“Get your tits out for the lads” true stories from a woman in football by Sally Freedman: Breaking silences to affect change in football organizing. By Michelle O’Shea, New South Wales: Fair Play Publishing. 2023. pp. 1–164. AUD $29.99. ISBN:978-1-925914-66-5

Abstract

An innocuous suggestion on a podcast that she had sufficient experiences of misogyny, sexism, and harassment for a book has, 12 months later, become just that. The publication and launch of international sport management professional Sally Freedman's book, “Get your tits out for the lads” true stories from a woman in football (2023) was purposefully cast against the backdrop of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand's hosting of the Women's Football World Cup.

“The FIFA” (Federation Internationale de Football Association) 2023 tournament is historic for institutional reasons. It is the first time two nations from different football confederations (Asia and Oceania) have been awarded the rights to co-host a World Cup Football tournament. It is also the first tournament following FIFA's formal commitment to redress treatment inequities including not yet realized pay equity (Beissel et al., 2023; Haldane, 2021). The ensuing 2023 tournament has been fervently celebrated by the host nation governments and domestic governing bodies through an aspirational event legacy. Underpinned by five pillars Australia's “Legacy 2023” plan includes a purposeful intent to increase women's involvement in football management, coaching, and refereeing (Football Australia, 2023). These aspirations are tied directly to Freedman's text, and which inform the proceeding review.

At the tournament's conclusion chief among celebratory outcomes has been the sale of tickets exceeding 1.5 million establishing a new benchmark for any FIFA Women's World Cup (Pender, 2023). Alongside this, a record television audience of 2 billion watched the spectacle (Whittaker, 2023). The media have described the 2023 tournament as a “turning point,” and “a game-changer” for the commercial and societal value of women's football (Belas Trindade, 2023; Holmes, 2023; Inside FIFA, 2023; Kwan, 2023).

Though attendance figures, media reach, and legacy commitments are worthy of celebration Freedman's book elucidates how the game-changer narrative is “inherently dangerous” (O’Shea, 2023). Pull back the curtain, scratch the surface and Freedman's experience shows us that progress in sport is not linear (Woodward, 2017) and it should not be mistakenly conflated with success.

Though women's physical exclusion on the football pitch is increasingly dislodged (Williams, 2006) it is enveloped by complexities and dangers, including Freedman's discussion of the verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse entrenched in the USA National Women's Soccer League (Draper, 2022; Lutz, 2022). Cases of abuse across the football systems of other competing nations (Hall, 2023; Panja, 2022) and the repeated institutional failures to address these dangers (Hall, 2020) alert us to the violences women face in football. Indeed, acts of violence defined the 2023 tournaments closing with Luis Rubiales (now former Spanish Football Federation President) lewd actions marking international football's #MeToo moment.

In parallel pay parity and the labor of women advancing change informally marked the 2023 tournament's launch (Lewis, 2023a; Rugari, 2023; Samios, 2023). On the eve of the World Cup opening contest the Australian women's national team (The Matildas) forcefully condemned FIFA for their discriminatory gender pay gap (Worden, 2023). A point of contention Freedman explores as she similarly demands that her expertize be appropriately remunerated.

It is against this complex backdrop and tied to the Gender, Work and Organization journals' commitment to making spaces for the analysis of gender relations and the gendering of organizations (in the case of this review international football organizing) that I offer the proceeding review. I provide my reading of Sally Freedman's story and mark this space as a context through which the systematic violences perpetrated against her and those “others” might be further known and the labor in telling her, and their stories valued. I aim to usefully contribute albeit in a small way to reconfiguring who is and is not heard and valued in football organizing. A game and institution that purports to be and commercially gains from its veneer as “the world's game.”

Sally Freedman takes us on a journey through a 13-year international football management career. She points to “naivety” and the unheeded warnings issued by family and friends about the “male, pale dinosaurs running football” (p. 1). A “struggle to get your voice heard” (p. 1) while a concern she dismisses comes to underpin the impetus for her text. It also accords with the experiences of many more women and those “others” seeking leadership possibilities in an institution tightly controlled by white, wealthy, politically connected men (Bar-On & Escobedo, 2019).

Though women's and non-white male bodies are increasingly rendered “fit for doing” football they remain “unfit for its organizing” (Bradbury, 2013). An inevitable point of burnout described by Freedman as emanating from having worked so hard to find a place in the world of football. And yet upon realizing her football management aspirations, it isn't quite what she “dreamt of” which echoes Berlant's (2011) construct of “cruel optimism.” The depths of cruelty are realized when something you desire is the very obstacle to your flourishing.

Cognisant of the backlash and career impacts speaking out will bring, Freedman reclaims agency and self by doing away with the “stiff upper lip” and the “I'm fine I promise mode” (p. 2) she embodies to navigate the masculine world of football. Overwhelmed by daily instances of sexism, harassment, and misogyny which she has diarized as “a form of respite and relief” (p. 2) she invites us to sit with her experience. To understand what it’s like to be a woman working in a sports assemblage numerically and culturally dominated by men (Bryan et al., 2021; Hovden et al., 2018; Knoppers et al., 2021; Woodward, 2017). An assemblage in one instance taking the form of one hundred men directing the ear-piercing chant, “Get your tits out for the lads” her way. Though ironically coming to thank these men for her book title it is anything, but the harmless fun Freedman suggests is the only point of reflection for these football lads.

