Chelsea should lead by boosting CFC Women amid first-team travails, WWC

Chelsea FC Women have provided more reasons to cheer this season than the men. The club should be taking advantage of the situation to promote the women to downplay the men’s struggles.

Chelsea have not made it easy to be a fan this season. The product on the pitch is polarizing. Transfer windows evoke dismay, disappointment and a recognition of the club’s decline. The Blues have set a few negative records and no positive ones. The club’s digital media has never exactly been the pride of London, but their ham-handed efforts this season have just given fans another target (looking at you, “Media Watch”). Just as economic recessions are boons for the pawn and repossession industries, the high-volume on the ticket exchange helps quantify the dissatisfaction.

But that’s just the men. Three hours before the men made history by losing 6-0 to Manchester City, the women came back from 2-0 down to draw league-leading Manchester City 2-2. In the two weeks between the men’s loss at Everton and Craig Pawson’s man of the match performance on the Blues’ behalf against Cardiff City, Chelsea Women won the first leg 2-0 and then scored a second-leg 91′ away goal against Paris Saint-Germain to advance in the Women’s Champions League.

The men must wonder what that feels like, eliminating PSG from the Champions League.

While the men scored few memorable goals before Wednesday night against Brighton, Ji So-Yun and Maren Mjelde scored Goal of the Season contenders a few weeks apart.

And as fans of the first team continue to bicker about who truly understands what a regista is, Karen Carney proved herself the inheritor of Cesc Fabregas’ magic hat with her assist to Mjelde for the clincher against PSG.

Chelsea FC are missing an incredible opportunity to shape the narrative around the club while simultaneously building support for the Women’s team. The men are down, the women are up. Accentuate the positive, obscure the negative. If the men’s struggles are the foundation for aggressively pushing the women’s team, well, that’s exactly the sort of hit-’em-on-the-counter opportunism that propelled this club for 15 years.

Chelsea fans are already experiencing a unique sense of disinterest from the club given the events this season. The lineups are almost always the same. The formation and tactics are blandly repetitive, which means player performances and contributions exist in a pretty narrow band. And that band? Not a very pleasant place to be. All of which means there is very little new to drive conversations from game-to-game, whether you are chatting with your friends or ensuring you hit your minimum number of articles each month.

This disinterest could carry over to withdrawal, which runs the risk of becoming detachment, through a combination of events this summer. Chelsea do not have any African internationals, which means we’ll be living vicariously through Victor Moses and Mikel John Obi during AFCON. At most the Blues will have Willian and Christian Pulisic at the Gold Cup. And there’s the transfer ban.

But there is the Women’s World Cup. The women’s team via the Women’s World Cup can help the club maintain its engagement with the fans, which will then strengthen their relationship with all parts of the club when the next season starts.

Unfortunately, we are already behind the curve on our coverage of that tournament because we are not able to watch Chelsea FC Women play regularly. Without getting to know them as people and players via their games, we’ll enter the tournament like an interim manager taking over mid-season: playing catch-up against a low ceiling.

As far as we can tell, Chelsea FC are not under any restrictions about streaming Chelsea Women’s games. There are no superseding broadcast or stream contracts at the league or tournament level. The club have the opportunity and capacity to make it as frictionless as possible: every game, no more than a login, outside the paywall, no territorial restrictions.

Making their games so accessible as to become part of the football conversation – the conversation driven by sites like this one – is a necessary step en route to the team or league being able to sell their broadcast and streaming rights to a platform that will pass the cost on to the viewer.

The current coverage of women’s football is unbecoming of the game and its players. Most media coverage presents women’s football as a novelty, a sideshow, as though the only proper responses to women playing football in 20-friggin’-19 is condescension in the form of you-go-girl bemusement or stunning-and-brave fawning. They simply can’t make their way to talking about women’s football as football, even though they would have no problem doing it for a National League South reserve side.

If Chelsea, the FA and the all-purpose powers-that-be want more for the women’s game, they need to open the door for football fans to be football fans of the women’s football teams. There’s a reason I used that word three times: it has to be about the football. Their football. Our football.

We want to spend our time hashing out Emma Hayes’ preferred formations and how she – not Maurizio Sarri – is the heir to Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte in the press room and on the touchline.

We need our writers weighing in on which Chelsea Women’s full-back would be better suited as a wing-back, which winger is better when inverted, whether it’s worth trying to play out from the back and which midfielder is better off dropping deep in build-up to open up space for the No. 10. And this summer, we want to be able to compare each player’s position and contribution for their national team to what they do at Chelsea FCW. Like we spent all last summer doing with the men.

But we can only do that if we can have perfect attendance via livestream in the USA or India or wherever we are, just as we do with the time we invest – lately against our better judgment – in the men’s team.

Too many backers of women’s sports want us to be fans in the abstract: supporters of the idea and the purpose more than the players and the teams. That undervalues the players and misunderstands why fans engage, particularly football fans.

Football fans want to watch, read about, debate, obsess over and simply support whatever it is their club is doing. Football fans don’t need a reason to do any of those things beyond the fact it’s their club. They only need to be able to partake in what is happening, which at the most basic level means being able to watch the games and follow the team as seamlessly as possible.

Shifting some of the spotlight from the men to the women will shift the narrative around the club as a whole from the negativity of the men to the positivity created by the women this season. Big picture, Chelsea can enable an important step in how we engage with the women’s game.