spectatorship (FIFA, 2020), the first FIFA-sanctioned WWC happened only in 1991, 20 years after the event in Mexico. Of the four nations studied, only the German team travelled to China for the tournament. Germany is also the only one of the four countries to have played every WWC since. England became a regular WWC participant only from 2007, France qualified for its first WWC in 2003 but became a regular only in 2011, and Spain has participated in only the two latest editions in 2015 and 2019.

The slow rise of women’s football in that region of the world, which has massively contributed to the organizational history of the game, has coincided with an undeniable increase in popularity documented by Ravel and Gareau’s (2016) qualitative analysis of the coverage of the French national team during the 2011 WWC and the London Olympic Games. The findings indicated ‘a shift in the media coverage from very gendered to more football-centred’ from one tournament to the other, but the authors attributed this change to the team’s ‘exceptional and unexpected results’ at the London 2012 Olympics (Ravel and Gareau, 2016: 845). The trend was also found in neighbouring countries. Pfister (2015: 652) concluded the German press treated the 2011 WWC games as ‘important events’, and Petty and Pope (2019: 499), who analysed British media coverage, argued that the 2015 WWC ‘served as a tipping point in the media coverage of women’s sport’. Four years later, the 2019 WWC was expected to break all popularity and media attention records (Delattre, 2019), and it did (FIFA, 2019).

Women, sports and the media

Scholars unanimously agree that women are vastly under-represented in sports media, when it comes to personnel hired behind the scenes – to produce sport media content (Antunovic, 2018; Baker, 2008; Mudrick et al., 2017), and in the content itself (Calvo Ortega, 2014; Coche, 2015; Cooky et al., 2015; Dziubinski et al., 2013; Godoy-Pressland and Griggs, 2014; Kaiser, 2018; O’Neill and Mulready, 2015).

Women’s sports and women’s football in the media

The 1999 WWC created a noticeable increase in media coverage for women’s football, and thus women’s sports, in the United States (Christopherson et al., 2002; Cooky et al., 2015), so the previously unexpected success of the 1999 tournament has since regularly served as a case study to explore the role of women in sports and, by extension, in American society (Christopherson et al., 2002). As women’s football has grown around the world, and specifically in Western Europe, over the past two decades, media coverage of the international game (as opposed to domestic leagues) has increased (Peeters and Elling, 2015; Petty and Pope, 2019; Ravel and Gareau, 2016). However, findings of the research surrounding WWC editions since 1999 are often comparable: the women’s game is generally positioned as inferior to the men’s game, and female athletes’ portrayals tend to focus more on their femininity, their heterosexuality and sometimes even their sex appeal than on their athletic prowess (Black and Fielding-Lloyd, 2017; Christopherson et al., 2002; Crouse, 2013; Meân, 2010; Pfister, 2015; Ponterotto, 2014; Ravel and Gareau, 2016; Shugart, 2003). These conclusions have been drawn in other settings and other countries across all media, including the more recent Internet platforms, from general or sports news websites (e.g. Coche, 2015; Jones, 2013; Kian et al., 2009) to university websites (e.g. Cooper and Cooper, 2009; Cunningham, 2003), to social media, regardless of the presence of journalists as gatekeepers (e.g. Coche, 2016, 2017; Pegoraro et al., 2018).

These persistent findings, Anderson (2008: 257) wrote, show that sports, particularly team sports, encourage ‘socionegative (sexist, misogynistic, and antifeminine) attitudes toward women’, which reflects hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987). And sports media have helped uphold this hegemonic masculinity through a clear difference in production value, and the framing of stories and content.

Why the lack of quality mainstream coverage of women’s football matters

The production value of women’s sports has been criticized by many scholars – and not only in broadcasting where the term ‘production’ is the most used. In 2008, former college basketball player Christine Baker wrote that ‘young sports writers’ who ‘had no real interest in covering the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) as a career’ occupied WNBA press boxes. She explained: ‘They wrote articles about the WNBA because their editors wanted them to practice their skills in order to make the “jump” to men’s professional sports’ (Baker, 2008: 151). This is a testimony to the idea that media put more time and effort into building excitement for men’s sports than they do for women’s sports, a common finding in scholarly studies, regardless of media platform (Black and Fielding-Lloyd, 2017; Coche, 2016; Cooky et al., 2015; Dziubinski et al., 2013; Kian et al., 2009; Meân, 2010; O’Neill and Mulready, 2015) despite recent improvements (Cooky et al., 2015; Petty and Pope, 2019; Pfister, 2015).

