Women’s Football Must Evolve Past ‘Family-Friendly’ Label to Forge Lasting Identity, Warns Aston Villa Chief

Birmingham — For years the Women’s Super League has sold itself on open turnstiles, cheap tickets and smiling players signing autographs for children. That formula once felt radical; today, Aston Villa managing director Maggie Murphy argues, it risks becoming a straitjacket.

“One cliché I hear more than any is: ‘Why don’t you go to schools, or do kids for a quid?’” Murphy tells The Athletic. “But that undermines the product — which is elite competition.”

Her frustration crystallises a debate now coursing through boardrooms from Villa Park to Kingsmeadow. The league’s historic £65 million broadcast deal with Sky Sports and the BBC was meant to usher in a new era of professionalism. Instead, early-season viewing figures have been accompanied by stagnating crowds: across the first six rounds of fixtures, WST data shows the average gate has slipped one per cent to 6,500, while Villa themselves drew just 2,500 for a recent Sunday noon meeting with Tottenham inside a 42,640-seat stadium.

The easy answer — more giveaways, more face-painting — no longer satisfies anyone. “Family-friendly” may signal safety and inclusivity, yet Murphy believes the phrase has become “a byword for diluted sport, something too terrified to alienate anyone that it risks forfeiting its ability to meaningfully connect with anyone.”

Arsenal have already proved an alternative path exists. By marrying on-pitch success with curated fan culture, the Gunners regularly sell out the Emirates and own every domestic attendance record worth having. For clubs without that heritage, the task is to manufacture identity from scratch.

Inside Villa Park’s Holte End on match-day, that process looks like local comedians on a pop-up stage, pints flowing before midday, former Lionesses Karen Carney and Jill Scott preparing to record a near-capacity live podcast, and children scrimmaging on a mini-pitch beside an arcade basketball machine. Murphy’s “12-player challenge”, meanwhile, invites supporters to pitch growth ideas; the winning entry will fund a fan-docuseries and official song sheets.

Yet even the most inventive pre-match carnival cannot escape the structural handcuffs of a television schedule that locks the vast majority of fixtures into 11:55 a.m. or 12 p.m. Sunday kick-offs. “We’re asking talent to perform at 10:30 in the morning, kids are at their own games, students aren’t leaving campus, and mates who fancy a beer aren’t doing it at that hour,” Murphy says. “We know women’s fans like to make a day of it and spend more per head than men’s fans, but we’re almost cutting off our hands.”

She stops short of blaming the league or its broadcast partners — “the money is transformational” — yet the tension between exposure and experiential quality crackles through every conversation about growth.

Villa’s identity workshops are therefore anchored to a deeper question: “Who are Aston Villa women? What do we stand for?” Answers range from an entry point for first-time football consumers to an extension of family loyalty to the club crest. None are wrong, but none are distinctive enough to persuade a neutral driving past the M6 to pull off and pay for parking.

Sarah Breslin, co-founder of supporter group Villa Bellas, puts it bluntly: “We should be bigger than we are. It’s about capturing that.” The club’s first-ever women’s fans’ forum in August, she adds, already shifted the culture from after-thought to agenda item.

Still, identity ultimately rests on what happens between the white lines. Villa’s side, promoted to the WSL only in 2020, sits fifth in their best-ever season but have lost four of their last five matches. Murphy knows no amount of peripheral razzmatazz can disguise poor results. “I want people to have a great day regardless of what happens on the pitch, but that only works for the people who already come. The ones who haven’t come yet aren’t going to come just because we’ve got a live podcast.”

Hence her North Star: make Villa Park the geographical and emotional heart of the WSL, a venue no traveller can logically bypass. “We don’t want people driving past the motorway and not coming. They need to be here because they want to be here, because they’re having a great time.”

Whether the league’s other clubs can craft similarly compelling answers will determine if women’s football steps beyond the safety of “family-friendly” into a future where elite sport, not discounted tickets, is the primary draw.