After six days in which a former player was held accountable in court for sexist comments and a current manager was charged by the Football Association with using sexist language, are we seeing a change in how that behaviour is tackled?
For years, talk of so-called “banter” has been used to silence complaints and it has been a struggle to convince football that sexism and misogyny even exist, but there are signs the sport is finally waking up.
Last week, Joey Barton received a criminal sentence for harmful social media posts targeting the pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko for doing their jobs. Aluko was targeted by racially charged posts, too.
A few days earlier, Barnet’s Dean Brennan had become the first EFL manager to be charged with sexist abuse towards a female referee. He has denied the charge. That comes after cases in non-league in the past two months wherewhere Hemel Hempstead Town were fined and a match at Coventry Sphinx was abandoned because of abuse towards female officials.
This type of abuse is vile and nothing new, but the visibility of those outcomes is. It starts to send a message that this behaviour won’t be tolerated any more, which is hugely important in the context of the Kick Sexism Out campaign we at Kick It Out launched at the start of last season.
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