Because, as framing theory posits, media play a major part in what the public thinks about as well as how they think about it (e.g. Gans, 1979), the lack of quality mainstream women’s sports coverage year-round influences the general public to think women’s sports do not matter. This has implications for the participation of girls and women in sports (including football): the more exposed a sport is, the more likely participation in the sport is to increase, and vice versa (Sherry et al., 2016). The same effect can happen to the audience through differences in production quality: a lower production quality encourages the audience to think of a product as lesser than one with higher production quality (Duncan, 2006). Through absence of coverage, lower production quality and, often, the selected storylines journalists focus on, media generally frame women as ‘something of an anomaly in sports’ (Tuggle, 1997: 22). As such, mass media play a key role in reinforcing a patriarchal ideology in sports (Calvo Ortega, 2014; Coche, 2016; Cooky et al., 2015; Kian et al., 2009).

However, recent studies point toward media turning away from this hegemonic masculinity in their coverage of women’s football – at least in some countries during major events. From their analysis in 2011 and 2012, Ravel and Gareau (2016) concluded that football coverage in France focused mostly on athletics. Similarly, Bell and Coche (2018, 2020) said the framing of the 2015 and 2019 WWC on American newspapers’ front pages ‘presented positive signs for representation’ (Bell and Coche, 2020: 11). In the UK, Petty and Pope (2019) found that newspapers gave a significant amount of coverage to women’s football during the 2015 WWC, and that this coverage was largely positive. Consequently, they called for further research for international coverage of the 2019 WWC ‘to see if media coverage continues on a positive upward trajectory’ (Petty and Pope, 2019: 499). The current study responds to this call by analysing the 2019 tournament’s coverage on four European websites, all belonging to the same company as a way to limit corporation differences.

France 2019 context

Hosted in nine French cities, the 2019 WWC featured nine European teams, more than ever before. Football World Cups and continental championships happen during the European off-season, so European media had few other relevant football tournaments to cover when the 2019 WWC took place. There were six international competitions played then, and only three were played in Europe with European nations engaged in the competition (Table 1). Of those, the WWC was the only ‘senior’ competition. The other two were junior men’s competitions though they are not gender-marked in their official name the way the WWC is. The U-20 World Cup (in Poland) and the U-21 European Championships (in Italy) overlapped with the 43-day study for 15 days each. Also noteworthy is that the previous three U-20 World Cups had been attended by barely more than half-a-million people, and fewer than 1.2 million attended the past three U-21 European Championships, for a total of about 2.8 million over six competitions. In contrast, the three WWCs prior to 2019 attracted more than 3.3 million people, which shows how much more successful the WWC is than these two other competitions. The other three international competitions played while the study was conducted were the Copa América among South American nations, the Gold Cup for Central and North American countries, and the African Cup of Nations. Again, these three competitions were men’s competitions but their official names do not mark them as such the way the WWC is.

Table 1.

Major football competitions played during the period studied.

Event	Host(s)	Competition Dates	Number of games during study	Relevance to European media
Research study	-	1 June – 13 July	–	–
Women’s World Cup	France	7 June – 7 July	52	European host and participants + Senior competition
FIFA U-20 World Cup	Poland	23 May – 15 June	16	European host and participants but Junior competition
UEFA European U-21 Championship	Italy San Marino	16 June – 30 June	21	European hosts and participants but Junior competition
Copa América	Brazil	14 June – 7 July	26	Senior competition but outside Europe
CONCACAF Gold Cup	United States, Costa Rica, Jamaica	15 June – 7 July	31	Senior competition but outside Europe
African Cup of Nations	Egypt	21 June – 19 July	47	Senior competition but outside Europe

FIFA: Fédération Internationale de Football Association; UEFA: Union of European Football Associations; CONCACAF: Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football.

Consequently, the unquestionable rise of women’s football in Europe, in participation, media coverage and, at least for some games, spectatorship (FIFA, 2019; Labeur, 2019; Longman, 2019), paired with the lower level of interest from simultaneous men’s competitions (from a European media’s perspective), make the 2019 WWC an interesting case to study with regard to football coverage in Western Europe.

