Football, gender and sexism: The ugly side of the world's most beautiful game.

The last 10-15 years have seen substantive claims of an apparent shift in the institutional support for women’s football by the sport’s governing bodies, a shift that is being somewhat echoed in more recent commitments from some major television broadcasters of the sport. However, while the women’s game has seen increasing audiences and more media attention, research suggests that a deeply embedded antipathy to it continues to permeate throughout the sport. In this chapter, we discuss some of the major factors and practices that serve to maintain the traditional gendered order of football (aka soccer), how these connect to football as a powerful and global ideological site, and the extent to which a shift in gendered representation was evident in the British television coverage of the 2017 Women’s Euros.