Southampton & The Sexism Of – Some Of – The Football Press

Editorial | Article posted on January 17th, 2025

Southampton & The Sexism Of – Some Of – The Football Press
By Ian on Jan 16, 2025 in Latest, Opinion, Politics | 2 comments

As the supporters of several different football clubs will most willingly attest, the concentration of too much in one set of hands can have unwanted side-effects. Over the last couple of years, the reputation of the now former Southampton chairman Nicola Cortese had risen from being the man who steadied the club's ship after its flirtation with insolvency several years ago to something approaching a miracle worker. Under his chairmanship, the club rose from League One to the Premier League in successive season, stayed up and has now pushed on to become a comfortably placed mid-table club. Cortese never seemed afraid to take unpopular decisions, either. His decision to sack previous manager Nigel Adkins was highly criticised – including on these very pages – and extremely unpopular at the time, but the appointment of Mauricio Pochettino has turned into one of the Premier League's most notable success stories of the last twelve months.
Happiness at a football club, however, can be a transient experience and the events of the last couple of days allowed the press the luxury of casting the Saints as a "crisis club" for the first time this season. "Southampton were a club coming apart at the seams on Wednesday night after the executive chairman, Nicola Cortese, quit and left the owner desperately trying to convince the manager, Mauricio Pochettino, not to follow suit" sais the Guardian, before going on to further embellish this feeling of impending crisis by falling back upon quotations from the manager dating from last May in which he said that, "I would not understand staying in this role if Nicola was not here," and that, "The person who actually called me from the start, told me about the project and put the faith in me was Nicola." It's not that loyalty isn't a touching emotion to witness, rather that in the viper's nest of egos that is the Premier League, it's unexpected to see anybody sticking up for anybody else for reasons other than sheer self-preservation. In themselves, though, these quotations proved little.
Nature, however, abhors a vacuum and during an otherwise slow news week there was plenty of speculation to fill the gaps left by an absence of hard fact. While much of this was – understandably – devoted to the whys and wherefores of Cortese's departure from the club, though, there was also a nasty hint of sexism to be detected in much of reporting of this story on account of the fact that the actual owner of Southampton FC, Katharina Liebherr, has the temerity to be a woman,

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