The Intolerable Teething Problems of the Women's Football Awards

By Yaa Mensah-King

While association football or soccer is a team sport, there are several individual honors that can be obtained in the form of awards. Some of the most prestigious awards are, the Ballon d’Or, FIFA World Player of the Year, FIFA World Cup Golden Ball and the Puskas Award. Most of these awards have one thing in common: complete domination by male football players. The Ballon d’Or was first awarded in 1956 but the Ballon d’Or Féminin, the women’s iteration of the award was first awarded over five decades later in 2018. It’s a similar story in the case of the FIFA World Player of the Year, first awarded for men in 1991 and for women in 2001. Only the Puskás Award was introduced for both men and women simultaneously in 2009. However, the award only exists in one iteration across the two genders. Unsurprisingly, since male football has the larger viewership and the award is largely influenced by public voting, there has never been a female winner of the award and only a few nominees.

It was then, of course, such a breath of fresh air to learn about the Women’s Football Awards; an organization with a flagship ceremony promising to be “Europe’s biggest celebration for women in football.” For once, women were not coming as an afterthought decades later but were in fact at the forefront and seemingly at first the sole focus of the awards. This was until further exploration revealed that there was a Male Football Ally of the Year award which was meant to celebrate male players “committed to promoting equality and opportunity for women in football”.  

What immediately came across as odd initially was not even the presence of an award for men, but the absence of a Female Football Ally of the Year award. All of the categories were solely catered to women until this one. Granted, there exists a Women’s Football Champion of the Year award but it is unisex. It is important to note that when men have their football awards, it is virtually unheard of to have an award for female allies. It’s easy to imagine the thinking behind the award’s existence: Add a few notable male players to the ceremony roster and their large followings will be more likely to get involved. This line of thinking is obviously very flawed because while it is true that women’s football has yet to grow to the levels of popularity of the men’s game; it is not true that for that to happen men need to be lauded as ambassadors. Celebrating individuals for something that should be commonplace seems to be counterintuitive when considering the intention is to promote equality between the two games. Men’s football is granted the luxury of just existing while women’s football comes across as some moral act or work on the part of anyone who deigns to watch it.

The existence of the Male Football Ally of the Year Award is absurd in its own right but it becomes enraging when considering who some of the nominees are. On July 4, 2022, The Telegraph reported that an unnamed 29-year-old Premier League player was arrested in North London for alleged rape. No Premier League club or player has made an official comment in regards to the allegations. While his teammates continue to brush shoulders with him since his release, for the public there is no telling who the player is. It becomes concerning when 9 out of the 10 nominees are Premier League players because the integrity of their support of the women’s game becomes questionable if they cannot support women in general.

Male players have large platforms which they can use to discourage some of the misogynistic rhetoric surrounding the game and start engaging their audiences with conversation on the women’s game. They might do all that and more but it would be completely superfluous to give them awards for it. Men should not be celebrated for being allies because it is the bare minimum but that does not mean their allyship must stop. ♦