For these fans from the Arsenal Women Supporters Club (AWSC), the match day begins in the pub. That this is noteworthy, in a country whose football traditions are as rich, is, in itself, notable: an indication of changing matchday habits in women’s football post-2022 European Championship victory.
AWSC committee member Sam Hanlon, who has attended men’s matches for more than a decade with his family but went to his first Arsenal Women game on his own, organised Sunday’s meet-up. “The easiest meeting point is a pub, but we want to avoid (the feeling that) you’re here to have a drink; the socialising is the key aspect,” he says. “A pub can feel quite hostile. Most men’s football games are almost all men, but we’re closer to 50/50. It’s a way to grow the community around matches. For women’s (games), if I didn’t make an attempt to find friends, it was going to be a solo experience. That might have stopped me going.”
Arsenal Women are the game’s foremost case study in growing a returning fanbase — they averaged crowds of 36,836 last season and now play all their Women’s Super League games at the Emirates — and emboldening it to build its own customs, some inspired by men’s football but many servicing a different audience. Equally vital is a core fanbase due to their past successes in the women’s game, tailored marketing, big-name Lionesses and a men’s team for whom rivalries with clubs like Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United helped the women’s team sell out successive home games against those sides.
All of which brings us to Arsenal’s opponents on Sunday, the London City Lionesses, and the questions accompanying their arrival in the WSL.
Arsenal plays all of their WSL home matches at Emirates Stadium. (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
London City’s identity is complex. Born of Millwall Lionesses, based in Bromley — a town at once in Kent and London — and the only WSL team fully independent of a men’s club, they are also the youngest club in the WSL. They are the division’s underdogs as new kids on the block but also its big disruptors, part of businesswoman Michele Kang’s multi-club portfolio. Their sights are set on league and Champions League wins.
“I always say, unless you’re six years old, you’re not a lifelong London City fan,” Sarah Batters, London City managing director, tells The Athletic. “We had to build a fanbase from scratch, and that is a challenge you don’t often find in football. It’s both a challenge and a gift.”
It is a challenge because there is no existing supporter base to advertise to. In Batters’ first season, 90 per cent of London City tickets were complimentary. The team previously played in Dartford to an average of 400 fans and had a one-person marketing department. Last season, in WSL 2, City averaged 1,800 through the gates and 3,000 this season. Sunday’s game was a sell-out, a London City record crowd of 5,440.
Aptly, Arsenal’s data suggests that the relationship between a men’s and women’s team isn’t as crucial as one might expect: in the 2023-24 season, 61 per cent of women’s game spectators had never been to the Emirates and only 25 per cent to a men’s Arsenal game.
“Where it’s a gift is just that liberating factor,” Batters continues. “We don’t have to follow a particular template, those rules that have been set through years of tradition. There’s a lot of freedom to create a fan experience that appeals to that audience interested in women’s football and that we think we can convert to fans.”
At Hayes Lane, there is a free fan zone with foam fingers, face painting, a London City-branded photobooth, a virtual penalty shootout, colouring pages and, when The Athletic visits, an arts-and-crafts table at which children are decorating novelty glasses and masquerade masks. A girl decorates hers with names like Alessia Russo and Kelly Smith.
There is also a de facto dog stand, home to Willow, a Labrador in a London City Lionesses jersey whose owners have attended City matches for three seasons, and Pipo, a groundhopping 15-year-old Bichon Frize whose owners will buy their first London City season tickets next season. London City, they explain, is one of very few dog-friendly grounds at this level. Their only gripe is that a lack of dog products in the club shop left them ironing the club crest onto blue dog fleeces using transfer paper.
Some of London City’s canine supporters (Katie Whyatt)
London City’s marketing department are inviting local running clubs to run to the ground, sample something from the local bakery that serves at games and then stay for the match. The jewel in the crown is City’s sister-club programme, which takes in 80 grassroots girls’ clubs in Kent and London. They provide the obvious — tickets to matches, mascot packages, coaching clinics — and the more meaningful. City’s new training ground, for example, will also include a community pitch and the aim is to partner with a local girls’ league.
Among them is the nonprofit Girls United, due to work with 1,500 girls aged five to 17 in South London this year. “A lot of them maybe didn’t watch football before,” says Abigail Ingram, Girls United London Manager. “(London City) were able to bring down the trophy when they won the Championship. The process was really individualised, from signing up to be a sister club through to the matchday experience, having photos after with the London City team, waving their flags, walking out (as mascots).”
Since stepping into women’s sports, Kang has stressed that moves that could be misconstrued as altruism — other investments include a $4million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years and a $30million, five-year donation to the United States Soccer Federation — are actually sound business practice. Another goal, then, for London City: to prove the business case for women’s football when stakeholders fret about its profitability and sustainability.
“Really, really important words she said to me in the first meeting, that I’ve heard over and over again, is: ‘This is not a charity,’” says Martin Semmons, London City CEO. “She believes that by being first in the market and prompting investment, debate and dynamism, the market will grow faster.”
