WSL stars are attracting tabloid attention and it’s affecting their private lives

The women’s football tabloid column inches are growing and so is the speculation around their private lives.

Not too long ago, former Arsenal and England player Alex Scott was under the intense spotlight with photographers clamouring to get pictures of her with new partner, singer Jess Glynne. The paparazzi regularly manage to track down England international Ella Toone with boyfriend Joe Bunney.

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During the World Cup this summer, Twitter and YouTube feeds went wild trying to dissect what was happening between Republic of Ireland internationals Katie McCabe and Ruesha Littlejohn.

Last week, newspapers ran multiple articles on Chelsea striker Sam Kerr’s engagement to Gotham FC midfielder Kirstie Mewis.

Some Women’s Super League (WSL) players are reaching mainstream celebrity status, which is no doubt helping to raise the game’s profile and grow attendances, but the increased attention has come rapidly and is unrestrained, blurring the line between players’ public and private lives.

Since the WSL’s first season in 2011, the accessibility of its players has been central to the league’s appeal. The understanding that stars will make themselves available for pictures and autographs after matches became a unique selling point in contrast to Premier League players who felt untouchable since money began to flood the game. But the appeal has grown an edge.

“There’s this real dark dynamic in women’s football where players are expected to carry the weight of the game on their shoulders,” says Alex Culvin, a former midfielder for Liverpool who is now head of strategy and research for women’s football at FIFPro, the global players’ union.

“The survival of the game depends on the players, but beyond what they do on the pitch. When I first played in the FAWSL 10 years ago, it was written into our contracts that we had to stay behind to sign autographs. There was no maternity pay in there.”

“We know the way the world works: you have to have influencers,” said Manchester United manager Marc Skinner.

“The modern generation of players are massive influencers towards the growth of our game. We bind to people, right? We always have to have a hook and it’s usually either a win, a big moment that changed your life or winning the league for the first time.

“You associate and attach to the personalities of those players. That drives interest. My job is to make sure that the football element remains because you have to keep getting better as footballers. There’s a very delicate balance because it will intrude at times. It’s part and parcel of the learning process as we go through this phase.”

All of this begs the question: how much are players expected to show of themselves with the justification of growing the game?

Doubtless, the game benefits from them sharing their personal lives willingly. Of her same-sex relationship with club team-mate Ann-Katrin Berger, England and Chelsea defender Jess Carter said in 2021: “By seeing that it’s normal and you can be whoever you want to be, (we) show younger people that it’s OK to be you.”

Problems emerge when the wider world speculates over players’ sexualities. The WSL’s insular nature, particularly in its pre-professional era when there were few boundaries between players and fans, lent itself to open secrets.

Scott’s previous relationship with team-mate Kelly Smith, for instance, was discussed for years on gossip forums before Scott wrote of it in her 2022 autobiography, How (Not) To Be Strong. TikTok and Tumblr have picked up where the message boards left off.

But there is an even darker side to the intrusion into female footballers’ private lives.

Former Charlton Athletic and Crystal Palace midfielder Leigh Nicol endured one of the most harrowing breaches of privacy when an iCloud hack resulted in nude photos and videos, shot when she was just 18, being posted on porn sites.

Now 28, Nicol works with B5 Consultancy, which specialises in providing player care and strategic advice on protecting privacy and reputation. B5 Consultancy is headed by sports and media lawyer Matt Himsworth, who has previously acted for Premier League and Championship footballers.

“In women’s football, everyone in the inner circle knew everything about everyone,” says Nicol. “That’s just how it went. Now, it’s not an inner circle. Women’s Championship players still go unnoticed a lot at the moment, unless something really bad happens, but their relationships with each other are of huge interest.

“Whether (the rumours say) you are or aren’t in a relationship with that person, you don’t want people talking about your private life. You’ve then got the pressure of young people’s families who may not know that they are in a same-sex relationship.

“They don’t need things on Google or Twitter. They don’t need their family going through that if things behind closed doors aren’t comfortable.”

Nicol advises elite female players to be smart: don’t go on dating apps, don’t go on dates in busy areas. “You’ve got really strange forums and blogs that post certain rumours. It’s weird and an invasion of your private life.”

