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The conclusion brings together the narratives and empirical case studies that have been presented in the collection and propose future research agendas. We conclude that emergent, and established, professionalisation of women's sport will continue to pose challenges that need to be made visible. We discuss a need for continued engagement in research media coverage, in all its formats, given its centrality to the commercial success of sport. We also articulate that experiences in and of women's professional sport are characterised by gender inequities. We advocate that it is not enough to think about women's professional sport as the little sister of men's professional sport are argue that there is work to be done for researchers in this area.

Association Football (football) is currently recognised as the world's most popular women's sport (Andersson & Barker-Ruchti, 2019; Dunn & Welford, 2017). In this chapter, we build upon a Foucauldian-informed feminist body of work (e.g. Barker-Ruchti & Tinning, 2010; Liao & Markula, 2009; Markula, 2003) to analyse the impact of the ‘shift in approach and purpose’ in the women's game (Rosso, 2010). And, in doing so, seek to explore how the relations of power operating in the context of women's elite and professional football have changed over the last 20 years. Moreover, we consider the implications of these changes for both elite female players and those responsible for their development and welfare. To achieve our aim, we compare the experiences of two players (Christine and Maria, pseudonyms) from opposite ends of the last 20 years, all the while recognising that the partial and situated insights we provide in relation to these shifts are inevitably tied to the intersections of marginalised (female) and privileged (white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class) subject positions.

This chapter examines the interconnected social, political and economic forces that are shaping and reshaping contemporary football. It identifies drivers but, critically, attributes commercialisation to structural (and not solely) economic differentiation, including the greater interdependence of the sexes in the game. First is a brief overview of the growing significance of women's football within the global sport system. Two zones of prestige exist currently for the professional game, in the United States and England. Questions are raised concerning the uneven effects of commercialisation and the contested values that underpin changes in the women's game. The chapter concludes with some reflections on future developments and research avenues that might be explored.

On 2 February 2020, 99.9 million viewers learnt about the Women's Football Alliance (WFA), the largest women's American football league in the United States, when former player Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl. In the same month, the WFA announced several corporate partnerships and a new television deal with statements that connected the support for women's American football to advancing gender equity.

This chapter examines the professionalisation of women's American football in the United States through the lens of mediated visibilities. We use the term mediated visibilities, rather than media coverage, to move beyond how journalists are writing about sport (or ‘covering’ sport) and account for the complex ways in which content about women's sport circulates across producers and platforms in the digital media environment. In particular, our analysis examines the opportunities and limitations of digital media in the process of (semi-)professionalisation of women's American football.

The WFA joined the broader ‘momentum’ of women's sport in the United States as both the league's social media platforms and the sponsors aligned their messages with cultural narratives around women's sport to invoke gender equity in promoting women's American football. Moreover, the league positioned the strategy to enhance mediated visibility the sport as an integral step in the process of (semi-)professionalisation. However, the role of the WFA's digital media platforms alone appears to be limited without substantial structural change.

In recent decades, significant advances have been made at both the grassroots and professional levels of women's ice hockey in North America. Yet, despite recent achievements, such as the establishment of ‘professional’ leagues, and compelling narratives of progress, athletes and league organisers still face significant challenges. The barriers women face, such as reduced access to resources and opportunity, lack of legitimacy, and league instability, and a continued reliance on relationships with men's sporting leagues, such as the National Hockey League, suggest that women's ice hockey is accommodated into the game in ways that reinforce and perpetuate systems of gender, reproducing a neoliberal notion of failure. Using Halberstam's (2011) notion of failure as the place from which reform and transformation can take place, we offer a critical reading of the (re)formation of the National Women's Hockey League and the developments in women's (semi)professional ice hockey in North America.

In 1993, the Sports Council's new policy document, Women and Sport, recommended that all national governing bodies of sport ‘establish a single governing body’. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, almost all women sports that were administered separately to their male counterparts therefore ‘merged’ with the men's governing body: squash in 1989, football and athletics in 1992, lacrosse and hockey in 1996 and cricket in 1998. In practice, these mergers became ‘takeovers’, whereby female administrators were forced to cede governance of their sports to male-run bodies whose priority and focus remained men's sport. Work has been conducted on the impact of this process on individual sports, while internationally, studies of similar amalgamations between men's and women's sporting organisations have found that such processes increase male control at the expense of female autonomy. However, there has been no study which considers the impact of the Sports Council's policy on the UK sporting landscape as a whole. Via use of oral histories and archival material, this chapter seeks to begin this process, assessing the impact of a government policy of forced integration of women's and men's sport, which still has potent ramifications in sport governance today.

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study that analyzed use of traditional and targeted sponsorship approaches by eight companies involved in the 1998-99 Canadian Hockey Association women's corporate support program. The study found the sponsors used methods from direct and relationship marketing to support corporate goals of sales, advertising, community-involvement and brand image and awareness. Several factors are discussed that would improve the sponsorships' effectiveness in the women's market.

This chapter examines English print media coverage of the England national women's football (soccer) team during the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. It draws on a content analysis of five English national newspapers from 24 May to 14 August 2015. A wide body of research has demonstrated that women's sport continues to be greatly underrepresented in the media but our findings are important as they demonstrate that during this tournament, women's football received a significant amount of print media coverage and that this coverage was largely positive. We argue that we have entered a new age of media coverage of women's sport in the United Kingdom, with a shift towards greater gender equality, and position this within the context of emerging professionalisation in the sport.