Freedman's recruitment experiences elucidate-as has prior scholarship (O'Shea & Toohey, 2014; O’Shea, 2017; O’Shea & Fullagar, 2019) how despite formalized policies gendered informal sport organization practices inevitably shape women's sport management career access. The valorization of masculine norms and the unencumbered worker who demonstrates an unabridged commitment to work (Acker, 2006) resonates through Freedman's reflecting on being interrogated at an interview about her partner status and if she has children. Though the question's legitimacy was tied in one case to calculating potential “relocation costs,” her male counterparts were not asked these questions. Nor were male peers asked to “spill the beans,” about who they “slept with” to secure their appointments.

Accepting her employment offer, Freedman shows us how football's masculine history continues to constitute its modern fabric. Football's governance structures, crafted by and for men, resolved in 1921 that the sport was “unsuitable for females” and actively excluded them for nearly 50 years (Williams, 2006, 2014). This exclusionary culture continues to seep through contemporary human resource policies, with all references to employees appearing as “he.” Despite requesting the language be altered, future policies induce the same inference, men manage football. Throughout her text, the constitutive effects of gendered language, images, and objects are usefully problematized. While football's power brokers would have us believe women's exclusion is confined to the sport's history, Freedman has us take note, “Yes, 2018 and the official staff manual referred to all employees as he” (p. 33).

Freedman's reflections on footballs diversity and inclusion efforts show us how “calculative regimes” (Miller & Rose, 2008) and liberal-oriented change agendas (re)produced through organizational claims that “we have a 40% female, 60% male [gender employee] split,” conceal and strengthen gendered and other intersecting power relations.

The absence of women from senior appointments is immediately and strategically rationalized away: “around 90% of the applications we receive for senior positions are from males, so it's no surprise” (p. 33). These claims tie to Martin's (2004) “legitimation dynamics,” wherein powerful elites “justify to a broader social audience the rightness … of institutional arrangements that work to their benefit” (p. 1254).

These institutional dynamics are damaging because organizations can absolve themselves of their responsibilities for perpetuating or redressing inequities (Simpson et al., 2010). Freedman is astute to this abolition, contending how the “but only men applied chestnut” (re)produces a culture where more productive questions and critical reflections remain unspoken.

Descriptions of her working life reveal the deeply embedded gendered structural and cultural inequities shaping women's sport management careers (O’Shea, 2017). Freedman provides us with poignant examples of how women's bodies are irritating problems requiring management, especially when they leak (O’Shea et al., 2023). Locked or no female bathrooms and the ensuing confrontation with a stadium security officer leads to Freedman's visceral response. Sinking to the bathroom floor “grasping her knees tightly with her head burrowed” (p. 27), the fight to exist in the male-dominated football world is overwhelming.

Humor and its capacity to veil truth (Holmes, 2000) is a theme that runs through the text. So to the less than humorous effects for Freedman including her management of a post-match function where a player whispered in her ear, “my cock is f”*!ing massive and wouldn't you like to see it?.” This is but one example of the sexual innuendo Freedman navigates, always humorous for the male speaker but for Freedman danger, belittlement, and silencing follow.

Leading from her communications expertize Freedman devotes the chapter “Newsfeeds and Sexism” to problematizing the broader assemblages (re)producing gender inequities. We are provided with a “sexism storyboard” with Freedman's media artifacts revealing the messy interrelations between sport and the media. New media offers sportswomen an unprecedented context through which to represent themselves as empowered subjects (Thorpe et al., 2017). Problematically, however, it is also a space through which gendered, racial, heteronormative, and other norms are strengthened (Kavanagh et al., 2019; Litchfield et al., 2018; O’Shea & Maxwell, 2021).

From a public relations perspective, Freedman calls out Sepp Blatter (FIFA President 1998–2015) for his suggestion that female footballers should play in more “feminine clothes” and “tighter shorts.” The sexualization of female athletes and the strengthening of heterosexist norms are constitutive of the culture permeating from “the very top.” From one President to the next, decisions continue to devalue women's football. The engagement of supermodel Adriana Lima as an official 2023 FIFA fan ambassador has a silver lining. Owing to social media backlash the decision was swiftly reversed (Ray, 2023) as was “Visit Saudi” commercial sponsorship of the tournament (Lewis, 2023b).

Through the final chapter “Injury time mantra” Freedman cites well-documented approaches to redressing gender inequities. Governance quotas and transparent criteria for employee selection and promotion are positioned as part of a practical yet entirely ineffective roadmap to women's involvement in global football organizing. Rather than redressing the deeply entrenched practices legitimating the game's toxic misogynistic culture, gendered violence is “swept under the rug.” So, women continue to enter and navigate a culturally and materially unsafe institution.

Exhausted and defeated, but not entirely broken, Freedman chooses separatism as her path forward. Today she purposefully agitates for change from outside football's formal organizing. As part of this intent, Freedman implores us, as readers of her book, to break the silences that normalize gendered violence against women, be it in sport or other institutional settings. She contends that “the only wrong thing to say [or do] is nothing” (p. 152). This review is “my something” that might move you to pause, value, and importantly act in the name of Sally Freedman's and those “other” women's stories.