The difference now is that the national media is watching, too.

To an extent, this is not new. As the women’s football author and academic Carrie Dunn observes in her 2016 book Football and the Women’s World Cup: Organisation, Media and Fandom, coverage of players’ lives beyond the pitch — of how former Lionesses and Chelsea defender Claire Rafferty continued to work as a financial analyst even after reaching the 2015 World Cup — helps maintain the illusion that players are relatable and accessible.

Other players had their achievements at that tournament contextualised by their personal lives: many of the pieces on former England internationals Casey Stoney and Katie Chapman focused on their roles as mothers over their on-field performances. Their private lives became public property but within a sporting framework.

In 2023, coverage has shifted and, as a whole, echoes how tabloids’ front pages have profiled men’s football. Consequently, some coverage is salacious. “‘World’s sexiest footballer’ Alisha Lehmann reveals an A-list celebrity offered her £90,000 for a one-night stand… and drops a hint at the identity of the ‘well-known international’ star”, read one October headline, referring to Aston Villa’s Swiss forward.

That tone is intriguing given our wider culture purports to be reckoning just how lurid and unforgiving the tabloid media was in the early 2000s.

“The names in women’s football are so well-recognised that they can be used in headlines,” adds Dunn. “That’ll be a good thing. Some of that kind of personality-based, individual coverage can be slightly prurient. A lot of the stuff about Lehmann, for example, is not necessarily football-related. The tone of coverage is quite important. Some of it is just clickbait for the sake of being clickbait, rather than genuine interest in women’s football and reporting what’s happening.

“There are always going to be figures in every sport who are more famous than others, whose actions off the pitch draw attention. But I do have a concern about the way some of this type of coverage is presented. There can be this undercurrent of sexualisation or prurience or overt intrusion. In women’s sports, not just women’s football, there is a desire and expectation for female athletes to look a certain way, to act a certain way, and that makes them attractive to the media.”

The media landscape, then, is still working out the best ways of talking about women’s football. Men’s football coverage offers the most obvious template, but is it the most helpful? Did England players anticipate that tabloids would regularly run articles about them?

“We have to protect the players,” says FIFPro’s Culvin, who recalls a scene in Netflix’s docuseries on David Beckham, in which the former England captain leaves his house to a whir of flashbulbs. “That would be my idea of hell. Men’s players are used to this but this is very new in women’s football.

“Without the education and protection from federations, clubs and unions, players are going to be vulnerable. Most of these photographers and journalists are men. If they chase women players down the street, it’s a very different dynamic. Men sometimes have bodyguards or cars waiting outside. Female players can’t afford to. There’s very little protection and education for players about what to do in specific situations.

“As a global labour standard, we are entitled to privacy in the workplace. But for professional footballers, everywhere is the workplace.”

In a rapidly changing landscape, WSL clubs have sought B5 Consultancy’s help and see their female players as needing the same services and support as their male players. That can range from help with legal action to advising players about fake social media accounts or accounts that speculate about their dating lives.

“The game isn’t going in the right direction for the women,” says Nicol. “There’s a lot of bad stuff that we don’t want to carry over that the men unfortunately go through.”

Nicol was working full time but only earning expenses at Charlton for training twice a week when her photos and videos from five years before were leaked in 2019.

“Overnight, I was branded as a celebrity in local newspapers,” she recalls. “No one can prepare you for that moment.”

Charlton, she says, spent “a lot of money fighting one of the main newspapers in this country from printing my name. They knew my name being published in a national newspaper, that my mum would read, was something that I couldn’t (cope with). I wouldn’t have been able to afford a lawyer at that time. I remember saying to the police: ‘If this is printed in this newspaper, I will kill myself’.”

Charlton kept in contact with the newspaper for 48 hours. “It wasn’t an easy process,” Nicol continues. “They had to try to discuss it human being to human being. ‘This isn’t a story with public interest. This is someone’s life you’re messing with. It doesn’t need to be in a national newspaper. Do you understand the implications?’”