Hypotheses and research questions

It has been suggested that women’s football is entering ‘a new age’ in Europe (Petty and Pope, 2019; Talmazan and Bailey, 2019), and the WWC is the only women’s tournament played during the study. The men’s competitions that overlap are theoretically less pertinent to European media, but there are 5 of them that represent about 73% of the 193 international games played during the period of the study. However, previous literature shows that only 5% or less of sports media coverage is about women’s sports (Coche, 2015; Cooky et al., 2015; Kaiser, 2018). The sex gap is large, so it seems unrealistic to believe it would close during the 2019 WWC. Accordingly, even though the women’s competition is theoretically more relevant to European media, the coverage of men’s football will be more than the expected standard calculated based on the proportion of men’s games played and thus the coverage of women’s football will be lower than the proportion of women’s games played. Consequently, the following hypothesis is proposed:

H1: Eurosport’s websites will dedicate more than 73% of football coverage to the men’s game and less than 27% to the women’s game.

Similarly, while production value has been found to be different between men’s sports stories and women’s sports stories in the past, improvement has been observed recently (Bell and Coche, 2018, 2020; Petty and Pope, 2019; Ravel and Gareau, 2016). Further, technological advances and the ease of subscribing to photo and/or news agencies, which provide access to millions of pictures or videos with a few clicks, have made it easier than ever to add multimedia elements to news articles. This brings the following research question:

RQ1: Will multimedia elements (photo, video or live commentary) be more likely to appear in stories of a single sex, and, if so, which one?

In line with the idea that media companies consider women’s sports as less important than men’s sports (Baker, 2008; Black and Fielding-Lloyd, 2017; Coche, 2016; Hardin, 2005; Meân, 2010), the authorship of stories will be analysed to explore Eurosport’s distribution of staff resources. Hence, the following question is asked:

RQ2: Will the authorship of stories differ between stories about men’s football and those about women’s football?

Following this quantitative analysis, cross-cultural differences among the nations studied will be explored and discussed before conclusions are drawn.

Method

This study examines the football stories published on four Eurosport websites from 1 June 2019, six days before the start of the WWC, to 13 July 2019, six days after the final of the tournament. Three of the four countries studied were included because of their expected good performances –France (the host nation), England (third at the latest WWC in 2015) and Germany (at the time, the only nation to have successfully defended a WWC title). Spain was added to the study because of the incredible growth women’s football has experienced there in the recent past. As argued by The New York Times’ Jeré Longman (2019), few countries have ‘embraced’ women’s football ‘quite as completely as Spain’:

News media attention has increased. Corporate sponsors have begun to show interest in women’s soccer, which helps them to be associated with a social cause and to receive hefty tax benefits. And there has been a broad societal insistence on gender equity by Spanish women, who have taken to the streets in recent years to demand change.

This has translated to recent victories in junior categories: the U-17 and U-19 Spanish national teams each won their respective European championship in 2018 and the U-20 team finished second in its World Cup the same year.

The four countries were chosen also because English, French, Spanish and German are the only four languages the author can read with more or less fluency. The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine the place given to women’s football by leading sports news websites in Europe – that is, how much of the football coverage is dedicated to the women’s game; and (b) to explore cultural differences across those four countries – because all four websites belong to the same company (Eurosport, owned by Discovery), there are no corporate differences.

Data collection

The unit of analysis was the individual story, which refers to whatever content was published by Eurosport on its football page (text stories, videos, photo essays or updated live commentary of an event). The researcher collected the titles, URLs and author(s) of all of the football-related stories published on Eurosport’s English, French, German and Spanish websites during the aforementioned period. To do so, the author accessed the football page¹ on each website daily at four pre-determined random times. Because the international football tournaments happening during data collection had specific pre-set schedules, non-random sampling was likely to make one or some of those tournaments more prominent than the others, so a random schedule was created. First, random.org was used to generate 172 times between 0:00 and 23:59. Then, Excel was used to rank these times randomly. Using Excel’s ranking, the first four times were used for the first day, the following four for the second day, etc. Each time the author accessed the football page, all the stories newly published since they last logged on were saved.

