The BBC’s decision to fold the Women’s Super League into its new, unified Football Awards is not a celebration of the women’s game—it is a transparent attempt to borrow legitimacy from the men’s product, and it cheapens both. The WSL does not need a place at the men’s table; it needs its own table, built with its own wood, set with its own silverware. By lumping Lauren James’s breathtaking creativity into the same voting pool as Phil Foden’s relentless excellence, the broadcaster implies that the women’s game cannot command its own audience or its own prestige. That is not inclusion; it is a favour, and favours have no place in sport.
Consider the mechanics. The Premier League, the Scottish Premiership, and the EFL each have decades of institutional weight, massive broadcast revenues, and fanbases that treat their end-of-season honours as sacred. The WSL, for all its rapid growth, remains a younger, smaller operation—one that has only just begun to draw consistent crowds and sponsorships. By packaging its Player of the Year and Young Player of the Year alongside the men’s equivalents, the BBC creates an illusion of parity where none exists. A 35-goal Erling Haaland season and a 22-goal Khadija Shaw season are not the same achievement; pretending they belong on the same ballot is a disservice to both players. Worse, it positions the WSL as a charity case, a side attraction that needs the men’s halo to be taken seriously. Emma Hayes, Sam Kerr, and Beth Mead deserve recognition on their own terms, not as footnotes to the men’s ceremony.
The deeper implication is that the BBC is more concerned with virtue-signalling than with actual investment. A standalone WSL awards night—even a modest one, broadcast on BBC Two or iPlayer—would signal genuine respect for the league’s growth, its rising attendances, and its tactical sophistication. Instead, we get a token placement, a checkbox in a press release. This move does not raise the WSL’s profile; it reduces its achievements to a sideshow. Within five years, the women’s game will have grown beyond this patronising crutch, and a fully independent WSL awards ceremony—one that does not need to beg for airtime alongside the Premier League—will be remembered not as a victory for equality, but as a long-overdue correction to the BBC’s well-intentioned but hollow short cut.