ONE of the most successful sports teams on the planet, Olympique Lyonnais Feminin, will continue their quest for a fifth consecutive Women’s Champions League title tomorrow night when they take on Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals in Bilbao.

Lyon will be aiming to reach their ninth final in 11 years, having won six of them, building on a dominance reflected domestically. Formed by the club’s owner Jean‑Michel Aulas back in 2004, they won their first French league title in 2007 and have won it every year since.

Despite their unmatched success in the world’s most popular sport, much about Lyon might not be so familiar with even the most ardent football followers, and even those with interest in the women’s game may not have seen them play much football.

While men’s football is everywhere all of the time, there is a lack of coverage across the board in the women’s game. It’s something that is slowly changing, but chances to showcase the sport are still being missed.

Women’s Champions League games are being shown on TV, albeit behind a subscription paywall, and are a chance for the game to take some of the spotlight — but it is an opportunity too rarely capitalised upon.

Following the disruption of sport and sporting coverage as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, there was a huge desire from fans to access some kind of live sport during and after periods of lockdown, even if some of the participants were unfamiliar.

Lyon players such as Wendie Renard, Dzsenifer Marozsan and Eugenie Le Sommer should be familiar, but despite being among the biggest stars in one of the world’s most successful sports teams, they are still far from household names.

The names of other Lyon players, Lucy Bronze and Alex Greenwood, might be more widely known. Why? Because they were part of England’s World Cup squad in a tournament covered widely on freeview television during 2019.

But these players go from being on everyone’s screens a lot of the time to being hidden on streaming services or behind subscription TV paywalls which will only be sought out if there is existing interest.

Charlie Dobres, director of Women’s Championship side Lewes FC, believes a chance has been missed to garner interest for women’s football in recent months.

“We feel that over the summer there has been a massive opportunity, which has been missed already, to broadcast women’s football, and indeed other sports, because of the lack of live sport available and the appetite to still watch it,” he told the Morning Star.

“It was a very, very big opportunity to have women’s football played and have it broadcast on some form of free-to-air TV platform, not just streaming and not just on platforms where you have to actively seek it out.

“The crucial thing about coverage is you need to easily be able to find it, and that’s why the Women’s World Cup last summer was so successful in terms of viewing, because you could.”

The current TV deal runs until the end of next season and it’s important that any future deal takes into account the increased popularity of the sport, as demonstrated during the 2019 World Cup, and the rise in quality women’s football has seen during the past few years.

One encouraging sign is that next weekend, the BBC will broadcast the Women’s Community Shield between Chelsea and Manchester City on BBC 1. The game is being played prior to the men’s equivalent which will only be shown on a subscription channel.

Dobres believes that this type of coverage, and the match-day organisation and logistics surrounding it, signals another way to increase TV access to women’s football.

“The opportunity to run men’s and women’s teams on the same day, potentially under the same broadcast infrastructure is there even more now,” he said.

“If you look at what’s happening now with the Community Shield, lo and behold, at Wembley there will be the Women’s Community Shield and then the men’s Community Shield played after.

“When matches are played behind closed doors you don’t have the issue of getting a crowd in, getting a crowd out, getting another crowd in. What you have is an available stadium.

“There won’t be a better season to put all women’s matches in the same stadium as the men’s team. This time around there will be either no or reduced crowd, so it seems to us such an obvious opportunity.

“When you consider the barriers, logistical and financial, have disappeared for doing that, why would you not put the women’s team in the men’s stadium, even just for one season, when it’s empty anyway?”

One of yesterday’s Champions League quarter-finals between Glasgow City and VfL Wolfsburg was shown live on the BBC at 5pm, but you would be forgiven for missing it due to the fact it was only shown on BBC ALBA, the Scottish Gaelic-language channel. But at least it was free-to-air.

While subscription TV services bid huge amounts for the rights for men’s Premier League and Champions League football, costs which end up coming out of the fans’ pockets in some form at some point down the line, women’s football appears to be tailor-made for freeview TV.

“It’s important that any TV deal has a sizeable chunk, if not completely on free-to-air,” adds Dobres.

“This isn’t the stage of the cycle to try to squeeze the biggest amount of money out of it, this is the stage to get it out there in front of people — to build the TV audience we know is there following the Women’s World Cup. People will watch it.

“If it’s on difficult to access paid-for channels it will limit the number of people who can enjoy and discover women’s football, which is really good to watch!”

Many more might discover it this week thanks to a run of Champions League games featuring one of the best teams in the world, a final on Sunday, and a Community Shield match on BBC on Saturday, but after that, it may once again take a back seat. 

Further opportunities to bring women’s football to a wider audience will present themselves in the not too distant future, they just need to be taken.