As a current football fan who resisted paying any mind to the sport for the first 18 years of my life, I completely understand why so many feminine people are put off by the National Football League (NFL). There are grown men crying and screaming, their mood for the week either made or ruined by the 53 men on their favorite team, aggressive tackling, weird rules. And every time you try to watch, the men in the room make you feel like a toddler for not knowing what a ‘down’ is. Why wouldn’t we focus our minds elsewhere and consider football some inaccessible male interest? This article is not meant to write off the roughly 84 million passionate and lifelong female NFL fans as nonexistent, but rather to help guide women and feminine people with curious yet hesitant attitudes towards the sport due to its complexities and overly masculine exterior. Whether you are curious about football and are finding a place to start or don’t really care but are curious why many men are so invested in this while many women remain apathetic, I hope to help clear things up.
In my freshman year of college, after years spent mocking football with my mother, I was invited to a bar to watch the Buffalo Bills play the New England Patriots at a Bills backer bar in Boston. Plagued by homesickness, I put on my one Bills sweatshirt and went to The Harp where I watched my hometown team crush their divisional rivals 47-17. For the first time, I understood the feeling of getting filled with pride for your home city through the actions of dozens of men in tights tackling each other on a TV screen. Football no longer seemed like one big masculine joke. While I learned how it felt to watch your team win, I barely knew anything about how the game worked. The truth is, you don’t need to know much detail about the game to enjoy watching football. The best way to learn is to understand the bare basics and pick up the rest as you go along depending on what’s relevant in each game. You don’t need to know every penalty, type of defense or player’s role to sit down with your friends and enjoy a game.
Women are not socialized to play a wide variety of sports from a young age in the same way that men and boys are, and we don’t deserve to be talked down to for not having an entire novel of rules burned into our minds. For men, playing and discussing sports with their fathers, brothers and friends is an essential facet of their early social bonds, and they can feel pressure to be as skilled and knowledgeable as possible in various sports. For many others, catching up later on when your entire childhood didn’t involve learning football’s ins and outs seems boring or impossible.
Furthermore, among the vast number of women who enjoy football, plenty feel unrepresented or othered by the rest of the fanbase. While it is true that 47% of NFL fans are now women, a closer look at these statistics tells a different story. According to data from Morning Consult, while nearly the same percentage of men and women consider themselves casual football fans, 51% of men consider themselves avid fans with only 24% of women claiming that title. Furthermore, while only 19% of men consider themselves “not a fan at all,” this is true for 42% of women. Despite the face value of this 47% statistic, there is a wide gap in reported interest among the sexes. To their credit, the NFL has attempted to appeal more to their feminine fans. However, their pink bedazzled jerseys have come off more like a fake attempt at inclusion rather than a genuine acknowledgment that nearly half of the NFL’s fanbase is composed of passionate women with deep understandings of the game.
Additionally, it is not encouraging to see how many NFL players treat the women in their lives. Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of violent crimes in the US yet a whopping 55% of total NFL player arrests. Perhaps the dominating male fanbase is a large part of the reason violent and despicable men are often allowed to continue to play professional sports. If more women were involved with and not discouraged by fandoms, maybe the NFL would not feel as empowered to employ men who hurt women. This is not at all to say that women are to blame for these abhorrent statistics; in fact, it is a joint effort between the abusers and the men who gatekeep and over-complicate the sport while wearing the abuser’s jerseys.
These obstacles are not limited to external sources though. As many women and feminine people get labeled as ‘pick-me’s’ for enjoying any number of sports, it makes them not want to discuss such topics in female-dominant settings. Whether you watch football or not, the world needs to be kinder to female sports fans and less discouraging to those looking to learn more. It can be fun for everyone whether you barely know what is happening or know the ins and outs of every game. If there were more female football fans, the sport might be less known for getting people so worked up that they punch holes in walls and, overall, it might feel less daunting to half of the population. Additionally, more feminine people showing interest could lead to more femininity being represented in high-ranking positions within the NFL, making it a less male-dominated environment. As a fan, I would love to see the culture around football move in that direction.
If you want to learn more about the NFL, I encourage you to start without trying to learn a single rule. Instead, just sit down with your friends and family who have a game on, cheer when they cheer and don’t be afraid to ask questions. The rest will come naturally and much faster than you think. There is so much community and camaraderie that comes with football whether you watch alone or with friends and family. Whether it’s a hometown team that helps you bond with everyone you share a city with or a random team you like based on vibes or mascot alone, having something to root for alongside millions of other people is a great feeling. Nobody deserves to feel discouraged from getting involved in this fun fall event. So, if you want to get into football this season, pick a team (preferably the Buffalo Bills) and jump right in!