Women’s football vs men’s: The differences and why they exist

Kampala- Hasifah Nassuna, a footballer and Ugandan striker in the national women’s football team, Crested Cranes has something to be proud of. She completed the Confederation of East and Central Africa Football Association (Cecafa), Women’s Football Championship, held in Njeru in September as top scorer with six goals.

Her feat now means she is entrusted to guide Kawempe Muslim Football Club that she plays for, to a third successive Fufa (Federation of Uganda Football Associations) Women Elite League title after her former club captain Sandra Nabweteme joined the Southwestern Oklahoma State University in USA early this year.

Such demands can be enormous, both physically and emotionally. So how is this 19-year-old, aspiring to become a lawyer, able to cope?
“I grew up playing football with boys to toughen up and compete harder,” Nassuna says. Her statement among other things is what got us to ask a question. Do men approach and play football in a much more different way from women?

Even before I had spoken to Nassuna, a colleague had triggered the thought, when he asked whether a girl can “control the ball with her chest without getting her breasts hit or damaged.” It confirmed that there is male prejudice towards female footballers.

As a Games Master at Kawempe Muslim Secondary School (KMSS), Ayub Khalifan has had a long distinguished coaching career that stretches from schools’ to club football, where he has won two national league titles and a number of national post primary tournaments with the club and schools’ girls’ football team respectively.

Currently, he also serves as a delegate and member of different technical committees at Fufa and Kawempe Division, which are responsible for organising the women’s national league and sports galas in the division respectively.

Having worked with male and female footballers alike, Khalifan insists there are more similarities than differences between the sexes.

“As you get used to coaching both sexes, you realise there are nearly no differences in terms of attitude from the players. In fact I don’t have to alter my demands or expectations depending on the gender of my players,” he says in what is perhaps, a classic answer from someone who has won various trophies with his female teams and none with the male ones since he became Games Master at KMSS in 2007.

“The girls know what is needed to become an elite athlete and so their attitude is good. Their concentration can be high but the only weakness is they are sensitive even towards criticism and something small can distract them while men can get on with it and focus on their strength,” he adds.

There are a number of areas people point out, in a bid to show the differences between the sexes on the pitch. One of those is aggression on the field.
During the Cecafa tournament this year, it was easy to see that women were less aggressive.

There was less tackling than in the men’s version and the women were more respectable towards referees; most of their matches ended without players contesting the officials’ decision. This is not irregular in women’s matches generally.

It doesn’t mean however that the women are not at all led by an adrenaline rush. At the Cecafa tournament, ahead of the final Group B match between Ethiopia and Tanzania, who were level on three points there was a lot of anxiety that even the organisers forgot (probably) to inform the teams that in case of a draw, the match commissar Agnes Mugena, would toss a coin to determine the winner, who would ultimately top the group.

As fate would have it, the toss flipped in favour of Tanzania.

Hell broke loose as the Ethiopian footballers surrounded Mugena, screaming and shoving her angrily and demanding to know on what grounds she tossed the coin in a post-match altercation that was more entertaining than the drab goalless draw they had just played out minutes ago.

Security and their coach Manni Mezeret had to come to Mugena’s rescue before the situation got worse. On the whole however, many women’s games progress with less fighting and fouls.

When it comes to physical differences, science shows that the men seem to be better off.
“All parameters show that men are actually stronger than women,” Dr Vincent Karuhanga of Friends Polyclinic, says.

“Men have more volumes of blood, more red blood cells, take in more oxygen, have more fat in their muscles and also have high metabolic rates than women. Those parameters are down in women until 10 years after menopause,” he explains.

“Blood helps with metabolism which in turn results into the body releasing energy. The distribution of fat is also different in men and women. Women have more fat under the skin while men have more fat in organs and in the muscles hence more energy,” he says.

“However, that doesn’t mean that there are no exceptions; still the parameters would be less in women. Only that some women have more male hormones than normal,” Dr Karuhanga adds.

Khalifan, on his part argues that with training, girls can cope and even competently challenge men at anything. He says women can even make and take hard hits.

It was easy to see this at the Cecafa women’s tournament with Ethiopia’s left back Bizuneh Etsegenet, who was particularly good at sliding into challenges. But it was also clear to see that many of the players, like it is wont to happen in men’s games, were injured from reckless challenges. Nearly half of the games saw a player or two to stretchered off for treatment.

