Mind the gap: FIFA, women’s football, and the progress narratives of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup

The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup (2023 FWWC) was a tournament that put the growth of women’s football on full display. Off the field, the tournament broke a succession of attendance, viewership, and commercial records. On it, unexpectedly strong performances from several minnows and debutantes provided ostensible evidence of the global expansion and growing parity of the women’s game. Coupled with the struggles of perennial powerhouses like the US and Germany, the tournament was unsurprisingly hailed as heralding a new era of equality and parity in women’s football. Exploring the discursive construction of a “closing gap,” this chapter problematises the way this narrative was framed by FIFA and the media. In particular, we argue that FIFA attempted to position itself as the benevolent rescuers of the women’s game, in doing so disguising their part in creating gendered in-equality in the first place and obfuscating the commercial motivations behind their increasing support for women’s football. We then suggest that, by conflating parity with equality, FIFA effectively plays down or conceals the myriad problems currently facing women’s football. Relatedly, FIFA’s notion of parity and equality, largely framed in commercial terms, facilitates certain policy interventions while closing off others. Taking the “closing [playing] gap” as symbolic of progress deflects criticism while avoiding the need to make deeper, substantive changes to the highly inequitable structures, norms, and institutions of modern football. The successes of the 2023 FWWC, the chapter ultimately argues, owed themselves to a host of factors that have little, if anything, to do with the game’s administrators. As much as FIFA may have “got it right” when compared to tournaments past, the 2023 FWWC worked not because of FIFA and its national associations but rather in spite of them.