Can sport save women’s media?
Plus: why you shouldn’t date musicians (at least in my experience)
Hello everybody,
It’s week two of Dry Jan and I am loving it. In an attempt to go the distance, I have decided I must teach myself a new skill, in this case, learning to cook proper curry. Last weekend, I started simple with Meera Sodha’s Mum’s Chicken Curry and this weekend I am tackling Asma Khan’s Macher Jhol, a Bengali fish curry. If you have a brilliant curry recipe that I simply have to try, do share! I am happy to commit six hours of cooking time at this point! Nothing can put me off! My diary is empty!
And like anyone else wiling away Dry Jan, I’ve been watching films. A lot of them. I successfully hounded a friend for their award season screeners and saw Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (completely excellent and 90 minutes: heaven) as well as the one I’ve been most looking forward to, A Complete Unknown (released in the UK next Friday). Ever since I saw pics of Timothée Chalamet in a baker boy hat in Greenwich Village, I’ve been equally excited and nervous for this movie. I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan since I was 13 and I wasn’t quite sure Timmy had what it takes to play him. Boy, was I wrong. He’s marvellous as a witty, brooding, cocky, and, at times, insufferable Dylan (I’ve seen Dylan perform live once, about a decade ago at the Royal Albert Hall, and he played the entire show with his back to the audience). But after watching the film’s love triangle between Dylan, Joan Baez and Sylvie Rosso (a stand-in for Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo) it occurred to me I had some thoughts I wanted to share on dating musicians. More later.
First up, I’d like to talk about (American) Vogue’s new cover stars: three-time Olympic gold medallist Gabby Thomas and superstar basketball player Angel Reese. Vogue is betting big on female sports, as are a lot of women’s media, and it makes sense. Women’s sport has never been so popular. In the US, the WNBA is proving to be more exciting than the NBA. In the UK, the women’s football team often outperforms the men’s. And last summer’s Olympics cemented legend status for some athletes (Simone Biles) while also creating new stars (Keely Hodgkinson). Women have won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year for the last four years in a row (Hodgkinson, Mary Earps, Beth Mead and Emma Radacanu).
I am a huge sports fan. I watched all of England’s matches in the women’s World Cup in 2023, and just about every single game in the men’s Euros last year. I was glued to the Paris Olympics, which was on in the background of my house pretty much all day, everyday. I love Wimbledon, hell I even got into the rugby World Cup in 2023.
These new female stars are truly inspiring, achieving unimaginable things while consistently entertaining us. These are exactly the women we should be looking up to, these are the women we want our children to look up to. And yet… The problem is that, in my experience, female sports stars don’t shift magazines. They don’t persuade readers to click the link. When I worked in women’s media, any interview with a female sports star - no matter how exciting or successful they were - was met with a resounding shrug from readers. For one women’s World Cup we executed a brilliant editorial strategy with some thoughtful, fun and exciting stories. We went to a lot of effort. No one read it. It was the worst performing content of the month, if not the quarter.
And yet the public were tuning into the matches, cheering them on, delighting in their success… but we couldn’t get people to read about the footballers involved. We saw the same thing happen with sprinters and tennis stars. It was a problem. There was a disconnect.
I have my own theories as to why this is. An athlete’s life is so alien to most women, perhaps it’s a relatability issue. Athletes stand for hard work and determination and strength. Is it that the obsessive nature with which they approach their chosen fields is not something that the majority of women can connect with? Do women feel closer to reality TV stars and musicians who are more likely to speak about their beauty regimes and relationships rather than their training programmes? I don’t have the answer.
Then there is the fantasy factor. A lot of women will be envious of the perks afforded to, say, a famous actress: amazing clothes, enviable romances, elegant work events. But not a lot of women fantasise about waking at 5am to lift weights and run track. I’m not saying sports stars are boring, far from it. Simply, one is glamorous and aspirational, the other is, to most people at least, not. It’s relentless hard graft, day in, day out. It’s perhaps why you can get people to read an interview with, for instance, Emily Blunt, but you’d be hard pressed to get anyone to read a profile on Dame Laura Kenny (Britain’s most successful female Olympian of all time).
The reason - I’m guessing - why women’s media would love to make women’s sport feel even more relevant is that there is a lot of money to be made. Corporate sponsors of sporting events are practically throwing cash at women’s media to support the tournaments and the stars. When I worked in women’s media we were often asked by our commercial team if there was some editorial package about an upcoming tournament we had planned as they had huge companies - especially finance and tech ker-ching - who wanted to sponsor the content. If (mostly struggling) women’s media could take a slice of the sporting advertising pie it would be huge for them. According to Vogue Business this week, “For brands, the biggest untapped potential lies in women’s sports, experts agree. Last year sowed the seeds, as the WNBA captured the zeitgeist (and brand dollars) and women’s sports from football to motorsports rose in prominence. In 2024, revenue from elite global women’s sports was projected to reach approximately £1 billion, up over 300 per cent on 2021. This year bodes even better.”
The problem, as I see it, is getting eyeballs on the editorial content. How do we get readers interested in the lives of these women, away from the pitches and courts and tracks?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see this change. The purpose of Vogue’s new covers is a chance to talk about “how sports and fashion fell in love” and Thomas and Reese both look sensational showcasing various looks. This is a good place to start. Fashion allows people to present a more personal, fun version of themselves. These sports stars are not one dimensional beings and allowing them to express themselves through fashion is a great way to get to know these women better, to see them in a different light - out of their kit and away from their teammates and sport.
As well as the Vogue covers, Carine Roitfeld and her son Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld are set to launch a new magazine dedicated to the relationship between sports and fashion this year. Emily Rhodes, creative foresight analyst at trends consultancy The Future Laboratory, told Vogue Business that the relationship between sports and fashion will become “more dynamic” in 2025, “driven by fashion’s increasing focus on functionality and inclusivity, as well as sports’s growing cultural influence”.
Some sportswomen may balk at all this, and would simply prefer to focus on the events. That is fine and obviously their prerogative. But if women’s media is to bet big on sport, for it to be a success for everyone, then they’re going to have to get women to really care about the athletes in a way that hasn’t quite clicked yet (of course there have been some exceptions and women such as Serena Williams and Simone Biles have passed through into pop culture icon status; I’m really talking about slightly lesser known stars). We need to rejuvenate the culture behind women’s sports, the stories that are told, the spaces we allow stars to exist in and be seen in. Newsletters such as Impersonal Foul, Madeline Hill’s sports gossip and culture Substack described as “If Bravo and ESPN had a baby”, does a brilliant job at this. Sorry, but gossip makes you care.
I don’t know how sales of Vogue’s Winter issue will do (although I have noted that the cover announcements on Instagram drew a lot fewer likes than recent cover stars). But maybe that doesn’t even matter anymore. The real win will be the potentially lucrative financial gain to be made from corporate sponsorship surrounding women’s sport. But first women’s publications have to stake a claim.
Maybe things have already begun to change. I last edited a publication in 2022 and since then it feels like women’s sport has made huge strides in terms of the public consciousness. I hope that affection has trickled down to how the public is consuming women’s media. It’s cheering to see these women become cover stars. I just hope people will be reading.
Now, onto A Complete Unknown and why, in my experience, you should think twice before dating a musician.