I see it daily in the knowledge and passion of the football editors, I see it in positioning of women’s sports stories on the website, I see it in the wordcounts which match those relating to men’s football, I see it in the attentiveness of the sub-editors, I see it in the increasing frequency with which the primarily men’s football journalists dip into covering aspects of the women’s game, I see it in our expanding pool of writers on women’s sport, and I see it, physically, in the Guardian’s HQ where front pages of England’s 2022 Euros victory are pinned to the wall in the offices of both the deputy editor and editor-in-chief.
Across the four-week tournament in Switzerland, the Guardian will be providing you with unrivalled coverage of all 16 teams competing. That includes news, profiles of all 368 players and guides to all 16 teams via our Experts’ Network, interviews, live blogs, the Moving the Goalposts newsletter, match previews reports and analysis, David Squires’ cartoons, the views of serial WSL-winning columnist Emma Hayes, our Women’s Football Weekly podcast, and much more.
All of this is costly and, where many others have cut back, we continue to invest in increasing our coverage of women’s sport because we believe that providing coverage of sport that are representative of 50% of the world’s population is both important and the right thing to do.
It is a responsibility, too. Sport and the media have a reciprocal relationship, we help grow interest in sport and, as that interest increases, the demand for coverage increases with it. Ultimately, we will benefit from the growth of women’s sport as much as women’s sport benefits from our coverage.
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