Promoting women’s soccer through social media: how the US federation used Twitter for the 2011 World Cup

Abstract

This study examines the coverage given to the US women’s national soccer team by its governing body, the US Soccer Federation (USSF), immediately before, during and immediately after the 2011 World Cup. Content analysis of two of the USSF’s Twitter accounts showed that although the differences in both quantity and quality of coverage between men’s and women’s soccer are not as great as those detected in traditional media between men’s and women’s athletics, a gender gap remains. Similar to traditional media, the USSF framed the women’s team as less important than the men’s, even though this study was purposefully conducted at a time when female soccer was supposed to be prominent because of the international schedule.

Introduction

Soccer has never been a primary piece in America’s sports culture. As journalist Jeffrey Toobin puts it, ‘the game that captivates the rest of the world – where it is a source of rapture and revenue – remains only a niche product at home. [...] Soccer is the Canada of American sports, viewed less with contempt than with indifference’.¹ About a decade ago though, women found more success in this domain than men ever had. More than 90,000 fans, including President Bill Clinton, witnessed the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) beat China in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final, and another 18 million watched the game on ABC.² However, this seems to constitute women’s soccer’s popularity peak as the fervour around the USWNT has consistently declined in the decade that followed.

While the coverage of women’s soccer has decreased in traditional media, the Web 2.0 developed, enabling the creation of online social media. As a result, companies, associations and federations, including the US Soccer Federation (USSF), now have the opportunity to talk directly with their consumers, doing without traditional media gatekeepers. While past research has focused on the coverage of women’s sports or women’s soccer in traditional media, this study’s author seeks to analyse how the USWNT is framed by its own organization, the USSF.

As explained above, women’s soccer fascinated America for a few weeks in 1999, but its proponents failed to set up a sustainable business model that could draw thousands of fans every week in a thriving professional league in the US The first attempt at a women’s professional soccer league occurred in 2000 with the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA). The league opened to respectable audiences in April 2001, but the television ratings and the average attendance at games rapidly dropped,³ resulting in the WUSA going out of business in September 2003.⁴ The second attempt to form a professional women’s soccer league in the US came a few years later with the Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) league, created in 2007. The inaugural game was played on 29 March 2009, but after only three full seasons, the WPS narrowly escaped ‘extinction’ due to its struggles with declining attendance and financial problems.⁵

Among the problems faced by women’s professional soccer is the patriarchal ideology that still prevails in American sports.⁶ The sport universe still embodies the stereotypical traits of masculinity such as toughness, power or aggression⁷ and the features typical of femininity, namely weakness and grace.⁸ Therefore, women’s sports, which are generally underreported in traditional mass media,⁹ are mostly represented by sports considered socially acceptable for women.¹⁰ Those socially acceptable sports are those that ‘demonstrate the agility and elegance “natural” to women’,¹¹ a definition that often leaves out team sports and other sports in which aggressiveness is important.

However, the creation and development of the Internet, which offers new distribution platforms to sports that have traditionally received little media attention, has offered new hope to fans and players of women’s sports. With its large reach and low costs, the web gives women’s sports the opportunity to overcome financial barriers and address fans directly, which might help to ‘level the playing field’ with men’s sports.¹² The purpose of this research is to study how the USSF uses social media, mainly Twitter, to promote women’s soccer. The USSF has a stated goal ‘to make soccer, in all its forms, a preeminent sports in the United States’, a mission that includes promoting both men’s and women’s soccer through social media. The federation has several Twitter accounts, two of which are used to post about the USWNT: the most popular one is general and offers coverage related to all matters of the USSF. The other is exclusively dedicated to the USWNT. The goal of this study is to determine whether soccer’s governing body in the US is, similar to traditional media, presenting the women’s game as less important than the men’s game, or, on the contrary, promoting both at the same level.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that enables its members to send and read other users’ short (up to 140 characters) updates – called tweets – in real time. It can be accessed from any device with Internet connectivity. One’s tweets are displayed on his or her profile page, on the home page of each of his or her ‘followers’ (those who track his or her activity), and, unless disabled in the privacy settings, in the Twitter public timeline accessible by everyone on the Internet. Founded in March 2006 in San Francisco, California, Twitter became public in August of that year. Two years later, Nielsen ranked it as the fastest growing social network.¹³

Twitter’s cofounder, Evan Williams, said Twitter’s target is the base of the pyramid: it strives to give a voice to ‘the most disadvantaged and marginalized’.¹⁴ As an illustration, Twitter established itself as a source of first-hand international information in 2008 with events such as the earthquake in China in May or the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, in November. In both cases, the mainstream media in the US looked for updates from witnesses of the incidents on the micro-blogging site.¹⁵

When it comes to sports, research has shown that women have consistently been ‘marginalized’,¹⁶ which might explain why women’s athletics seem to have turned to Twitter to promote themselves.¹⁷ The process worked for women’s soccer in the summer of 2011. Indeed, on 17 July, the women’s World Cup set two new records for number of tweets sent per second: the end of the third-place match between Paraguay and Brazil generated a record 7166 tweets per second, while the end of the final between the US and Japan beat that figure just a few hours later with 7196 tweets per second. As of February 2012, these events remain the third and fourth top tweets-per-second sporting moments after only the 2012 Superbowl and Tim Tebow’s overtime touchdown pass during the play-off game between the Broncos and the Steelers.¹⁸

