Pretty ridiculous really. I still enjoy watching it, call me sexist but football with the added bonus of boobs bouncing around the TV screen will always appeal to me. Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk
Basically be better having 3 or team groups going by these standings . The bottom teams in each group are cannon fodder. Women's World Cup Qualifying Table - Football - BBC Sport
Seems to be a common theme in the international game. Think it'll be a long way off changing. At least with the men, most nations have some professional league or standard of football. You get the odd thrashing in men's football but they're much rarer.
There’s a lot of talk about how England’s men team qualify with relative ease, they scored 39 goals in 10 games. England W have 53 in 6. Women’s football clearly needs some pre-qualifiers currently, maybe they can be removed once the game grows to a level of popularity that can support international football. However if you’re a young girl in Latvia is watching your national team lose 20-0 really going to inspire you to go out and start playing football?
A few Covid postponements means that some of the teams in the league are a game behind but league is pretty much as per previous posts. Arsenal with a small advantage in the 2 team title race. 3rd place still well up for grabs, Tottenham occupy it currently going in to the winter break but still a long, long way to go. Leicester finally picked up their first win in the top flight. Good day to do it too because it's pretty much a 2 team relegation battle and they've now gone above Birmingham who they beat today. No games now until January so a bit of a break. I still think finishing 3rd is unlikely for Spurs but we're having a fine season so fingers crossed.
It's the equivalent of the Premier League. If you mean in terms of quality then certainly lower than the Championship. The standard is improving all of the time but it's still relatively new as a professional sport, aside from a handful of clubs maybe. It has been enjoyable for the mostpart as most of the teams are on a level playing field and also try to play more attractive, possession-based football but the quality is lacking at times and you see stuff and mistakes that you just wouldn't see in the men's game. I think all of the teams and players are now full-time professionals so it will get better but I think you'd be hard pushed to say it's equivalent to anything about League Two tbh. The officials are still part-time at the minute too as far as I'm aware. The standard at the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal are higher of course but the league as a whole isn't near that standard I would say.
I think you need to be honest, the standard is a fair bit lower than League Two. But there's no shame in that. Female biology means that women are significantly less strong, shorter and slower than male players which means that if you put the best women's team up against men's teams, you'd have to go quite far down the men's pyramid until you found a level where the best women's teams could compete. It's just how things are, you only have to look at things like athletics and other Olympic sports to see how far apart the standards are between the men's and women's events and is why there are separate competitions in the first place. Women's football is a different game in many ways played in a different style that suits the physical attributes of women and comparisons to the men's game are unfair because the two are naturally incompatible. It should be enjoyed for the spectacle that it is and not be bogged down with comparisons with the men's game which are always going to be negative due to the limitations of female biology, the huge funding gap between the two sports and the hugely smaller playing pool in women's football compared to men's which makes it harder to produce top quality players. I don't think covid is helping the development of women's football at all. All the stopping and starting, attendances being reduced by covid rules. And with the parent men's clubs feeling the pinch from the impact of covid rules and grounds being closed for so long, it's the women's teams that are going to be losing out on investment.
I meant quality. Sounds like an argument for bringing a bit of honesty into the game and slightly reducing the size of pitches and goals, if they are biologically never going to compete with men? But it seems that it can't be accepted that there are differences for 'political' reasons, to the detriment of the womens game.
I've always thought that - but I doubt we'll ever see it due to practical reasons (and, I agree, likely some petulant nonsense around perceived inferiority in using smaller pitches/goals). Everyone rightly points out how weak the goalkeeping is, but it's a heck of a difficult job for the women GKs. I have to think it would be a far, far better watch with smaller pitches/goals. As someone who used to watch L2 regularly, it can be appalling, no question, but can also be surprisingly good if a team is in rhythm, balanced and well-managed.
A tad unusual. One of New Zealand's defenders scored a first half hat-trick of own goals v the USA - a perfect hat-trick too!
You beat me to it, @Jason Just read it and wanted to post it here, too. The first one was a beauty and the third one....well it looked a bit like she wanted now this hat trick
In recent years Germany's wimmins national team, often world champions, have lost 3-0 to Stuttgarts B youth team and 2-0 to Frankfurt under 16's . Landesklasse team Teltower fc thrashed women's bundesliga team Potsdam 13-0, Seppenrade of the kreisliga (and even I've played at that level !) beat Köln 3-0, Düsseldorf under 15's thrashed top bundesliga side Duisburg 11-0. In 2016 Australia's national team got thrashed 7-0 by a team of 14 year olds from Newcastle Jets. The examples go on, women's football is crap, the standard is at pub league level without the physicality.
Unfortunately i have to agree. I've been a supporter and advocate for women's football for a long time now, and therein lies the problem - i haven't seen it improve one little bit. It's basically at the same standard it was 10 years ago. Domestically all the top teams hoover up the best players, leaving the rest of the teams to choose "the best of the rest". And internationally as some recent results have shown (didn't England even beat a team something like 13-0 not long back?) it's no better, with the stronger nations who put more money into the game dominating. I'll still watch the occasional game, but it's at it's peak, in other words it's never going to improve beyond where it is now.
Top end of the WSL is can be a decent watch but as SJ says there's a lack of depth overall. Making the pitches/goals smaller and the game more about technical skill would absolutely make it a better watch but that's obviously not going to happen. If it had been split in the 1800s like netball and basketball it would be accepted. Netball is FAR more entertaining a 'product' than the WNBA.
