Women’s football isn’t only breaking records – it’s reforming the visual culture of sport

“These women were challenged in every way: physically, emotionally, economically,” explains Cait. “For most players, the salary for an entire season didn’t even cover the cost of child care or rent, forcing many to take on secondary jobs to make ends meet. Culture-wise, there wasn’t one. The sport was vaguely pink-washed and lacked any coverage outside of niche women’s titles and offers from Sports Illustrated. Facilities were poor. The players weren’t allowed to play on grass like the men’s teams; their shins and knees would be covered in astroturf burns. I remember one huge scandal where a Western New York Flash game was played on a modified baseball field with incorrect proportions. It was a very different time!”

Gratefully, over the last decade, women’s football has evolved from a niche segment of the sports industry to a dynamic, multifaceted, trailblazing world of its own. This evolution is reshaping how the game is played, marketed, and consumed worldwide. We’ve seen record-breaking match attendance, new broadcast deals, greater representation in gaming, and gains in pay parity for the national team. Women’s voices are now heard at the highest levels of the sport. Still, in the life cycle of a culture, the game is just beginning. I’ve lost track of the nights I wake up with an urgent desire to open a women’s sports bar or start an indie mag dedicated to grassroots squads. Somehow, the hard-fought struggle that ushered the game out of the shadows and into the light has created an aura of limitless potential.

“Historically, the football industry has been very insular, gatekept and also very commercial. It’s not typically behaved like a cultural industry,” says Holly Gilbertson, managing partner of Pacer, a creative studio built to accelerate the cultural visibility of women in sport. “Covid got a whole generation of women thinking about movement in a different way. It re-coded sports because health was wealth, and going out for a walk became the only thing that kept us going. At the same time, Tiktok reframed beginnerism, creating a more holistic culture around participation. It used to be ‘all the gear, no idea’, now it’s cute to try something for the first time. To be in your running girl era, even if you’re lapping the block. It’s dismantling the old world of tribal fandom (you can only be a fan if you know everything) and becoming more about fun and community, rather than posturing.”

After being ignored, underfunded and undermined by traditional media, the culture around women’s football was forced to grow between the cracks, emerging both IRL and URL. Together, players and fans established a visual language that felt more specific, politicised and personal. Ironically, it was the lack of eyes on the sport that enabled this DIY ethos to bloom, forging incremental growth from within that resulted in a culture that transcends aesthetics and instead offers an entirely new value system around the game.

“What’s exciting to me is the shift from ‘heroic individualism’ to collective culture,” says Lydia Birgani-Nia, a London-based brand consultant and strategist working across sport, culture, and innovation. “It’s the grassroots clubs and collectives that are setting the cultural agenda. They’ve been doing the work long before brands caught on; creating inclusive, community-driven spaces that blend football with politics, care and joy. They are the ones redefining what the game can feel like, look like, and stand for outside of the traditional agenda. These movements are powered by people who are not waiting for permission. They’re documenting their own stories, designing kits, running workshops, and building intergenerational networks. The culture they’ve built feels messy, intimate, political – and that’s what gives it real power.”

Every Sunday, grassroots clubs like Romance FC, Victoria Park Vixens and Whippets FC are building safe and inclusive community hubs that blend an activist ethos with cultural platforms. Lydia, who plays for Baes FC, a collective for women, trans, and non-binary people of Asian heritage, adds, “Clubs like Baes FC focus on rest, care, and collective joy as core values – which completely reframes what we consider “success” in sport. This value system is a powerful counter-narrative to the hyper-commercialised, extractive culture of elite men’s football, and I think it’s setting the blueprint for what sport would look like across the board.”

Lydia is right. Cultural literacy is earned, not bought. And at times, it has been painful to watch brands and platforms attempt to play catch-up. The result is often blatant tokenism, aesthetic flattening and glossing over nuance in favour of surface-level representation. The biggest losers in these situations are not just the brands, but also the players, who are forced to compromise and undermine their integrity. In riposte, players are increasingly stepping into the role of cultural architects. “I love what Grace Clinton is doing – her personality and presence is refreshing and unfiltered in a way that speaks to a younger, more online generation of fans,” says Lydia. “She feels like a player who’s pushing to show footballers beyond the pitch. They’re personalities, curators and cultural touchstones.”

Ella Toone recently announced the launch of her creative studio, Amicizia, in collaboration with co-founder James Marshall. Amicizia’s vision is to forge meaningful connections between players and brands, creating innovative storytelling that resists tired tropes or a lazy copy-and-paste of what works in the men’s game. “I’ve seen projects where players are just an afterthought, shoehorned into a creative, or worse still, the ideas are condescending or a bit cringe,” says James. “Bringing the right team together for every project is important for us. We want to work with creatives who relate to the players, who understand the game and its unique culture.”

Growing the game at pace means it’s inevitable that capitalist greed will, at times, undermine the beating heart of the culture. But it’s not all bad. Nike’s recent Lionesses kit drop video felt like the first time anyone captured the spirit of the squad while retaining the individual identity of the players. Likewise, Ella Toone’s Vogue Shoot and Leah Williamson’s Wonderland Cover were editorial yet authentic, something the team at Women’s Health failed to achieve time and time again.

As the game develops, new ideas and leaders are emerging. Victoire Souki Cogevina, co-founder of Mercury 13 – a group investing in multi-club ownership worldwide – is attempting to bring the strategies of luxury marketing to the women’s game. Their first acquisition, Como FC, went under a radical rebrand in partnership with London design agency Communion earlier this year. Together, they broke from the past and positioned the club more like a luxury fashion house, complete with minimalist kit design and chic activations. Their plan is to attract a new audience, one who cares less about XG (expected goals) and instead is more interested in stories of female empowerment – tapping into the magnetism of sport without losing the heart and soul of the club.