BILLY BREMNER MEMORIAL JOIN OUR CAMPAIGN
Date: 29th October 2024
Joey Barton is a former footballer who has been convicted of two violent crimes and has spent time behind bars. He has also been charged with violent conduct by The FA on three occasions. At a club fancy-dress Christmas party in December 2004, Barton lost it when a youth team player, Jamie Tandy, tried to set his shirt on fire. Tandy was stupid in the extreme, but Barton was equally dumb, retaliating by stubbing out a lit cigar in Tandy’s eye, causing a burn to his eyelid. And if that’s not bad enough, Barton, for reasons presumably only known to himself, was dressed as Jimmy Saville.
Mr Barton has subsequently made a career of sorts out of misogynistic abuse of women footballers on social media. Earlier this year, he took aim at a teenage goalkeeper, playing for the women’s team of one of Scotland’s senior clubs. His online comments horrified the vast majority of those who saw it. Yet he’s not alone.
During the 2023 Women’s World Cup, one in five players received discriminatory, threatening or abusive messaging. These female footballers were 29% more likely to receive online abuse compared to their male counterparts during the 2022 Men’s World Cup finals. Players from the United States and Argentina received the highest volume of abuse and in the final, between England and Spain there were 637 abusive messages sent.
A study by the University of Stirling Management School and others of the TikTok accounts of Manchester United and Burnley showed “that sexist comments were apparent in all TikTok posts containing female football players, with some also containing more aggressive misogynistic comments.”
The latest report by FIFA, analysing over 5 million posts in different languages across a variety of social media platforms revealed that over half of the abuse faced by female footballers was homophobic, sexual, and sexist.
We like to think that we’re different in Scotland, somehow better than the rest. Is this true of our attitudes towards women footballers, fans and referees?
Female referees, physios and other club officials have also been on the receiving end, particularly of sexist chanting from the ‘lads’ in the crowd. One of the undoubted pioneers of women referees was Morag Pirie, who refereed a Highland League match between Huntly and Wick Academy on 2nd August 2003; the first time a woman had controlled a semi-pro game in Scotland. A few months after making her debut as a senior referee, she ran the line in a match between Albion Rovers and Montrose. Albion Rovers’ manager, Peter Hetherston, was sent to the stand for his comments to her, but doubled down on them afterwards, making it clear that, in his view, there should be no place for women in football, stating, “She should be at home making the tea or the dinner for her man who comes in after he has been to the football.” Even though he claimed this statement was merely a joke, the SFA didn’t see it as such and Hetherston faced a disrepute charge, but he resigned before the hearing took place.
Are we any better today? The SFSA is going to conduct a major study, asking female fans, players and officials about their experience of social media. Conducted by our Lead on Women’s football, Sinead Ramsey, we’ll be running a survey over the next few weeks and hope to report our findings in January. We’d encourage everyone in the women’s game to share the survey link and to get their female friends to take part.
Alastair Blair, Director of Operations, SFSA
Posted in: Latest News