A Life of Football by Accident: The FA's Director of the Women's Professional Game Kelly Simmons Talks Goals

A life of football by accident: The FA's director of the women's professional game Kelly Simmons talks goals By Heather McLean, Editor

Monday, November 11, 2019 - 12:19

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Kelly Simmons, director of the women's professional game at The FA

The Football Association (FA) established the Women's Super League in 2011, and in 2018 it went fully professional for the first time. Overseeing the development of women's and girl's football under the auspices of the FA is Kelly Simmons, director of the women's professional game.

Simmons is focused on the entire gamut of the domestic women's professional game, from grass roots growth and encouraging girls to play, to the top level league that is taking this sport into the realms of mainstream popularity.

Women's sport has got a lot more press than usual this year. On the significance of the Women's World Cup to the overall popularity of the women's game, Simmons comments: It was massive. The semi final moment is the second most-watched television programme of any sport on television this year [following the Rugby World Cup final]; 11.7 million were watching the semi final. Why's that important? Because we've been trying to break down cultural barriers as we've developed the game. We've come a long way, but there are still perceptions that it's a male sport or women's football isn't great to watch, or whatever these stereotypes and perceptions are, -they have just been smashed through these global and domestic audiences.

FIFA announced their audience [reach for the Women's World Cup 2019] recently and globally it was over a billion [1.12 billion viewers watched coverage of France 2019], and that means a huge audience has seen top quality women's football and has been coming back in more and more numbers throughout that tournament. They've seen it, they've enjoyed it, and they're engaged in it.

Capitalising on momentum

The Women's World Cup was a key moment in the growth of the women's game, says Simmons: I think when we look back at 2019, we're going to go, wow, something really happened there'.

She adds that the Women's World Cup is now followed by another two events that are enabling her to continue to push the women's game through the FA: We've had three incredible years, with the World Cup in a great time zone having been held in France, we've got the Olympics and we've qualified which is fantastic so we've got that to look forward to, and then we've got the UEFA Women's Euro Championships in England which is going to be phenomenal and the BBC have bought the rights and it's going to be huge.

So it's not just a one off and capitalising on that, she notes, referring to the Women's World Cup, It's three years with fantastic pinnacle events too hook everything to, and make sure we keep women's football high and visible in the public eye.

On 2 September this year the FA launched FA Player, a new live streaming platform, exclusively dedicated to women's football. FA Player, which is free to use and available online and via a dedicated mobile app, provides live access to over 150 domestic women's football fixtures throughout the season. BT Sport, host broadcaster for the Women's Super League, and the BBC are continuing their regular coverage with over 30 live games televised across the 2019-20 season, with FA Player created to broaden access beyond traditional channels free of charge in a single destination.

As to why it decided to go over the top (OTT) with its own channel, Simons says the FA noticed through research it carried out internally that more could be done to bring the sport to fans. She explains: From our research, we were only getting max two games out a week, and not every house has BT Sport so people don't know where to go to find women's football. We thought an OTT offering was really important as part of building that fan base.

The FA have already beaten their internal target of people registering for the FA Player channel by the end of the year, from its launch in September. However, says Simmons, we smashed it in the first week. She adds: We didn't have a lot to benchmark that figure against, but we smashed it so we're now resetting the targets for the year.

The launch of FA Player and production of those extra games has already paid off, increasing the women's games reach. Since the channel launched, the FA has already signed three overseas TV distribution deals for the content on the channel and it is tendering for an agency to help it do further deals, and, there are more in the offing, Simmons adds. This is starting to produce revenues in terms of overseas TV rights, says Simmons. We're really pleased!

FA Player's fast growing popularity is also helping the FA to set the women's game up so that, like the men's leagues, it is possible for clubs in the lower leagues to get promoted into the professional top tier.

Simmons explains: [FA Player has] also giving us the opportunity to put a weekly FA Women's Championship match on, which is really important because it's really vital we support the second tier clubs to enable them to grow their audience, attendances and revenue, because otherwise you'd end up with a closed league by accident; if you don't support both [tier one and tier two] leagues, you'd struggle to promote teams and meet the criteria for professional football because the gap [between semi-professional and professional football] would end up being too big. So [FA Player] has helped us get Championship games out there as well.

The Women's World Cup was a key moment in the growth of the women's game, says Simmons: I think when we loo

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