Coding procedure

As data (title, URL and story author) were collected, four variables were added manually: (a) sex (male, female or both/neither); (b) topic as determined by the classification given by Eurosport in the story’s URL (e.g. a league, including Premier League in the UK, La Liga in Spain, Serie A in Italy, etc.; an event, including the WWC, the Copa América, the Gold Cup and Junior competitions; transfers, etc.); (c) whether the story was sponsored by a company other than Eurosport – as indicated by the website (e.g. Hyundai has sponsored a few stories for the French website); and (d) whether the story featured a multimedia element, each coded in a binary yes/no – a photo, an exclusive video (i.e. a video seemingly produced and hosted by Eurosport and/or Eurosport.com) or live coverage. If the story featured a video, its duration was recorded in the data too.

On the first five days of data collection (about 12% of the data collection period), the researcher and a coder collected the data at the same random times to code the manual variables explained above and calculate intercoder reliability using Freelon’s (2013) ReCal tool. Because the variables are fairly objective, intercoder reliability was strong across the board. Three of the variables coded as data was collected (sex, sponsor and photo) had 100% agreement, and the other three (topic, video, live coverage) had Krippendorf’s alphas of .95 or above. Authorship of stories was coded after all data were collected. The researcher created three categories from observing the collected data: (a) Eurosport staff; (b) newswire service; and (c) sponsor. The coder and researcher used the same first five days to check intercoder reliability on this variable. Krippendorf’s alpha was .97 indicating excellent reliability.

Data analysis

Before analysis, URLs appearing twice or more in the data set were checked manually to ensure each story was included only once. After this, the only URLs that appeared more than once were those for live commentary: for example, Eurosport Germany used the same URL to provide live commentary on WWC games, but the content was updated before each new game covered. In this instance, while the URL was the same, the content – and sometimes the title for it – differed, so they were deemed to be different stories. After this culling process, 6703 stories were included for analysis, which consists mainly of descriptive statistics but also includes chi-square analyses to detect statistically significant differences between the sexes.

Results

Quantity of coverage

Almost 85% of the 6703 stories were about men’s football (n = 5657), which is significantly different from the expected standard of 73% based on the number of men’s games played during the study, χ² (1, N = 6703) = 257.35, p < .001 (Table 2). Slightly less than 15% of the stories (n = 962) were about women’s football, which again is statistically different from the expected standard of 26%, χ² (1, N = 6703) = 324.24, p < .001.

Table 2.

Number and proportion of football stories published by sex, for each country and in total.

	France	UK	Spain	Germany	Total
Male stories (number)	1025	1461	2184	987	5657
Male stories (%)	78.73% **	78.89% ***	89.47% ***	89.08% ***	84.40% ***
Female stories (number)	258	361	224	119	962
Female stories (%)	19.82% **	19.49% ***	9.18% ***	10.74% ***	14.35% ***
Both stories/Neither story (number)	19	30	33	2	84
Both/Neither stories (%)	1.46%	1.62%	1.35%	0.18%	1.25%
Total stories (number)	1302	1852	2441	1108	6703
Total stories (%)	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%

Note: chi-square analyses were used to determine whether the difference between the proportion of stories and the expected standard for each sex was significant. Based on the number of games played by men and women, the proportions of male stories were compared to the expected figure of 73.06%, and the proportions of female stories were compared to the expected figure of 26.94%.

p < .01; ***p < .001.

Spain and Germany particularly under-covered the women’s game: only 1 in 10 football stories was about women’s football. The two other websites published at almost twice that rate: in France and the UK, about 20% of stories were about women’s football and ‘only’ slightly more than three-quarters were about men’s football. Yet chi-square analyses reveal that each of the four countries published significantly more men’s stories than would be expected based on the number of international men’s games played (p < .001 for every website but the French website, whose difference was significant at the p < .01 level) and significantly fewer women’s stories based on the number of WWC games (p < .001 for each website). Hence, H1, which stated that Eurosport websites would dedicate more than 73% of football coverage to the men’s game and less than 27% to the women’s game, is supported, which points toward the continued symbolic annihilation of female athletes (Coche, 2015; Peeters and Elling, 2015).

Production value

Only 7% of men’s stories did not feature a multimedia element (photo, video or live coverage), while almost 20% of women’s stories did not (Table 3). A chi-square analysis reveals that this difference is significant, χ² (1, N = 6619) = 109.00, p < .001. Further analysis indicates that this difference is caused by the British website (χ² (1, N = 1822) = 46.28, p < .001), on which 30% of men’s stories did not include a multimedia element, but about half of women’s stories did not. These figures are particularly high considering all three other websites included a multimedia element on more than 98% of their stories, regardless of sex – they also were all as likely to illustrate their men’s stories with multimedia elements as they were their women’s stories. The uniqueness of the British website may be at least partly explained by the style of publications. While further analysis would be necessary to draw definite conclusions, visual inspection of the data seems to indicate that the British website published more text-only, one-paragraph stories for breaking news than the other websites did.