The paper relented but the battle persisted. Clubs refused to sign Nicol over fears she would damage their reputation. Videos and images continued to circulate online. She is taking legal action against PornHub over claims the website published her videos without her consent.

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Super-injunctions, though, are expensive; a legal letter alone could cost more than £1,000. “I was a minimal earner,” Leigh says. “I just had to let it come out. A lot of players couldn’t even afford an initial phone call with the lawyer to see where they stand. That’s a chunk of your monthly wage, without even starting the real process.

“Mental pressures come with that, knowing I can’t afford the help my male counterpart would. For the girls, it’s not an option — apart from, maybe, your top one per cent of female footballers. We are not in a position where you can afford to fight the newspaper or get things taken off Twitter or Instagram. The only chance we’ve got at not putting ourselves in that position is by making good choices and minimising mistakes.”

“A standard WSL player probably couldn’t afford someone (from a legal firm),” adds Himsworth. He recalls sending legal letters to several men who shared Nicol’s videos, one of whom rang his office to bemoan that he felt targeted by “‘some millionaire footballer’”. It is not only a misconception but also taps into the belief, Himsworth says, that all of Nicol’s life is up for public consumption.

He continues: “There isn’t a fair match-up between the amount of money the girls are earning versus the amount of attention they’ve got, (compared) with the amount of money the boys are earning with the amount of attention they’re getting. They’re in the public eye in the same way as some of the less-famous Premier League players are and they sell newspapers when people report on their private lives.

“Tabloids have an interest in, and have done for decades, the sexual relations of male footballers and what they’ve been up to. We are now at that point where the tabloids have an interest in female footballers’ sex lives. Public interest only comes in when there is a genuine public interest; it shouldn’t be confused with the public having an interest in it.”

Himsworth brings up the handling of the alleged love triangle between John Terry, his Chelsea team-mate Wayne Bridge and Bridge’s former girlfriend Vanessa Perroncel, widely reported in the British media once a super-injunction was lifted.

“If I were to apply for an injunction to prevent a story coming out about a WSL player having a relationship with another WSL player, I would need to be able to argue that there’s no public interest in it,” Himsworth explains. “The newspapers will probably say: ‘(As an example) the girl you’re in a relationship with plays for Arsenal and you play for Tottenham. There’s a public interest in that because it creates conflicts on the pitch’.

“That argument is a bad one but it’s one the newspaper would try to make. Or they will say: ‘Your Instagram account is full of pictures of you with your girlfriend who plays for Chelsea, and you’re cheating on her with this girl who plays for Arsenal. You can’t tell everyone you’re blissfully happy with Girl A while you’re having a relationship with Girl B. We’re going to run it’.

“It’s really important for the players in the WSL to understand that the more information you put out about your private life, particularly on social media, the more vulnerable your private life is to people looking at it.”

Women’s football still relies on social media to grow and feed its fanbase. Typically, most fans’ relationships with elite sports teams and athletes would be defined as para-social: fans expend emotional energy and interest on players who are unaware they exist, but women’s football bends the two together.

“In a sporting context, it seems like there’s a need for a new definition of these kinds of relationships,” says Nikki Thomas, a PhD student in communications specialising in the relationship between athletes and fans. “Para-social is originally defined as having distance or imagined intimacy. More and more in a social media world, that intimacy is less than imagined. People have the opportunity to interact with athletes in a way they weren’t able to before.”

During the pandemic, players shared footage showing how they kept fit and busy during isolation, all shot in the houses they shared with other players.

“The relationships we form with these professional athletes make us feel some sort of ownership over them, their behaviour and their public personas. Being able to see so much more of these people’s lives makes us more invested in them. Accessibility and social media give us the ability to attach to athletes in a way we didn’t before.”

The WSL will have to navigate this tension as social media remains a cornerstone of its marketing strategy. To what extent do the pictures that players share invite further curiosity and speculation about their private lives?

What complicates this ethical issue is the lingering sense players need to be advertisements for the sport in all areas of their lives; the idea that Earps’ one million TikTok followers will somehow, vaguely, result in greater attendances, increased shirt sales and more kids inspired. Until we demarcate those boundaries more clearly, there are no easy answers to those questions.

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)