Reach creates seven-strong team to cover women’s football

Reach, the UK’s largest commercial publisher, is creating a dedicated team to cover women’s football following England’s Euro 2022 success.

Reach is forming a seven-strong team of journalists to exclusively cover the Women’s Super League (WSL), the highest league in England.

The team will be dedicated to covering each of the 132 games played in a season, and each of the 12 WSL clubs will be assigned a team member to cover club news throughout the week.

Their stories will appear on the Mirror and Reach’s regional websites local to the clubs – for example Football London, Liverpool Echo, Birmingham Live, Sussex Live, Berkshire Live and Manchester Evening News.

The roles created include a sports editor, chief reporter, club reporters and a social media reporter.

Alice McKeegan, head of football at the Manchester Evening News who is leading the project, said: “England’s success at the Euros this summer has displayed to the country just how good the women’s game is, and we want to ensure our coverage of the sport is first-rate too.

“It’s really exciting to be able to recruit a team of dedicated journalists to expand our coverage and ensure we’re giving our audience what they want.”

The move comes after the success of the Lionesses at Euro 2022, with the victory over Germany in the final attracting 87,192 fans to Wembley Stadium: the highest attendance ever for a Euro final, including the men’s competition. The match was also the most viewed TV programme of 2022 to date and the most-watched women’s football game ever, peaking at 17.4 million views on BBC One.

Reach has steadily increased its coverage of the women’s game – in 2021 it hired an editor to focus on women’s football –and is using the current national buzz around the sport to expand further into the domestic game. It follows a recruitment drive for more than 70 journalists last year to report on sports other than men’s football.

Neil Hodgkinson, audience and content director for sport at Reach, said: “Our strategy is to become a broader church for sports coverage. There are a lot of sports out there other than men’s football and we have seen great results from having extra people writing about F1, tennis, boxing and UFC.

“Coverage of the success of female athletes in tennis, boxing and cricket has also proven popular with readers. Some of our titles have seen particular success here, for example Wales Online’s regular and popular coverage of women’s rugby.

“Increasing our coverage of the WSL and women’s grassroots game is a natural progression. The key thing is to stick with the coverage and show you are as committed as the fans.”

Reach’s sports channels across its national and regional titles reach 13 million people, according to Ipsos iris data cited by the company. Football London by itself is the fifth biggest sports news website in the UK with a monthly audience of 1.2 million people, Press Gazette analysis this month showed.

Each regional title will also cover an opening game of the Women’s Championship, the English second division, this month with each article evaluating the effect of the Lionesses’ success on the league.

Reach is not the first to develop a team exclusively for women’s sport. In 2019 The Telegraph created a four-strong team dedicated to the area, although this was not exclusively aimed at football. Earlier this year Goal and Mundial publisher Footballco created a new social-first brand Indivisa dedicated to the women’s game.

Picture: Reuters/Peter Cziborra