Table 3.

Proportion of stories without any multimedia element (photo, video and/or live coverage), with a hosted video (not embedded) or with live coverage by sex, for each country and in total.

	France (N = 1302)	UK (N = 1852)	Spain (N = 2441)	Germany (N = 1108)	All (N = 6703)
Stories without any multimedia element
Male	1.46%	30.60%***	0.23%	0.51%	8.34%***
Female	1.55%	49.58%***	0.89%	0%	19.23%***
Both/Neither	0	36.67%	0	0	13.10%
Stories with a hosted video
Male	16.49%	12.73%***	6.82%	13.98%**	11.35%***
Female	13.18%	3.88%***	7.59%	5.04%**	7.38%***
Both/Neither	21.05%	3.33%	6.06%	0	8.33%
Stories with live coverage
Male	4.39%	1.30%^*	1.56%	7.09%***	2.97%***
Female	5.43%	2.77%^*	0.45%	31.93%***	6.55%***
Both/Neither	0	0	0	0	0

Note: chi-square analyses were used to determine whether the difference between men and women was significant.

p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

Compared to photos, which can easily be added to stories using an image bank, hosted videos and live coverage require staff resources. Unsurprisingly, these two multimedia elements were not as frequently present as photos were, but about 14% of all stories featured a hosted video or live coverage. Looking at hosted videos, about 11% of men’s stories included a Eurosport-hosted video (Table 3), while only 7% of women’s stories did. This significant difference (χ² (1, N = 6619) = 14.39, p < .001) is caused by two websites – the UK and Germany. On the British website, videos appeared more than three times as much on men’s stories (13%) than they did on women’s stories (4%), proportionally, which is significantly different (χ² (1, N = 1822) = 23.58, p < .001). The German website also had a significant sex gap regarding the presence of hosted videos: only 5% of women’s stories featured one, while almost 14% of men’s stories did (χ² (1, N = 1106) = 7.50, p < .01).

Furthermore, videos featured on men’s stories (M = 139, SD = 421) were, on average, 4 seconds longer than those featured on women’s stories (M = 143, SD = 415) overall (Table 4). According to a 2-tailed independent t-test assuming unequal variances, this difference is not significant, t(81) = .33, p = ns. Though differences for each website were not tested because of small sample sizes, it is worth noting that on the British website, videos about women’s football were on average 65% longer (136 seconds) than those about men’s football (82 seconds). This indicates, for women’s football, that the British Eurosport website dedicated its video production resources on length of videos rather than quantity of videos. These significant differences in visual coverage further support the media’s upholding of hegemonic masculinity. This finding is in line with Ravel and Gareau (2016: 842), who found an overall shift toward more equality across sexes in football coverage, but also concluded that visuals ‘constituted the most blatant example of objectification and sexualization of women’. Athletes’ portrayals could not be analysed within this study. However, that visuals are more often absent for women’s football than for men’s football indicates that Eurosport, particularly its British website, perceives the women’s game as less worthy than the men’s. Framing theory suggests the media strongly influence what the audience learns, including through the exclusion of certain frames. As such, the absence of visuals for women’s football can have an effect on society, such as influencing girls’ or women’s decision to participate in sport or not (Sherry et al., 2016).

Table 4.

Average duration (in seconds) of hosted videos by sex, for each country and in total.

	France (n = 207)	UK (n = 201)	Spain (n = 168)	Germany (n = 144)	All (n = 720)
Male	202	82	125	155	139
Female	182	136	98	67	143
Both/Neither	79	289	31	–	95

As for live coverage, it represented 6.55% of all women’s football stories but only 2.97% of men’s football stories, a statistically significant difference (χ² (1, N = 6619) = 31.27, p < .001) that is largely due to the German website, on which about a third of all women’s football stories consisted of live coverage compared to less than 10% of the stories about men’s football, χ² (1, N = 1106) = 74.37, p < .001. Live football coverage on the UK-based website was also more likely to be of women’s football rather than men’s football, though the difference is only marginally significant, χ² (1, N = 1822) = 3.99, p < .05. Though more men’s competitions happened during the study, none of them included any men’s senior European teams, so Eurosport websites providing more live coverage of the WWC than men’s football is not surprising. Yet it indicates that the websites’ editorial teams perceived the WWC as an important event to cover, which confirms the heightened media attention women’s football receives during major competitions (Bell and Coche, 2018, 2020; Petty and Pope, 2019; Ravel and Gareau, 2016).

