Last weekend, the USA cemented their status as the most rewarded side in international women’s football by clinching a record fifth Olympic Gold medal and taking their combined number of intercontinental tournament wins (World Cups and Olympics) to nine.

In the post-match press conference, Emma Hayes, the manager who enjoyed an extremely decorated spell at Chelsea, described clinching Olympic Gold as ‘the greatest moment in my career.’

Despite this, the question of the Olympic Games’ standing in the World of Women’s football has been called into question amid truncated scheduling and a diminished sense of purpose in light of the growth that women’s football has seen in the last decade.

The History of the Games

To properly understand the significance of women’s football at the Olympics, we must consider the context under which the games were founded as well as the history of women’s football itself.

Until 1988, the Olympic Games were made up of strictly amateur competition, as was the will of Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the games in 1894. This ethos would be carried on by Coubertin’s successors. Avery Brundage, president of the IOC from 1952 to 1972 reinstated his commitment to what he coined the “Amateur Code”. In the last three decades, the code that was once the guiding principle of the Olympics has mostly been eroded. In 2024, for the first time in the history of the games, prize money was awarded (to gold medallists in Athletics events).

It is this amateur spirit that has historically linked the Olympic games and women’s football. The struggle for the right to play at all- let alone professionally- has been endured across the world of women’s football. When the tournament began in 1996, the United States were still four years off from launching a pioneering first professional women’s football league. It was one that would be launched of the back of the American hosted ’96 games and the sea-changing 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup. In Europe, London 2012 marked a pivotal moment for the growth of the Women’s game in England, but it would be another 6 years until the WSL became Europe’s first fully professional league. With women’s football now in an age of professionalism, this amateur ethos now feels out of place.

While the men’s football tournament officially transitioned from a senior amateur competition to a professional under-23 competition in 1992, the women’s tournament has essentially evolved from an amateur-based competition into a professional one over time. This has occured not due to a change in Olympic regulations, but the professionalisation of the women’s game itself. Women’s football has now been played at the Olympic games for 28 years, but the women’s footballing world the tournament is being played in now, compared to the one that existed at the tournament’s inception, could not be further apart.

A Platform for Growth

Another theme rooted in the history of not just women’s football, but women’s sport more widely, is the fight for visibility and perceived relevance. With landmark tv deals yet to be struck, and the selling the out of main club stadiums a world away, the prestige of the Olympic Games offered women’s football visibility, in much the same way that the casual viewer’s interest in sports like fencing, skateboarding and modern pentathlon will sky-rocket during the games.

To this end, the final of the women’s tournament at London 2012 was attended by over 80,000 people- an attendance figure that would stand as a record crowd for a women’s football match in Europe for over a decade.

As recently as Tokyo 2020 (played in 2021), the Olympics were seen as a platform to grow the game. After winning gold with Canada, Christine Sinclair made a call for change in the women’s game in Canada: “I hope we inspired a lot of people back home and I hope we see some investment in the women’s game.. I think it’s time Canada gets a professional league or some professional teams and if a gold medal and three Olympic medals doesn’t do that nothing will. I think it’s time for Canada to step up. That’s what I hope they saw today.”

At Paris 2024, the women’s football tournament felt like one that the game had outgrown. Crowd sizes paled in comparison to those seen five years previously when France had hosted the Women’s World Cup. That was another tournament that inspired a boom in global interest in women’s football, but Paris 2024 represented barely a blip on the radar for those who weren’t already well-immersed in the women’s game.

In England,  coverage of Saturday’s final between the USA and Brazil was hidden behind the BBC’s red button on the day that domestic men’s clubs football returned. Indeed, the only football match being shown on terrestrial UK television on Saturday afternoon that could be accessed without trawling through BBC Iplayer, was the Community Shield fixture between Manchester City and Manchester United.

