Big Story

The Football Association’s long and troubled effort to launch a professional summer women’s league has moved a step closer to actually happening: about a year from launch, they have announced the eight teams who will make up the league, out of 16 applicants. They are: Arsenal LFC, Birmingham City LFC, Bristol Academy WFC, Chelsea LFC, Doncaster Rovers Belles, Everton, Lincoln LFC and Liverpool LFC.

If we take a look at the current elite level of English women’s football, the FA Premier League, we will find a noticeable omission: Sunderland sit atop the standings currently (albeit second-placed Arsenal have plenty of games in-hand on them), but were not chose for the new Super League. Also missing from the Super League are fellow Premier League teams Nottingham Forest and Millwall.

Forest’s chief executive Mark Arthur expressed his disappointment: “When you are launching a new product,” he said, “you should surely include the biggest brands.” Arthur made his feelings plain: “”The application and decision-making processes were not satisfactory. We’ve done so much for the women’s game in recent years, yet we weren’t even granted an interview to explain our submission.”

Sunderland will be equally disappointed, if not surprised: word leaked last month that they would not make the final cut, leaving the north-east of England unrepresented in the Super League. Last month, Sunderland boss Maurice Alderson said that “”With the help of Sunderland FC, we put in a very strong bid and not for one moment did I think we wouldn’t get in. We’re top of the league, we reached last season’s FA Cup final and we’ve got nine current internationals at various age levels. To have all that on top of a bid backed by a Premiership club and get turned down is devastating. We’ve been kicked in the teeth.”

Without knowing the details of each application, it’s impossible to say if any of those clubs simply failed to meet the basic criteria the FA laid down or not.

Lincoln City were the surprise inclusion, with their rather interesting logo. They have an impressively ambitious statement on their website today looking forward to the future, including the Super League’s television deal with ESPN.

Since the inception of Lincoln Ladies F.C. it has been the club’s main aim, and indeed its main priority, to play at the highest level of women’s football.

This is the first time in the history of the city of Lincoln that a football club from the city will play in the highest league and at the highest level. It fills us all at Lincoln Ladies with great pride that it is our club that has delivered this fantastic prize and all the possibilities that go with it to the city, and to the people of Lincoln.

From the outset, we must stress that Lincoln Ladies will not be content with just making up the numbers in this new elite league. Rather we will strive, as we always have, to be champions of England, and we will now also look towards success for our club in European competition.

We will endeavour to build the strongest squad possible, which will include some players who presently play for us and also world class players who we hope to bring in from outside, to enable our club to achieve the success it craves, and to give the people of Lincoln a women’s football club they can be really proud of.

The Super League will be played in Summer, which of course means our supporters can enjoy watching our games in beautiful weather, warm sunny afternoons and balmy evenings, with all the benefits this will bring, enabling our club to make each football match a fantastic enjoyable and memorable experience.

It’s a real shame that the sporting success of Sunderland hasn’t been recognised, but the ambition and enthusiasm of a club like Lincoln does bode well for the Super League.

Quick Hits

• Ridge Mahoney sums up MLS’ new labor deal, as all sweetness and light now pours forth from the players, league and owners: “For 2010, the salary cap will be $2.55 million per team (it was $2.32 million in 2009) and the minimum salary for non-developmental players is $40,000 ($34,000 in 2009). Each will increase at a basic five percent per year, though for older players the minimum will be greater. At that growth rate, the salary cap will be approximately $3.1 million in the final year of the CBA, and the minimum will be slightly more than $46,000.”  Personally, it seems to me to be a score draw given the positions each side came from.
• Tim Vickery on a welcome sight, Uruguayan football (back) on the rise: “If it can keep grooming technically gifted players then this country of just 3.4m people will continue to punch above its weight on the football field – and that, surely, is a better course of action than punching below the belt.”

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

It looks like the Women’s Super League in England, a new semi-professional venture (not fully professional, as some are saying), will finally launch in 2011 and the application process is now open for clubs who wish to participate.

The plan is for eight teams to compete in a summer season from March to October, thus minimising schedule conflicts with the men’s game but also going up directly against Women’s Professional Soccer in the United States.

The Football Association broke its pledge to launch a new Women’s Super League in 2010 earlier this year, citing difficult economic times. The furor over that, and continued criticism’s of the FA’s poor record on diversity from the government and pressure groups, seems finally to have spurred an organisation with a historically terrible record on promoting the women’s game (and in fact, doing the exact opposite by banning it from Football League grounds for fifty years) to finally fund a step forward.

Unfortunately, every single document listed on the F.A.’s Women’s Super League application page — all of which look like interesting reading from their titles — are not actually linked properly, so it’s impossible to read all of the details. Oops.

But the site does offer one interesting and important detail,  stating that “Clubs who successfully apply for membership to The FA Women’s Super League will be able to apply for funding from The FA to support club development activities in specified areas thereby promoting sustainability. A maximum of £70,000 per season per club will be available.”

This is a welcome commitment, given the league is in a highly competitive market for the best British talent with much of it playing overseas in Women’s Professional Soccer right now.

However, according to the Guardian, that development fund is only available if clubs make a considerable financial commitment to pay £20-30,000 to top players.

It’s a little worrying that even the league’s project leader, Sally Horrox, thinks that “we might be scaring a few of the clubs off. But we are raising the bar for the women’s game and we are serious about player payments and other minimum requirements.”

Sunderland chairman Maurice Alderson added that “We can’t afford to pay our players expenses, let alone £30,000 a year. We run our whole club on less than half of that. I love the concept of the league and I’d love be part of it, but it’s going to be very difficult.”

