Action Replay: Get your kit on (2026)

The Action Replay column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last year an American athlete suffered an unfortunate mishap in a 400 metre race, when his penis appeared from his shorts. He struggled to push it back in, and did indeed win the race. This illustrates the point that sportspeople often need to wear rather brief outfits that do not impede their movements. And, of course, it is mainly women who have to put up with media attention to such matters.

For instance, in the recent Commonwealth Games, there was much hoo-ha about the dresses worn by the Australian netball team. The dresses tended to ride up at the slightest movement and the players had to keep tugging them down. The players, however, seemed more blasé about this than some of the supporters. It has been suggested, though, that girls might be put off playing the sport if it means wearing inappropriate outfits.

A few years ago Norway’s female beach handball team were fined because their players at the European championships had worn shorts instead of bikini bottoms, as specified in the rules. But then the rule book was changed to allow shorts, with no mention of bikini bottoms. Men players, incidentally, had to wear shorts that were at least ten centimetres above the knee.

In Action Replay for June 2011, we commented on similar issues, including the requirement that women beach volleyball players must wear bikini bottoms with a maximum size width of seven centimetres.

These issues have certainly not gone away since then. The European Broadcasting Union recently issued guidance about sexualising images of female athletes. This included avoiding low camera angles that can result in compromising scenes, for instance of long jumpers or pole vaulters, and also slow-motion replays that serve little technical purpose. According to one long jumper, some camera angles may have ‘serious long-term effects on [an] athlete’s mental health’, with abuse on social media taking place.

The incident mentioned in our first paragraph was shown in high-definition replays, but clearly it is women who are subjected to the most unfortunate experiences in connection with sports outfits. A reflection of the sexualisation of women in society, sadly.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Ads and roses (2025)

The Action Replay column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September the Red Roses won the World Cup. More fully, England won the Women’s Rugby Union World Cup. The tournament was held in England, and England were the favourites, so the result wasn’t a great surprise. Nevertheless, it did lead to a great deal of celebration and excitement at the victory, but also at what it showed about the growing interest in women’s spectator sport. The final was the most-watched rugby match on TV this year. There has been a lot of fuss about the likely ‘legacy’ of the success, with more people watching and, in particular, more women and girls playing rugby at the grassroots level.

For a variety of reasons: lacking confidence, having fewer opportunities at school, or spending more time on family responsibilities, for example, women and girls are on the whole less involved in sport and physical activity than men and boys are, hence Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign.

The most obvious example of the increased interest is football, where England’s national team, known as the Lionesses, have twice won the European Championship, and most professional clubs now have women’s teams too. London City Lionesses aren’t linked to another club, but formed as a breakaway from Millwall Lionesses.

There has, of course, long been a media interest in women’s sports, but this has been primarily in individual events such as athletics, gymnastics, swimming and tennis. For whatever reason, team sports have lagged behind, with the possible exception of hockey and netball. Only in the last couple of decades have team sports attracted more attention.

Twelve years ago no women’s national cricket team had professional contracts, and England players had to fly economy class to major tournaments. This year the fifty-over Women’s World Cup was played in India, with a total prize money of nearly $14m (which was more than that for the most recent corresponding men’s World Cup).

A specific indicator of the growing interest in women’s sport is in advertising, where many brands have begun to focus more on sports adverts that deal with products aimed at women, from perfume and jewellery to shampoo. And women athletes now appear more often in the adverts, something that sportsmen, especially athletes and footballers, have been doing for some time. Last year’s Paris Olympics was a good example of more woman-focused advertising. Nike, for instance, has increased its spending on marketing in order to compete with ‘upstart’ rivals. And it’s not just advertising, as broadcasting rights for women’s sports have become more valuable too.

It’s good to see more people, whatever their age and gender, participating actively in sport but, as so often, there are other interests at stake too.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Lions and lionesses (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

High drama last month as the England team lost in the European Championship football final, and the press agonised about ‘heartbreak’ and ‘devastation’ amid photo spreads of downcast faces and slumped shoulders. ‘Everyone was truly gutted’, said one player. Well, perhaps gutted is the wrong word. Gutted is being made redundant, or homeless, or being turned down for an operation, or having to face a Job Centre inquisition or go to a food bank three times a week. These affable young men get paid around £200,000 a week, while their manager earns £5m a year. The poor lambs will no doubt get over their melancholy.

The press were inconsolable though. How much longer does England have to wait for a Euro or World Cup title, they sobbed. It’s been 58 years!

But wait, what about when England won the European Championship in 2022? Don’t the women count? Oh dear, this is awkward. The women’s game is not the same, you see. There are even those who mutter that women don’t really play football, they play at football. Perhaps those critics don’t realise that women’s football used to be hugely popular and drawing crowds of 50,000 until it was summarily banned by the all-male FA in 1921, supposedly for being too unladylike, but really for eating into the FA’s profits. Even today there’s a built-in bias. At a UK average height of 5’3″, women have to play on the same standard pitches with the same goalmouths as average 5’9″ men, meaning that they have to work harder than men to play the same game (tinyurl.com/mrxvxyzw).

