Leicester City Women are breaking records and barriers - and we can help
At the same time as Leicester City’s men were backed by a large travelling support at Stamford Bridge, the women’s side fell to a narrow defeat at Tottenham Hotspur.
The next time they travel to face Tottenham, it’ll be a far bigger occasion - one we’re overdue acknowledging here and which deserves our support in the stands.
When we first set up The Fosse Way, we wanted to be the place for Leicester City fans to come to read about the men’s first team, along with the academy side, and the women’s first team.
The men’s team, we’ve got covered. Their academy side less so, not helped by the club’s withdrawal of live coverage - an exasperating move from here to Bolivia.
As for the women’s team - that’s on us. We started with reports on pretty much every game last season, even if the inequality of resources available to Women’s Super League clubs made it feel like wading through quicksand watching a team trying desperately to compete with the star-studded lineups of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City.
Going backwards at the wrong time
In the summer, we decided to pare things back, for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s a big overhead to watch and report on two games every weekend, and the men’s team take precedence for all of our writers, who all do this in our spare time.
Secondly, almost nobody was reading them anyway: any articles or reports about the women’s side receive about 5% of the views we get for the men’s team, which is broadly reflective of the differing attendances at home games.
It felt like a backward step, with the women’s game growing all the time and breaking records and barriers season after season. The momentum accelerated by the 2022 Euros is still in effect, the WSL attendance record broken last weekend with 36 games still to go.
In the meantime, LCFC Women have gradually been getting better and better too. They’ve signed another top goalkeeper, Dutch international Lize Kop, to compete with Janina Leitzig - a move which seemed unnecessary at the time but has since proven to be shrewd. They’ve added quality to the midfield in the form of Japanese internationals Saori Takarada and Yuka Momiki.
They’ve got a genuine top flight striker for the first time with the arrival of Lena Petermann and a real star in the making, perhaps the best player ever to pull on an LCFC Women’s shirt - the Finnish attacker Jutta Rantala. There have been plenty more great additions and key players like Sophie Howard and Sam Tierney have remained, instilling a clear identity to the team.
Most importantly of all, they’ve effectively secured WSL safety this season far earlier than in their two previous campaigns.
All these references to “they” rather than “we” feel jarring though. For those of us who haven’t earned the right to brand ourselves as part of the collective, is there enough space in the Leicester City obsession for a second team?
Room for two?
This weekend summed up the difficulty of following both the men’s and women’s teams - the women kicking off away to Tottenham Hotspur while the men’s side were still battling away at Stamford Bridge in an FA Cup quarter-final. Kick-off clashes like these make it difficult to maintain consistency of passion for both sides.
For the vast majority, following the fortunes of the women’s team ends up being something that comes and goes in your consciousness. The late winner scored by Carrie Jones at home to Reading to make WSL survival last season almost certain was one of the few highlights of a year supporting two Leicester teams that really struggled for most of their respective campaigns. Other games seem to pass by as though they didn’t happen at all, consigned to the margins by a simultaneous men’s game.
Yet there are fans who prioritise the women’s team, and this number will grow. The women’s game in this country may still be years behind the men’s in certain aspects, catching up after the Football Association kneecapped it in 1921, but the Premier League has also switched many fans off.
They’ve gone elsewhere, looking at the way fans have more power in Germany or more proximity in non-league. And if you’re looking for affordable top-flight football in this country, still following Leicester City, that’s easily achievable by opening your horizons to the WSL.
Money talks
There has been talk for a long time of the Premier League’s financial bubble bursting. Actually, there’s so much money and power sloshing around at the most high-profile clubs these days that it feels like football has eaten itself.
In the Men’s FA Cup, you might get lucky and draw Oxford, Sheffield Wednesday and Maidstone before only having to beat one mid-table Premier League side to secure a trip to Wembley, or you might end up having the kind of day Leicester’s men’s side did on Sunday.
Whether the club have made a horlicks of it or not (and the former sounds more likely based on recent reports), they have at least made efforts to adhere to financial regulations which may have been designed to safeguard clubs but which have essentially just increased the divide between the have and have nots.
Chelsea, meanwhile, have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on players that don’t play, and appear to keep throwing them together until it works. This adds nothing of value to the sport.
On the other hand, Chelsea’s women’s team, although again possessing a squad overflowing with talent, have been a trailblazer for the sport. They, like Arsenal and Manchester City, got ahead of the curve, eventually followed by Manchester United.
The thing is that once you get past that big four in the WSL, and other clubs that have been traditionally the bigger ones in the men’s game - Liverpool, Tottenham, Aston Villa - you arrive pretty swiftly at Leicester - currently 8th of 12 in the table, although victory on Sunday would have meant a top-half placing with six games remaining. After 8-0 and 9-0 defeats in recent seasons, the biggest margin of defeat this season is four.
For obvious reasons, I only saw the second half of Sunday’s game against Tottenham but it seemed a clearly below-par performance by this season’s standards. There was a surprising lack of technical quality in midfield and Leicester just couldn’t raise the game above a level of scrappiness that suited Tottenham as soon as they took a second-minute lead, which they retained until the final whistle.
Up for the cup
Safety is virtually assured in the WSL so attention is really focused on another away game against Tottenham on Sunday 14th April - this time at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium rather than at Leyton Orient. An FA Cup semi-final. The club’s first in the women’s game and a huge occasion. With the men’s side playing on the Friday night at Plymouth, there’s an opportunity to take a massive travelling support to such a fantastic arena.
For some reason, it doesn’t feel like even a third season at the highest level has captured the imagination of fans of Leicester City’s men’s team on a broad scale. Some, it seems, won’t ever get involved, for reasons ranging on a sliding scale of understandable to unacceptable - from lack of time, through closed-mindedness, to full-on misogyny from some quarters.
The funny thing is that the women’s team, even in defeat and difficult runs of results, actually offer what many feel is often lacking from the men’s side. It’s exceptionally rare to see anything other than 100% effort. Managers of other clubs in the WSL take pot shots at Leicester for committing the most fouls.
It really is “inject it” territory. Particularly because the women aren’t on huge money. You can’t go into it as a fan demanding effort for the gigantic pay packet they’re on. But you can expect effort because it appears to be the bare minimum each time they cross the line.
This is obviously to centre everything around the players rather than the management due to the current situation surrounding manager Willie Kirk - “helping the club with an internal process”, a description we’ve already analysed on these pages.
It’s actually three words of Kirk’s from before Christmas that have stuck in my head most of this season: “We need more”. He was talking about numbers of fans at home games, and he was right. These are players always appreciative of the efforts in the stands - and who deserve more of our words.
See you in north London?