Alderson’s comments sum up the general excitement and concern about the new venture. It’s certainly about time the FA followed through on their commitment and debt to women’s football, and they should be praised for making funding available. The women’s game has grown enormously at the grassroots in England in the past couple of decades and the profile of the national team reached an unprecedented high as Kelly Smith and Karen Carney led the team to the UEFA championship final this year.

But the gap between the English game and the European elite was still evident as Germany easily dismissed England, with an obviously greater depth and class of athlete available to them, all of whom play in the Women’s Football Bundesliga — a twelve team league set-up way back in 1990 by the German Football Association, who obviously had far more forethought than their English counterpart.

The Super League might be the way to remedy that. But will English clubs be able to raise enough investment to match the ambition of the league, or will this prove to be another false dawn?

Big Story
It’s not often a 6-2 loss is taken to presage a “nation’s arrival on the big stage”, but that’s the reaction today in the Guardian from Anna Kessel on the England’s women’s team’s defeat in the UEFA European Championship final to Germany last night. The Germans, winning their seventh European title, were faster and stronger than the English underdogs, who were in their first final for a quarter-century.

But their run to the final and the pluck of their first half performance certainly demonstrated the improved quality of the team. At 3-2 early in the second half — England clawing their way back into it thanks to an exquisite feed from Karen Carney to Kelly Smith — the Germans were rattled, before their superior force saw them overrun England towards the end.

The women’s game in England has been growing fast at the grassroots, with participation booming over the past two decades, leading to this improved performance along with England’s under-19 team winning the European Championship in July. But development at the professional level has not kept pace so far, with the introduction of central contracts too late and too little to keep many English stars from moving to WPS in the U.S. along with the disrespectfully made announcement earlier this year that the proposed new F.A. summer women’s Super League would be delayed from its intended 2010 launch.

Amidst the excitement over England’s run this week, F.A. chief executive Ian Watmore got all the soundbites right as he promised the Super League really, really would launch in 20111. But once the media glare once again drifts away from the women’s game, will the F.A. finally fulfill their duties? Let’s hope the momentum from the past week does force them to do so.

Worldwide News

• Meanwhile, today is National Fabio Capello Day in England. The Telegraph’s Henry Winter remembers Capello’s own “thirty years of hurt” with the World Cup; the Times looks at the fortune England’s success so far has already earned the Italian; and the Daily Mail considers how Capello solved the conundrum of playing Lampard, Gerrard and Rooney together (“I spoke with them and I said you are a fantastic player, you are a fantastic player and you are another fantastic player.”)
• The Football Association is cashing in on success, with a new major sponsor — Mars — set to be unveiled soon. But ESPN are playing hardball over available FA Cup rights vacated by Setanta.
• Arsene Wenger makes an important if extremely self-serving point about the proposed ban on the transfer of players under the age of 18, arguing that reducing the ability for (oh, say) Arsenal to capture all the best talent would stifle their talent and perhaps more worryingly, lead to their sale to businessmen and agents.
• Jeff Cooper of St. Louis Soccer United speaks about his plans for men’s professional football in the city, a goal he seems to keep coming agonisingly close to achieving. Cooper was one of the leaders of the proposed purchase of USL from Nike recently, and speaks about the prospective breakaway league, whilst also keeping his options open for his obvious first preference to buy into MLS by attempting to woo David Beckham.
• Your Friday FIFA round-up of the upcoming weekend action not in Europe is available.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

It might not be getting the 16 page pullout supplements in every newspaper that the Barclay’s Premier League is, but the F.A. Women’s Premier League also kicks-off this weekend.  The shadow of the men’s game (as well as the women’s European Championships going on concurrently) obviously looms over the season’s launch, but so does a black cloud over the future prospects for women’s football in England as a whole.

The grand ambition of the F.A. was to give the women’s game a new lease of life in 2010: instead of rainy, cold evenings a new elite Super League was planned for launch to run during the summer, where it might just win a little more of the spotlight. But that plan has now been shelved, perhaps indefinitely.

The original announcement in September of 2008 by the F.A. of a new Super League was a clear response to the impending launch of the summer-league WPS in the United States the following year, with several England internationals being tempted away by the pay and quality of the professional league. But in April this year, the Football Association announced it was deferring the start of the Super League due to “financial difficulties in companies with which we trade” . The F.A.  has done little to reassure anyone the Super League will ever now launch.

After the decision was announced (a desultory letter from the F.A. was sent to the clubs after the decision had already been leaked to the press and posted on the F.A.’s website), criticism rained down on the F.A. from within the women’s game. “If anybody wanted a clear indication of the FA’s regard for women’s football, this is it,” said Sue Tibballs, the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation’s chief executive in April. “They were looking at their budgets to see what they could cut and women’s football was an easy option. You have to question their fitness to run the women’s game.”

In June, F.A. Chairman Lord Triesman addressed the Women’s Premier League clubs, and failed to give any assurances whatsoever that the Super League would not be deferred again. “We cannot guarantee that this will not happen if significant commercial FA contracts and investment income is lost,” Triesman said, according to the minutes from the meeting.

Bristol Academy manager Gary Green had earlier pointed out that “It’s another kick in the teeth for the women’s game. I understand the bad economic situation, but that’s been going on for quite a while so you have to wonder if the plans were ever in place.” Legendary Arsenal coach Vic Akers added that “I think they looked at the budgets to see what they could cut and women’s football seemed the easy option.”

It wasn’t the first time the F.A. had failed to fulfil its promises to the women’s game: a similarly touted shiny new league failed at the start of this decade as well. Considering the historical debt the Football Association owes the women’s game not just from this but from the long ban on the sport under its auspices from 1921 to 1972, one has to wonder if they can ever be trusted again to nurture the future of the sport.

And providing one more little kick to the shins to the women’s game, the F.A.’s official Women’s Premier League website fails to even mention the new season is starting on its latest news page.