Women’s football has worse problems than Charlie Hebdo’s caustic cover

Few things do more than sport to help you to connect with your body and teach you that so many of the limitations you perceive are only in your mind

My six-year-old daughter, who’s been counting the weeks until she’s old enough to join our local football club, should be able to enjoy playing the game on the same terms as her big brother (Getty)

Had it not been for the furore online, I would not have seen Charlie Hebdo’s front cover this week. Anyone would think they deliberately set out to ruffle feathers. Their response to the Women’s World Cup was a cartoon depiction of a giant vagina with a football stuck in it. It took me a moment to understand the outrage because, at first sight, it looked to me like a drawing of an ear. Once I clocked the buttocks, it made a bit more sense.

Many of us first heard about the French satirical weekly after the horrific terrorist attack in 2015 when 12 staff members, including the director of publications Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, were murdered in their offices by Islamist terrorists. The world stood in shocked solidarity, the internet awash with “Je suis Charlie” hashtags and Twibbons. Charlie Hebdo was not cowed by the attacks and continues to go against the grain, as these pesky satirists are wont to do.

A bit of hasty research has revealed that the graphic on Charlie Hebdo’s cover is a visual reference to the painting L’Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet, who was born 200 years ago this month, and that Charlie Hebdo has a track record of drawing genitalia on its covers and often expresses contempt for football in general, recently depicting a male French international footballer as a vibrator.

Quite honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the intended meaning of the cartoon was or how it might be taken by those in possession of all of the relevant context. Given that I spent a bit of time identifying it as “not an ear”, I’ll have to leave it to others to take a strong moral stance on the cartoon itself.

Happily, we can find plenty of unambiguous contempt for women’s football closer to home. Given that Fifa is an organisation that had to be dragged kicking and screaming from under the oily wing of its former president Sepp Blatter – a man so comically unreconstructed that his big idea to get professional women footballers taken more seriously was for them to wear hotpants – it’s perhaps unsurprising that its flagship women’s tournament, the Women’s World Cup, always seems to unleash a minor stampede of charmless berks who justify their needy mockery by reference to the supposed gulf in quality between women’s and men’s sports.

Well, let’s say that they’re right: that the standard of women’s sport is, objectively, vastly inferior across the board. I don’t believe that is actually true, but nor do I want to spend my evening fielding 46 functionally identical tweets telling me all about the time that Martina Navratilova lost in three sets to a kiln-dried log with a stick-on beard, so let’s just say that it is.

Does it matter? I don’t think so.

Of all people, fans of men’s football – happy as they are to follow lower-league clubs around the country, quite irrespective of the likelihood that one of the players might begin a dribble in central midfield and finish it in the outer reaches of the car park – ought to sympathise with the idea that a spectator’s emotional investment in sport, especially football, is not all about absolute levels of skill. It is also, crucially, about a sense of belonging.

So forgive me if I don’t much care whether Marta plays football to the same standard as Messi. What matters far more to me is that young girls – by which I mean the lucky few who’ll play in future World Cups and the rest who won’t – will see women who’ve reached the top of the game through a combination of extreme dedication and talent, and will fall asleep giddily dreaming about pulling off their own improbable feats of skill and teamwork.

Not to mention that my six-year-old daughter, who’s been counting the weeks until she’s old enough to join our local football club, will be able to enjoy playing the game on the same terms as her big brother without worrying about whether she and her mates are ever going to develop the upper body strength to go toe-to-toe with Romelu Lukaku.

I’m often asked who inspired me to be a comedian. No one inspired me to want to do it – I just always needed to and the reasons for it are probably best left to a psychiatrist to explain – but many people inspired me to gather up the courage to do it, and they were not necessarily other comedians.

I was 13 when Fatima Whitbread won gold in the javelin at the European Championships in Stuttgart. The fact that she was a woman, was so celebrated in her sport, and was so unbelievably strong and focused opened doors in my own mind to possibilities that I hadn’t previously known were there.

The following year, she was all over the TV and the papers again when she won the World Championships in Rome. Who could have known that she would inspire a shy, chubby, Iranian kid in west London to wisecrack for a living?

But few things do more than sport to help you to connect with your body and teach you that so many of the limitations you perceive are only in your mind.

Those who deride women’s sporting tournaments today remind me of the numpties who used to go the bar when a female comedian came onstage. They too will find themselves a dying breed, left far behind, choking on dust, as the world leaps forward.