After buying City, Kang headhunted Semmens from Southampton. He says the goal for London City is to “reach the professionalism and infrastructure and process levels that the men’s Premier League is in” and a growing fanbase will unlock everything. “It’s probably the No 1 focus for her,” Semmens says. “The fanbase drives all those interactions that lead to revenue. That’s probably the most important one on Michelle’s mind. To have a fanbase, the stadium full, the best atmosphere in the WSL, a great matchday experience — that has a big impact (on sponsorship).”
“We should be winning the fandom of every girl that loves football in Kent,” Batters continues. “We’re the local team to them. This is where we have to work hard for every fan.”
Arsenal have worked with supporters, including on a programme called Block by Block, to define what their WSL matchday looks like. “It’s not the men’s ground anymore, but the club’s ground,” says Hanlon. “There’s been a lot of sessions on different things.” Fans have had their say on flags, music, whether the team should walk out to Good Old Arsenal, the anthem of the men’s team, or find something unique.
London City have been similarly intentional. Ticketmaster provides full purchasing data on sales and indicates that families are far and away City’s most significant demographic. A third of their matchday audience comes from five miles around Bromley, another third from or within five miles of Kent and the final third from Greater London.
Together, the media-commerce company whose ownership group includes Alex Morgan and Sue Bird, are City’s front-of-shirt sponsor via their Everybody Watches Women’s Sports logo. The announcement prompted a surge in shirt sales to the US and has helped to make that region the fastest-growing online audience for City alongside Europe, Batters says. Female 18-34-year-olds dominate City’s online audience, which grows by 10 to 20 per cent each month, Batters adds, driven by the popularity of particular players. Posts about the Spaniard Jana Fernandez, Batters says, “blow everything else out of the water”.
“The male fanbase follow a club regardless of how they do — even though they hate it, even (if) they leave at half time,” says Semmens. “They will worship a player but the second they leave, they hate them. The women’s game is counter-flip to that. They believe in that role model, sort of influencer-follower relationship — more strongly, in some ways, than they do the clubs. We fill our stadium on Sunday because people are interested in our project, but because they also want to see Chloe Kelly and Alessio Russo. I truly believe that if Chloe Kelly signed for London City tomorrow, her fans would come and watch us. It doesn’t mean they’ve given up on that club and they’re now London City fans, but they follow those athletes.”
London City’s partnership with Togethxr for their front-of-kit sponsor prompted a surge in shirt sales to the US. (Richard Pelham / Getty Images)
With its shorter professional history, women’s football fandom has always felt malleable, but Batters points out that traditions across the game are shifting. “Men’s football has a problem with sustainability of fanbase as well,” she says. “By (the) age of eight, kids have 10 clubs in their consideration set — which could be their local club, the club their favourite player plays for, their favourite club to play on FIFA. Men’s clubs are having to think, how do I become that club that child is going to support?
“One of the nuances with the women’s game is that you don’t have to be just a fan of us. It’s absolutely fine if you are an Arsenal fan and you engage with us three matches a year. It is understanding there’s different shades of fandom. When the players are signing autographs, it’s all kinds of shirts people are asking to be signed.”
City are aware that some of this, including City’s half-time show on their debut WSL game, is anathema to some of the game’s purists. A brass band plays at points during Sunday’s game, which sounds divisive but never feels invasive. The fanzone is in a separate gated area through which no one needs to walk to reach their seats. Other parts of the matchday feel like a throwback to a bygone era for which Premier League fans hanker: after home matches, select fans can enjoy an interview experience with players in the bars. Hayes Lane also has safe standing.
“We’re in a very affluent, highly populated area of South London and North Kent,” says Semmens. “There is a market of young, high disposable incomes who have a lot of opportunities to experience non-football things. We’re competing for that fanbase. It’s not: ‘We want to take fans from Tottenham or Crystal Palace.’ We want to give them a product that allows them to come here. That probably skews towards a young, cooler, female audience. We have to offer a product is much broader than football to bring them in.”
London City v Arsenal has brought together two teams of two divergent histories, statuses and relationships with men’s football, but what’s fundamental is what meaningful community and connection look like. In their quest to define that, neither team is so different from the other.
Elements of Arsenal’s success should be replicable. Manchester United, for instance, had two of the most marketable Lionesses after the 2023 World Cup in Ella Toone and Mary Earps. For whatever reason, though, no other club has been able to pull those factors into what Arsenal have, the irony being that all of this has happened without Arsenal being the dominant on-field force of the era. Chelsea Women’s matches at Stamford Bridge are often only half-full.
The common denominator among the biggest WSL teams is, of course, the Lionesses. “We have a target to produce a number of players for the England team every year,” says Semmens. “It will increase our fan base. If England win the World Cup, it helps us. Those futures are very closely aligned, and Arsenal showed the way with that.”
