Football has more female fans than ever before but Simon Tindall wonders if they are to likely to take an interest in the women’s game

I’ll watch any kind of football from sons and dads on the beach, pub teams in the park to the Masters tournaments on Sky. But the words “women’s football” get me reaching for the remote as fast as if the continuity man had said Formula One or Open golf. The Women’s World Cup was an opportunity to reassess this position. The manner of the coverage on the BBC and in quality press obliges you to be interested, to view this as a “good thing” – like five fruit and veg a day – as opposed to a “bad thing” to be media‑ignored like speedway, greyhounds or most boxing.

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Another England quarter‑final exit… Anjana Gadgil assesses the progress of the women’s team and explains why the host nation struggles for players despite a population of 1.6 billion

Imagine a Premier League footballer and England international having to scrimp and save to play for their national team. It just wouldn’t happen in the men’s game. But footballers who double up as postwomen, teachers and PAs have to save to go on a week’s package to Marbella, let alone to spend six weeks playing at last month’s Women’s World Cup in China. Arsenal right-back Alex Scott is one example. She teaches sport science at schools in London, but had to take unpaid leave to go to the Far East. Likewise team-mate and football coach Mary Philip, who describes herself as ­“penniless” when she plays for England. She lives on a council estate in north London with her husband and two children and was one of the few players whose family weren’t in the stands for the group-stage games. “We just couldn’t afford it,” she says.

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In the old days you had to wait for the Shoot! questionnaire to find out the likes and dislikes of your favourite players. Now, as Glen Wilson is alarmed to discover, such information is just a click away

Somewhere in my childhood, on a caravan park near Penarth, I kicked a ball about with a kid who told me his uncle was Clayton Blackmore. “Don’t ask my Nan about it,” he said pointing to the beige static home behind him, “she’ll tell you I’m lying.” Obviously I was impressed. As a child, perhaps due to one too many Hot Shot Hamish comic strips, I was convinced that footballers were some sort of super breed; bigger, stronger, more athletic than I could ever be. The fact that someone my age could know or be related to one of these people, even ­Clayton Blackmore, stunned me.

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Concerns over dodgy club owners are not confined to England – and some regions are far worse off. Henry Mance reports from a country where gangsters use drug money to own players and win titles

“I left a message to see if you needed players, because I could get you some, and you’d just have to pay the salary, you understand? The players have a certain gratitude towards me.” A decent offer perhaps, but this is from no agent or chairman. It’s from Jorge 40, one of Colombia’s most feared paramilitary leaders, finding time in a hectic schedule of drugs and violence to dabble in the transfer market. He’s offering a director of his local team, Valledupar, several players on loan from Real Cartagena and América de Cali. The drugs influence is back in Colombian football, if it ever went away.

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Groundtastic, now in its 50th edition, has documented the huge change to British stadiums at all levels over the past 12 years. The fanzine’s co-editor Vince Taylor explains the motivation

For those of us whose pulses quickened at the sight of floodlight pylons towering over neighbouring housetops, and whose idea of bliss was to be stood in the middle of a crowded concrete terrace, the publication of The Football Grounds of England & Wales by Simon Inglis in 1983 was a moment of epiphany. Though it wasn’t quite “the love that dare not speak its name”, nobody before Inglis had articulated this fascination some of us have for football grounds as entities in their own right. He introduced us to Archibald Leitch, the Scottish civil engineer who more or less invented the British football stadium as it existed before the Taylor Report, and also demonstrated that every football ground, no matter how great or humble, generally has an interesting tell to tale.

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