City Lions Dominate Arsenal With Stunning Performance!
For these fans from the Arsenal Women Supporters Club (AWSC), the match day begins in the pub. That this is noteworthy, in a country whose football traditions are as rich, is, in itself, notable: an indication of changing matchday habits in women’s football post-2022 European Championship victory. AWSC committee member Sam Hanlon, who has attended men’s matches for more than a decade with his family but went to his first Arsenal Women game on his own, organised Sunday’s meet-up.
“The easiest meeting point is a pub, but we want to avoid (the feeling that) you’re here to have a drink; the socialising is the key aspect,” he says. “A pub can feel quite hostile. Most men’s football games are almost all men, but we’re closer to 50/50.
It’s a way to grow the community around matches. For women’s [games], if I didn’t make an attempt to find friends, it was going to be a solo experience. That might have stopped me going.
” Arsenal Women are the game’s foremost case study in growing a returning fanbase — they averaged crowds of 36,836 last season and now play all their Women’s Super League games at the Emirates — and emboldening it to build its own customs, some inspired by men’s football but many servicing a different audience. Equally vital is a core fanbase due to their past successes in the women’s game, tailored marketing, big-name Lionesses and a men’s team for whom rivalries with clubs like Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United helped the women’s team sell out successive home games against those sides. All of which brings us to Arsenal’s opponents on Sunday, the London City Lionesses, and the questions accompanying their arrival in the WSL.
London City’s identity is complex. Born of Millwall Lionesses, based in Bromley — a town at once in Kent and London — and the only WSL team fully independent of a men’s club, they are also the youngest club in the WSL. They are the division’s underdogs as new kids on the block but also its big disruptors, part of businesswoman Michele Kang’s multi-club portfolio.
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