THIS YEAR WILL see, like every other year since 1993, the release of a Fifa football game.
What will be different this year is that it will feature 12 women’s national teams and, it was revealed today, women on the cover.
In the US, fresh from winning a World Cup, Alex Morgan will grace the cover alongside Barcelona’s Lionel Messi.
In Canada and Australia, the female role will be filled by Christine Sinclair and Steph Catley.
While most have hailed a huge leap forward for women’s football, coming off the back of the biggest female world cup in history, some on the internet have reacted…about as well as you would expect some on the internet to react.
To wit:
Some have accused EA Sports, a company which turns over $4 billion a year and is run by men, of kowtowing to feminists, but most have seen it as what it actually is: a company putting marketable sports people on the cover of a commercial product.
In the US, Canada and Australia, the Women’s World Cup captured public imagination, with the final between eventual winners America and Japan becoming the most watched football game ever in the US.
In England, where the women’s game is still a relative minnow to the men’s, Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson will be shoulder to shoulder with the Argentine genius.
Last year’s version of Fifa had 16,000 players, all of them male. This year’s will have fewer than 300 women. So the men aren’t really under threat.
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