The mission statement of women’s football at the Olympics had been to provide a platform for athletes in a sport that lacked visibility. It is tricky to say what the purpose of the tournament is in 2024, or what it will be in 2028, 2032 etc.  The next Olympic games will be hosted in LA, with the Rose Bowl Stadium a candidate to host the final. Given that this was the scene of what remains to this day the most attended (FIFA recognised) match in the history of women’s football some 29 years prior to the 2028 games, surely the LA is one of the last cities in the world where women’s football has a pressing need to showcase itself?

The importance (or lack thereof) of the Olympic Games

That isn’t to say that growth of the game is the be all and end all (and in all honesty it is not helpful to view constantly view women’s football in purely existential terms), but on a sporting level, the answer to the question of what winning Olympic gold means in 2024 is not immediately clear. If you win the World Cup, you are crowned champions of the World. If you win a continental tournament, you are crowned champions of your continent, but what of the other world Championship? It is what the League Cup or Conti Cup is to the FA Cup, what the UEFA Nations League is to the Euros. It feels as if the tournament itself lacks a clear purpose in the classification of the ‘best’.

The Geographical Factor

As someone from Europe, I appreciate that I could be guilty of looking at this with a quite Eurocentric view (and even more so as someone from England, whose national football literally cannot enter an Olympic football team and has to qualify on behalf of another team in Team GB).

The games take on a different cultural significance in the Americas, which can partly be attributed to nations from the CONMEBOL and CONCACAF federations playing in what some may consider ‘a less competitive’ continental championships – Brazil have won all but one edition of the women’s Copa America, while the USA have won 10 out of the 11 CONCACAF W Championships/Gold Cups. There is also a self-perpetuating factor of CONCACAF dominance at the Olympics – North American teams have won six of the eight women’s football tournaments and that historic success has in itself boosted the prestige of the tournament in that part of the world.

In Europe however, there can be no doubt that the Olympics falls behind the Euros in terms of significance. As much as London 2012 captured the imagination of those new to women’s football at the time, had Team GB won Gold in 2012, it is hard to imagine national interest in women’s football in the UK taking off in the same way it did off the back of a home Euros win in 2022.

Scheduling and Player Welfare

Then there is the player welfare problem. In Europe and South America, the scheduling of the World Cup, EURO, and Copa America means that an international football can be neatly packaged into bi-annual tournament cycles. In men’s football, this translates to a summer tournament in every even year; and in women’s, a summer tournament every odd year.

Add a third tournament in the shape of the Olympics into the mix, and you have yourself the awkward middle child. With the prevalence of ACL injuries the unwanted hot topic in women’s football, a third tournament in a four year cycle sticks out like a sore thumb. On top of this, the entire tournament was played out over the course just 16 days – that in itself the consequence of the rigid nature of scheduling a tournament within the parameters of a larger sporting event like the Olympics.

In other words, player welfare and Olympic football do not mix. En route to winning gold, 8 USA players started all five matches of the condensed tournament, with Naomi Girma and goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher playing every minute of the USWNT’s five matches- including two back-to-back 120 minute matches.

Is Football in the ‘Olympic Spirit?’

Finally, there is the question of how ‘Olympic-spirited’ professional football is as a sport. The Olympics is second only to the FIFA men’s World Cup as the most watched sporting event in the World, and its prestige speaks for itself.

In the majority of the 32 sports played at the summer 2024 games, winning gold, or even silver and bronze, represented the pinnacle of an athlete’s career. In football, this is demonstrably not the case. This was well illustrated in the medal ceremony for the men’s competition, where Michael Olise took off his silver medal rather than wear it with pride. While most athletes would consider an Olympic medal a prized accolade, football’s ultra-competitive nature meant that the Bayern Munich midfielder saw anything but gold as a mark of failure.

On the women’s side of the tournament, Brazil were more gracious in defeat, but the fact remains that Olympic success does not represent the pinnacle of women’s football. This simple premise alone undermines the presence of the sport at the Olympics, even in the women’s game. With the women’s football returning to the United States for LA 2028, perhaps it would be fitting to draw the curtain on senior women’s football at the Olympics in the same nation where the sport was introduced to the games some 32 years earlier.