Authorship

Overall, news agencies wrote 55% of men’s stories and 57% of women’s stories while Eurosport staff wrote 44% of men’s stories and 41% of women’s stories, with the remaining 1% or so of stories for each sex being authored by third-party sponsors (Table 5). Because only 22 stories overall were written by sponsors (20 on the French website and 1 each in the UK and Germany), they were excluded from any statistical tests about authorship. Yet it should be noted that about half of the sponsored stories on the French website (n = 11) were about women’s football (6 were about men’s football and 3 were about both or neither). A chi-square analysis of all Eurosport- and newswire-authored stories indicated no sex differences regarding authorship overall, χ² (1, N = 6600) = 2.45, p = ns. However, sex differences were found on the French website, χ² (1, N = 1266) = 10.96, p < .001, and the British website, χ² (1, N = 1821) = 4.96, p < .05. In both cases, men’s football stories were more likely to be authored by Eurosport staff than women’s football stories were, and, conversely, stories about women’s football were more likely to be from news agencies than those about men’s football. This indicates that, proportionally, the French and British Eurosport websites dedicated more writing staff resources to men’s football than women’s football. This echoes Baker’s (2008) comments about women’s sports being secondary to men’s from the media decision-makers’ standpoint. The lack of resources for women’s sports coverage causes a lack of quality mainstream coverage year-round, which leads to a clear lack of accessibility for the public (Maître, 2019; Packer et al., 2015). Again, this can have major repercussions on audiences’ perceptions of the value of women’s football compared to that of men’s football (Sherry et al., 2016).

Table 5.

Authorship of stories by sex, for each country and in total.

		N	Eurosport author(named or not)	Sponsor	News agency
Total	Male	5657	44.48%	0.14%	55.38%
	Female	962	41.37%	1.14%	57.48%
	Both/Neither	84	47.62%	3.57%	48.81%
France	Male	1025	67.80%***	0.59%	31.61%***
	Female	258	54.65%***	4.26%	41.09%***
	Both/Neither	19	42.11%	15.79%	42.11%
UK	Male	1462	32.65%^*	0%	73.41%^*
	Female	360	26.69%^*	0.07%	67.28%^*
	Both/Neither	30	43.33%	–	56.67%
Spain	Male	2184	20.01%	–	79.99%
	Female	224	22.32%	–	77.68%
	Both/Neither	33	54.55%	–	45.45%
Germany	Male	987	91.89%	0.10%	8.00%
	Female	119	93.28%	–	6.72%
	Both/Neither	2	50%	–	50%

Note: chi-square analyses were used to determine whether the difference between men and women was significant after excluding sponsor-authored stories because of the small number of such stories published.

p < .05; ***p < .001.

Discussion and cross-cultural differences

This study’s data provides an opportunity to explore cultural differences in how football is covered on Eurosport’s websites. The websites in France, the WWC’s host country, and the UK, whose English team played the maximum of seven WWC games thanks to their successful run to the semi-final and their subsequent loss to Sweden in the third-place match, covered women’s football at about twice the rate of their counterparts in Germany and Spain (Table 2). These differences may be explained by the higher rate of newswire services’ stories published on the French and British websites: they were the only two countries with a sex gap in the proportion of stories authored by news agencies (Table 5). Furthermore, more than 95% of the women’s coverage on these two websites, as well as on the German website, was dedicated to the WWC. In fact, on these 3 websites, only 28 women’s football stories total were not about the WWC. Meanwhile, 27 of the Spanish website’s women’s football stories (12.05%) were not about the WWC. Football enthusiasts might be inclined to believe this is because Real Madrid announced the creation of a women’s team during data collection, but this news prompted only four stories on the Spanish website.

