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3 hours ago
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As much as it is tempting to romanticise about Bill Shankly’s most famous quote, he was wrong. Football is not more serious than life and death, and over the years far too many of us seem to have taken the former Liverpool manager’s words a little too literally and stopped being able to enjoy football for its primary purpose: fun.
Whether it is clubs writing letters of complaint because a referee – a fallible human like all 8 billion of us – has made a mistake or the rage on social media that a pundit’s opinion might be skewed towards – shock – their former club, isn’t it time we chilled out a bit?
For three sun-kissed afternoons by the Thames, an end-of-season seven-a-side women’s football tournament provided the perfect antidote to the depressingly serious elements of the modern game. Forget VAR, PSR and arguing about the significance of xG, this was goals, laughs, goals, then more goals.
The third edition of World Sevens Football, which involved eight English teams and was won by Chelsea after an 11-goal thriller in the final, served up what the players had craved: fun. On the pitch, flair players such as Manchester United’s Melvine Malard and Jess Park thrived in the format, showing off their stepovers and lethal finishing, and the Chelsea forward Aggie-Beever-Jones, the top scorer with eight goals, toyed with defenders.
Teams also showed off meticulously prepared walk-on routines, which ranged from the hilarious to the bizarre, from Everton’s players pretending to give birth, to the Chelsea manager, Sonia Bompastor, being carried on to the pitch by her players, to the Manchester United head coach Marc Skinner’s entrance in a dressing gown. Even the referees couldn’t resist some acting.
It was not to everybody’s taste, naturally. Some observers, perhaps mistaking what they were watching for the World Cup final, expressed annoyance on social media that women were not acting in a way that is good and proper. One X user, responding to a video of Aston Villa’s players dancing, wrote: “Organisers of this have genuinely set them back years.” Another X user wrote: “Unfortunately, women’s football won’t ever be taken seriously.” First football had the “celebration police”. Now we’ve got the “walk-on police”.
Not only those who dislike women’s football were unhappy. The former Everton women’s manager and former Canada assistant coach Andy Spence, a respected figure in the women’s game, responded to a viral video of Everton’s players acting out a mock funeral for their on-loan full-back Hannah Blundell, by writing: “What is going on? The Women’s game has made such progress but these ‘tournaments’ and the narrative around them are threatening the integrity & hard work people have put in to make the Women’s game be accepted by a wider audience. Please stop. Embarrassing.”
Everybody is entitled to their opinion and, undoubtedly, this lighthearted tournament will not be to everybody’s liking, but the event did three crucial things that women’s football needs. First, it broadened teams’ reach: one clip on Dazn’s Instagram of Beever-Jones’s amusing walk-on has been viewed more than 11 million times. Second, it brought investment into a sport crying out for cash, with $500,000 (£372,000) going to the winners. And it attracted fans, with a sold-out crowd of 3,000 attending the final on Saturday. In future, the capacity will need to be more ambitious, to make the event profitable but, given that Chelsea’s participation had been announced with 10 days’ notice, that sellout will have encouraged organisers. Jennifer Mackesy, a co-founder of World Sevens Football, said: “The response from fans in London has blown us away.”
It also provided light relief to the players after a gruelling season. As Everton’s interim head coach Scott Phelan said: “The majority of it is about enjoyment and letting the players express themselves and enjoy football in its purest form.”
The event is by no means perfect. Giving Chelsea and Manchester United access to the two regular changing rooms at Brentford, while the other six teams were housed in far smaller, temporary dressing rooms, because those two sides were seeded for the group stage, did not go down brilliantly with some other teams, and that will need to be addressed at future editions.
More significantly, there was awful news for West Ham and their defender Tuva Hansen, who sustained an anterior cruciate ligament injury. The Manchester United goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce will miss the United States’ matches this month after getting injured. Those incidents will make some fans wonder whether the fun was worth the risk. The tournament will also have an increasingly difficult time finding gaps in football’s ever more congested calendar. But the engagement enjoyed by its broadcast partners Sky Sports and Dazn mean this format has a bright future.
As for the walk-ons, the fans embraced those as much as a half-volley into the top corner. Mackesy said: “With the joy, the walkouts and the celebrations, we are not sacrificing the quality of football on the pitch. They [the players] are hyper-focused on winning this tournament … It shows you can do both [and] let the fans experience these players in a different way.”
Fans may hope to see some of the free-flowing, attacking football from this event in their 11-a-side seasons, and it is surely more enjoyable for players than sitting in a low block hoping for a draw. The technology entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, who co-founded the Los Angeles-based NWSL club Angel City, said: “There’s pressure to win an 11-a-side game, so you tighten up, and so [here] they’re being able to play more freely and we are seeing the results of that. Why would you not take that back into the 11s game and say ‘I play better when I’m free’?”