The heat and astro-turf (the artificial grass on which the games were played) could explain why some were carried off, but for others, it was down to the hard hits they took.

Looking back at other tournaments, there have been other serious injuries for women that could compare with some of the career threatening injuries male footballers like Uganda Cranes striker Brian Umony and defender Savio Kabugo have suffered.

Umony, who turns out for Ethiopian club St. George, broke his leg as he vied for the ball with Arba Minch’s goalkeeper, in an Ethiopian Premier League encounter last year. He has not played football for over a year now.

Women’s injuries
Kabugo, a defender with the men’s national team Cranes (the men’s national team), suffered a sharp pain in his left upper shin after a few hard runs during their friendly match with the Under -20 national team in 2015. He has never felt the same and continues to play with that niggling pain.

The women have faced serious injuries too. During the semi-finals of the Fufa Women Elite League in June, Gafford’s Zainab Nabatanzi injured her knee owing to a reckless challenge.

She is still trying to recover from that. A year before, She Corporate midfielder Shadia Nandawula suffered a similar injury in a semi-final against eventual inaugural champions Kawempe.

“Both men and women can be very physical and it is common to find a girl who is stronger or faster than boys but usually the opponent dictates how you approach the game. If they are physical or running hard, my girls have got to dig-in too,” Khalifan explains the reasons behind the above scenarios.

When it comes to how the game is actually played, women too can display great skills.

From my observations at the Cecafa games, female players like Nassuna and Ethiopia’s Shetaye Sisaya kept the crowds excited with beautiful skills that would make any football coach proud.

In fact, nearly all the female players of the Ethiopian team, were comfortable at dribbling and showing off fancy skills. Largely though, most of the other teams had their skillful players take on the wide and central attacking positions. The defensive players were mostly pragmatic, preferring not to take risks with fancy skills.

In stark contrast, men spend more time with the ball and draw more contact from opponents, perhaps explaining that aforementioned aggression, where women would opt to pass to a teammate.

On the pitch, it is observed that men also run more rationally because they have that much more experience in the game, compared to the women, especially those still learning, who tend to aimlessly follow the ball and crowd in a particular area of the pitch rather than keep their position.
This, perhaps, explains why some women’s teams are less able to defend wider areas and therefore concede many goals.

“That makes skill an important aspect of the ladies’ game, because you have to manoeuvre your way out of that crowd. Maybe athleticism works for the men but again it depends on the nature of opponent you are facing,” Khalifan stresses.

What is true also is that over the years, men have had more chances to improve their skills.

Italian coach Carolina Morace in an interview on the Federation of International Football Associations (Fifa) website states that males usually start to play football in a serious way much earlier than the females and that even at age of four or five, boys are often attending football schools and learning the technical and tactical aspects of the game.

Apart from that, the fans and the following of games has tended to tilt in the favour of the men.
“The men’s game has always had that big following because of the different perceptions about women’s football,” Crested Cranes midfielder Jean Sseninde says.

“But over time that has been changing and the women’s game is growing. We are even securing sponsorship deals just as men and getting large crowds,” Sseninde, who plays for English club Queen Park Rangers, where Air Asia sponsors the clubs’ men and women’s teams, adds.

Sseninde is right. In Njeru, the thousands of fans that graced the Cecafa Women Championship were more than those that attended a friendly match between Uganda Cranes and Cameroon last year.

In the West, where both versions of the game are more developed there is an even bigger discussion on wages.

According to the Guardian, last year five members of USA’s women national team complained against wage discrimination based on gender, citing a gross disparity in how much the women are paid by the US Soccer Federation compared to the men’s national team.

The issue was exacerbated by the fact that the USA’s women team is more successful with three Olympics gold medals in 2004, 2008 and 2012 and a Fifa World Cup in 2015.

The men don’t have a trophy of that international magnitude in their history and can only boast of five triumphs in the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) Gold Cup.

The matter is still before their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but with the success of their female national team and the revenue streaming in – owing to popularity of the men’s game on the other hand, it is a matter that has provoked wide debate.

It is evident that over time, female players have earned a great standing in the football community and are getting better at the game. There is no doubt that some disparities exist.

What is not in doubt either however is that the men have been at the game much longer, have more opportunities to improve their skills and are rewarded more for their efforts. If women are offered the same opportunities and rewards, perhaps the glaring differences would not exist.

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