When the Old Wave Retreats: The Story of a Female Pundit in the Men's Football Festival

I remember the group stage broadcast of the 2026 World Cup in Russia vividly. The match between two men's national teams was entering the 70th minute, with the score at 1-0. Instead of reading out possession statistics again, I spoke about a 6-0 victory by the Chinese women's national team over Tajikistan in the women's Asia Cup qualifiers. A small detail, quietly inserted into the men's football news feed. Immediately afterward, 50 negative comments poured in. But a quick poll I created afterwards showed that 78% of viewers wanted more women's sports content. That wasn't a victory. It was a signal.

The neglect of women's football has persisted for decades, to the point of becoming an unconscious reflex in how the sports media industry builds its broadcast schedules. When I started as a sports commentator in England in 2026, women's competitions were only mentioned as an appendix, usually condensed into a few lines of results. I remember editorial meetings where colleagues would ask each other: "What's there to say about a women's match?" That question wasn't malicious. It came from a media structure shaped by men's football for nearly a century. This neglect wasn't just a British problem, but a common feature of the global sports industry.

After moving to Shenzhen in 2026 and leaving traditional television to launch my online series "Góc nhìn thể thao nữ" (Women's Sports Perspective), I began to understand that the problem wasn't the audience. In the first episode, I invited striker Wang Shuang, then 22, to talk about match pressure and her European dream. The show reached 500,000 views within 24 hours, a record for women's sports content at the time. Audiences were not turning their backs on women's football. They had simply never been given the chance to hear the stories of those who play the game.

But if I stopped at view counts, I would be deceiving myself. The commercial value of women's football cannot be separated from its competitive value, and both are being undervalued by the very people who work in sports media. I have watched many male colleagues shift to covering women's football simply because they saw it as an untapped niche market. They came with curiosity, not respect. They left when viewership didn't meet expectations, leaving a larger gap for those who remained. The lesson I learned is not that women's football needs to be commercialized at all costs, but that it needs to be covered with the same professional standards as men's football.

In 2026, when the pandemic halted all competitions, I worried about female players losing income. Drawing on the network I had built from 2026-2026, I launched the livestream series "Tiếng nói phòng thay đồ" (Voices from the Locker Room) for them to share their own stories. Goalkeeper Zhao Lina, the hero of the Tokyo Olympic qualifiers, revealed her salary had been cut by 60% and she had to sell her medals to pay for her mother's medical bills. After the broadcast, 1,200 viewers contributed to a support fund and many young players sent messages of encouragement. Helping her speak out eased my own anxiety during the global freeze. The pandemic fell silent, the locker room spoke up, and I was merely the one holding the microphone.

By the Tokyo 2026 Olympics, after two years of listening to players through livestreams, I produced a series analyzing the Chinese women's team's new 4-3-3 formation. Although the team was eliminated in the group stage, I pointed out the role of midfielder Zhang Rui with over 80% passing accuracy and how this playing style inspired women's clubs in Shenzhen. The article was shared over 10,000 times and used by some teachers as teaching material for school football. I realized that tactics had become a bridge between professional insight and public emotion.

But here is what I must say plainly: the sports media industry is still operating on an old logic. When a men's football match ends, hundreds of tactical analyses are published within hours. When a women's football match ends, most content stops at the result and emotional stories. This asymmetry doesn't come from women's football lacking tactical depth. It comes from editors not having enough knowledge and patience to dig deeper. I once received a request from an editor: "Keep it short, readers don't care about women's football tactics." I refused. If I had accepted that simplification, I would have contributed to maintaining the very prejudice I was trying to break.

At 56, I still ask one question: where are women scoring in this game? Not just on the pitch, but in editorial rooms, in organizing committee meetings, in decisions about broadcasting rights allocation. Change is happening, slowly but genuinely. More female sports journalists are being assigned to cover men's football matches, and they are the first to ask questions about women's football's presence in news coverage. When the old wave retreats, I step onto a new platform, and my voice remains my own. And I believe the next generation will no longer have to insert women's records into men's football news feeds, because they will have their own.