Feminism in FIFA

According to "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture”, by Rakow, women have been excluded in popular culture. In doing so, “men have monopolized, managed, and masculinized human activities, excluding women from many spheres of creativity and from many forms of amusement and leisure activities” (Rakow 203). This can be related directly to sport, and to the world famous covers on FIFA games for Xbox and PlayStation.

Here, we see the FIFA cover for 2015/16 football season. The main cover, as shown, entails Lionel Messi on his own. But, isn’t there a women’s equivalent of Lionel. Furthermore, the football world for women isn't as large but it's large enough for a World Cup to occur every four years. All we see here is a male, arguably the best player in the world, but shouldn’t 
a female represent the female football world. 


Even when searching for FIFA covers online, the search results were dominated with covers of Messi and other players besides him, appealing to the different leagues and teams mainly throughout Europe. I only saw the gender balanced cover when searching specifically for a female cover for the game, demonstrating the influence males have had in disregarding any association of female involvement in an apparent masculine game, unfortunately.

Here we can see how sport, especially soccer has been dominated and controlled by males, excluding the importance of the female game. The president of FIFA is male, along with the majority of the FIFA panel. Isn’t this clear evidence that males have steered a sport away from women, and as a result have not presented a clear picture of the football industry.

In the second image, you can see a special edition cover which displays Alex Morgan, a female football phenomenon. However, this cover isn’t the one exhibited for general sale. Here, we see FIFA covering their tracks and slightly attempting to notice the female football world and the growth it’s gaining. This cover, in fact, is the first FIFA cover with a woman on the front, owing to the success of the United States and the FIFA Women's World Cup gaining over 20 million viewers in the summer of 2015.   

The "Cultural Theory and Popular Culture”, by Rakow, talks about the recovery and reappraisal approach. The question here is given a male dominated culture, how have women been able to express themselves? In answer to this, we can see that women through the development in popularity, such as Alex Morgan, have been able to gain enough recognition to place them on such a popular video game.  As the female football world grows, hopefully sexism will cease to exist among the FIFA ranks, enabling women to receive adequate coverage, demasculinizing a male dominated game.