The British Media’s Attitude to Para Football

Memorable and commemorative, that is how the year has been for the Lionesses and women’s football in this country.

After winning the Euro 2022 final 2-1 in dramatic fashion against Germany, history has been made and the impact it will have on the women’s game for decades to come.

This achievement was achieved despite the FA’s ban on women’s football for 50 years from 1921-1971 which undoubtedly stifled the development of the game.

As the Lionesses catch up to the men in terms of viewership, ticket sales, and funding; it’s becoming more of an attractive proposition, however, this attention has been all well and good, but it has unfortunately exposed some ignorance amongst the media.

A post from Squawka Football highlighted Ellen White’s incredible achievement of reaching 10 goals at major tournaments for England which puts her in an exclusive club with current England captain, Harry Kane and Match of The Day host, Gary Linekar

This prompted a response from Cerebral Palsy England international, Jack Rutter who said in his tweet: “Incorrect. Myself & other disability footballers have scored more in major tournaments for England. The media must do better with this. Take nothing away from the 3 players. But everyone deserves the correct credit for what they have achieved.”

The reaction was majorly positive as many para footballers have gone to several tournaments and haven’t received an ounce of credit nor recognition in the media.

Researching for this article was a struggle, it’s not as simple as searching “England top scorers” and being directed to statistics on the FA or England Football website.

Thankfully, after searching for nearly an hour, I did finally manage to find some stats for just cerebral palsy football - whilst I did come across some pages for blind, partially sighted, and amputee football, the information didn’t contain goal-scorers which was preposterous.

Squawka Football worded the post as, “Only three players England’s history,” which claims that they included all senior level England teams except for the fact they didn’t include any of the para teams which are still funded and play under the English FA name.

If we are truly going to unify all senior levels then Ellen White, Harry Kane, and Gary Linekar don’t close to Jack Rutter’s 16 major tournament goals since 2005 - the most major tournaments would belong to Michael Barker who contributed with 20 goals in the CPISRA World Championships with 11 of them coming in the 2011 edition of the tournament.

The records for goalscorers isn’t l available for tournaments prior to 2005.

Even England Futsal star, Luke Ballinger commented under Jack Rutter’s tweet with: “Know what you mean mate. Just the 60 for me but nothing ever mentioned.”

You can sense in their tweets the despair and frustration that they constantly feel with not receiving the appropriate credit they deserved for their years of service to the country.

As mentioned before, researching for this article was not an easy task, surfing the internet for nearly an hour just to find even a bit of information - you’d think the information would be available on the FA or England Football website, but there’s nothing.

BBC and BT Sports have gone above and beyond with their coverage of The Winter Paralympic Games and the FA Disability Cup Finals have brought in a significant number of viewers, many probably first time - their coverage of those events were handled sensitively and represented all types people which has a knock-on effect for future generations.

So the worry isn’t the demand, over 18% of the UK population is disabled according to some sources - that’s millions of people potentially the future of disability sports and the only way they can know about it and get involved is through the media.

If other media conglomerates can follow in the footsteps of BBC and BT Sports, there’s a bigger audience captured and the future of disability sports will most definitely be in a better state and just maybe the attitude can be stopped.