As a reminder, England’s women managed to do what its ‘young lions’ couldn’t do in two generations, beating Germany to the title in front of a mixed stadium crowd of 87,000 ecstatic, flag-waving patriotic loonies. Now there’s nothing but silence and collective amnesia. 58 years, wails the press. The women ‘lionesses’ who held up the trophy to that deafening applause must view all this in bafflement. “Er, hello… hello?”

But seriously, some women have bigger things to worry about than equality on the pitch, like getting a post-footy kicking from violent spouses. A 2013 Women’s Aid survey showed a rise of 38 percent in domestic violence incidents when England lost a major game. And, tragic but true, they’re not even safe when the match goes the other way. A 2022 report from the Warwick Business School notes a 47 percent increase in domestic violence whenever England wins a World Cup or Euro match.

The Independent quotes one woman: ‘So now I don’t follow any football, my fiancé is not into football and if I’m being honest I don’t think I ever would have got with somebody who had a big interest in football because it’s just left me scarred and for me it was just filled with fear, and fear of what mood he was going to come home in, and just walking on eggshells.’ To underline the message, Women’s Aid took the Baddiel and Skinner Three Lions song tag ‘Football’s coming home’ and turned it into the darkly sinister ‘He’s coming home’.

Women aren’t the only ones who need fear the outcome of football matches. Many sports fans, watching the England side’s successful five-out-of-five spot kicks against Switzerland in the quarter-final penalty shootout, will have remembered the sickening racism following the failure of three players (all of them black) to score in a similar shootout against Italy in 2021. The three players endured hideous online abuse that resulted in a police investigation and 11 arrests. Tory politicians including the Home Secretary Priti Patel duly weighed in with official condemnation, after having previously scoffed at the England team ‘taking the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter, describing the action as wokism and ‘gesture politics’. Justifiably incensed, footballer Tyrone Mings scored a sizzling counter-strike on Twitter: ‘You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens’.

And indeed it did happen. A study by a number of universities showed a 30 percent rise in racial hate crimes in London in the weeks following that match. The researchers were interested to know if such ‘trigger events’ caused increased incidents generally, or in a more uneven and localised way. In fact the increases were seen most in boroughs already known for such violence: ‘This supports the assumption that trigger events do not have a homogenous effect on societies, but rather reinforce existing attitudes.’ Well no surprise there. Guns only shoot people if they’re already loaded. One scrap of positive news is that the reverse might have some effect too: ‘The Egyptian-born, Muslim striker “Mo” Salah joined Liverpool FC in 2017, which, according to a different study, led to a significant decrease in Islamophobic violence and attitudes in the city’ (tinyurl.com/y248y54t).

People who follow sport but not politics might believe the one has nothing to do with the other. But sport is political, and politics is often sport. Many stayed up late, or indeed all night, to watch the 4 July general election results come in, as the micro-dramas including the toppling of ‘big beasts’ made for compulsive viewing. Arguably Britain’s first-pass-the-post electoral system is better understood as a championship sporting event than as any serious and legitimate exercise in democracy. And just like a sport, everyone knows it makes no real difference who wins. Monday morning, it’s back to the same old slog.

And that slog is capitalism, the enslavement of the vast majority by a tiny bunch of super-rich crooks. There’s a way to beat that rigged game, but only if the world’s disempowered workers stop growling at each other, and start working as a team with a serious common goal. Let the lions and lionesses come together. Their roar would shake the world.

Paddy Shannon

Action Replay: Short Changed (2011)

The Action Replay column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The laws of football don’t say much about what players can or must wear. Shirt and shorts, no jewellery (on safety grounds), no undershirts that contain advertising (though of course in the professional game the shirts themselves have the sponsor’s name or logo prominently displayed). But in some sports the players’ clothing is a controversial issue – the clothing of women players, we mean.

It was recently decreed that women in badminton tournaments above a certain level must wear skirts, supposedly ‘to ensure attractive presentation of badminton’, which presumably involves making the players look more comely and so enticing more spectators and TV coverage. The ruling means skirts as opposed to shorts, though in fact the new regulations do allow skirts over shorts or tracksuit bottoms, so it’s not clear how effective they will really be.

A picture of a female badminton player which is not from 2011.

Naturally there have been objections, some on religious grounds. Others are not against shorts, just against making them compulsory. It’s probably no great surprise to learn that the whole idea came from a sports marketing firm.

The sport with the most controversial clothing regulations has to be beach volleyball. In 1999 it was decided that both men and women had to wear swimsuits, with women players usually wearing skimpy bikinis. In Olympic events women’s bikini briefs have a maximum side width of 7 centimetres and must be ‘a close fit’. What next? That the players have to be blonde with a bust over a certain size?

In cricket, the Indian Premier League has been featuring cheerleaders in short skirts and with provocative routines. One team recently tried to replace these with traditional dancers wearing saris, but many supporters thought the sari was ‘not sexy enough’.

Sadly the sexism of those who run these sports is often reflected in the attitudes of the paying public.

Paul Bennett