ABSTRACT
‘The future of football is feminine’, promised FIFA President Blatter after the final curtain had fallen at the USA Women’s World Cup in 1999. Four years later, when the International Olympic Committee bestowed the special award for ‘Women and Sport’ upon the 2003 World Cup finals, he renewed the pledge. A year later, when the Asian Football Confederation celebrated its 50th anniversary, the courteous chief representative of the world football federation claimed that the future of football was in Asia. Whether the future prospects of the people’s game now actually will be with women or in Asia, both phrases allude to the expansionary will of football’s control body into regions, markets and consumer segments that have been so far largely excluded from the ‘house of football’, another bright catchphrase coming from the Blatter presidency of FIFA. As with the conventional phrase of the ‘people’s game’, the house of football wantonly conceals the indisputable fact of the marginalization of close to half the people of the world. In most parts of the globe, gender discrimination is the most evident rupture in the ideology of the people’s game. Gender inequality in football is particularly noticeable in those societies where football has emerged as the preferred leisure activity of the male working and middle classes.