A visual inspection of the 55 stories’ headlines indicates a wider variety of coverage for the women’s game on Eurosport Spain. The website published stories about some female players’ transfers/moves, the tragic death of a Swiss player, the inclusion of women’s football in esports, the WWC 2027 hosting bid process, and financial investments in women’s football in Spain, South America or even China. Several of these topics were purely absent from the other websites. The German website published only four non-WWC women’s football stories (one about Real Madrid and three about the German-speaking Swiss player’s untimely death) and its French counterpart only seven (one about Real Madrid’s announcement, another about the creation of a new domestic competition and five about superpower Olympique Lyonnais). The British website offered a bit more variety, though not as much as Spain did. With 17 stories, Eurosport UK published stories about the Tokyo Olympics, FIFA’s promotion of the women’s game, the Swiss player’s death, Olympique Lyonnais’ new coach announcement and its domestic Super League. This finding suggests Spain’s Eurosport is investing more time and resources in offering various media coverage of women’s football compared to its neighbours, thus providing empirical evidence for the trends Longman (2019) observed regarding Spain’s embracing of women’s football. This type of behaviour from media outlets will likely help to further popularize women’s football in Spain, as routinized coverage of women’s sports significantly helps audience-building (Sherwood et al., 2017).

Looking at topics covered (Table 6), despite the WWC being the only Europe-based senior tournament played by European nations, none of the websites studied covered it more than any other topic. Instead, it was the second most covered topic on the French, British and German websites, and the third most covered topic on the Spanish website. Overall, players’ transfers in men’s football were by far the most covered topic (n = 1546; 23%). Comparatively, the WWC was the topic of 907 stories (14%), ranking just after the South American continental competition, Copa América, with 922 stories (14%), the majority of which were published on the Spanish website (n = 701; 10% of all stories, and 76% of Copa América stories). The French and British websites covered the African Cup of Nations extensively, with 121 and 270 stories, respectively, which represents about 10% of French stories and 15% of British stories. In comparison, less than 5% of the stories published on the German or Spanish websites were about Africa’s biggest competition. These stark cross-cultural differences may be a consequence of the vast colonial history of France and the UK in Africa, and Spain’s colonial history in Latin America. While we know the world wars and bans on women’s football have significantly affected the evolution and current status of women’s football as second to the men’s game (Delattre, 2019; Labeur, 2019; Pettus, 1998; Petty and Pope, 2019; Pfister et al., 2002; Prudhomme-Poncet, 2003), this analysis suggests other historical events and the international relations they shaped are profoundly affecting the sex gap in football coverage too. More research is needed in this area.

Table 6.

France(N = 1302)	UK (N = 1852)	Spain (N = 2441)	Germany (N = 1108)
Transfers (357 stories)	Transfers (356)	Copa América (701)	Transfers (396)
Women’s World Cup (WWC) (251)	WWC (344)	Transfers (437)	WWC (115)
African Cup (121)	African Cup (270)	WWC (197)	Bundesliga (106)
Copa América (74)	Euro 2020 (113)	La Liga (156)	International Junior (103)
Ligue 1 (70)	Nations League (110)	African Cup (112)	Copa América (53)

Conclusion

This study is an analysis of Eurosport’s football coverage during the 2019 WWC. It is important to recognize its limitations. First, the number of tests of significance run was fairly high, which increases the likelihood of Type I errors. Second, only Eurosport websites were included for analysis, and while the data provides an interesting look at how football was covered in Western European media during the summer of 2019, it cannot be generalized to all websites. Finally, because of today’s broadcast landscape, Eurosport’s rights to football competitions (including the WWC) differed by country, which may have affected the broadcaster’s online coverage.

Despite these limitations, this study still offers insight into the ‘new era’ of women’s football in Europe (Talmazan and Bailey, 2019). Its unique contribution lies in its data, which stems from four different European countries, but only one company, thus limiting corporate differences. While men’s football is still more widely covered and men’s club competition still takes precedence over the women’s most prestigious tournament, the WWC was the most covered current competition on three of the four websites studied. This certainly hints at a new age for women’s football, but the preponderance of men’s club football stories overall shows we are entering a slow transition into a new era, rather than having fully arrived in it. Indeed, when the men’s World Cup happens, its coverage is exhaustive, causing other competitions and most transfer news to take a back seat (Vincent and Hill, 2011). That did not happen in the summer of 2019, as the WWC was not even the main topic covered on any website studied. At this time, the weight of history still hinders women’s football’s take-off.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Roxane Coche

Notes

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