Literature review

Media coverage consists of frames that determine the central organizing idea for news content. Media frames select a portion of reality and emphasize it at the expense of other parts. The same thing may be done via Twitter: USSF employees choose to post something on one account only, on both or on neither in the same way traditional media

select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.¹⁹

In sum, media cover some sports like men’s football or basketball to a substantial degree, but exclude other events, including women’s athletics in general. This makes sport ‘a celebration of manhood’,²⁰ wherein the traditional, Victorian definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ are still somewhat prominent.²¹ Through the frames they feature when covering athletics, mass media have not helped challenge the hegemonic masculinity present in the sporting world. Research has shown that they have actually helped reinforce these stereotypes.²²

Women’s sports coverage

The amount of women’s sports coverage is ‘at best sporadic and at worst non-existent’ in traditional mass media.²³ First, in print, Boutilier and SanGiovanni,²⁴ and Lumpkin and Williams,²⁵ who both looked at Sports Illustrated, ‘the most widely read sports magazine in the United States’,²⁶ found that the magazine rarely included coverage of women’s sports. It could be argued that Sports Illustrated targets a male audience, which would explain these findings. However, analysing the images of professional athletes in multiple mass circulation magazines, including sports magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Tennis Magazine, news magazines Time and Newsweek, and a variety of other magazines, such as Reader’s Digest or People, Hilliard reached similar conclusions, finding the publications studied gave more prominent coverage of men’s athletics than of women’s athletics.²⁷

Newspapers are no different. Eastman and Billings found that ‘men’s sports received almost 5 times as much space as women in USA Today and a staggering 10 times as much space as women in the New York Times’,²⁸ while Duncan, Messner, Williams & Wilson revealed that only 3.5% of stories published in the sport section of four daily newspapers (USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Morning News) were about women’s athletics.²⁹

Such disparity in proportion also exists on television³⁰ despite the fact that some women’s sports have the power to attract an audience.³¹ Five studies about televised women’s sports coverage sponsored by the LA84 foundation were conducted between 1989 and 2009, using a sample of three Los Angeles network affiliates (KNBC, KCBS and KABC) during three two-week segments (for a total of six weeks of data). These studies revealed an increase in the coverage of women’s sports between 1989 and 1999 – from 5 to 8.7%,³² but a shocking decrease since 1999 – from 8.7% in 1999 to 1.6% in 2009.³³

This gender disparity is almost non-existent during the Olympics– about 45% of Olympic coverage has been for women’s sports on NBC in all summer Games since 1996,³⁴ most of that coverage has been devoted to sports that are socially acceptable for women because they demonstrate the agility and elegance ‘“natural” to women’,³⁵ such as gymnastics. This difference in coverage between team sports, most of which are considered masculine, and acceptable individual sports was noticed as early as the 1980s by Bryant,³⁶ and Boutilier and SanGiovanni.³⁷

Besides the silent treatment reserved for women’s sports, the quality of coverage has been subject to negative criticism. All five of the LA84 studies denounce the lack of ‘serious’ and ‘respectful’ coverage of women’s sports on television: ‘most of the few reports on serious women’s sports (like basketball, tennis, golf or soccer) were fairly brief, the occasional more in-depth women’s sports story was often a gag feature or a story on a marginal, but visually entertaining pseudo sport’.³⁸

The production value of women’s sports has also been criticized. For instance, on television, pregame and postgame shows are generally longer for men’s athletics than for women’s; the number of instant replays and slow motion is inferior in women’s sports compared to men’s and the use of statistics is much more frequent in men’s sports.³⁹ Adams and Tuggle, who analysed ESPN’s SportCenter for a month in 2004, found that the programme never started with women’s athletics, which was pushed back toward the end of the show; that women’s stories were, on average, shorter than men’s and that none of them involved a reporter, while more than 10% of men’s stories ‘were “packaged” by a reporter’.⁴⁰ This difference of production value is not confined to television. For instance, Christine Baker noticed that WNBA press boxes were often occupied by ‘young sports writers who had no real interest in covering the WNBA as a career. They wrote articles about the WNBA because their editors wanted them to practice their skills in order to make the “jump” to men’s professional sports’.⁴¹

Moreover, scholars have reproached the media because of the role they play in keeping the sport universe a masculine territory by their portrayal of women athletes.⁴² Many denounce the hypersexualization of female athletes by media,⁴³ who ‘emphasize attractiveness rather than athletic skills’.⁴⁴ For instance, published women’s sports photographs are often of beautiful and glamorous female athletes, suggesting that they are the only ones ‘worthy of being pictured’.⁴⁵

Furthermore, scholars have found that media tend to highlight women athletes’ heterosexuality through traditional feminine traits.⁴⁶ First, emotions are given more importance when reporters cover women’s sports compared to men’s sports.⁴⁷ Second, television news journalists often portray female athletes through their role as girlfriends, wives or mothers.⁴⁸ Finally, media highlight the sex of female players by discussing their clothing or sense of fashion.⁴⁹ These portrayals thus suggest ‘the compatibility of the athlete and traditional masculine roles while emphasizing the incompatibility of the athlete and traditional female roles’, reinforcing the idea that the sport world is a ‘male preserve’.⁵⁰ Similar results have been found in studies of women’s sports online coverage, a relatively new field.

Women’s sports online

Interactivity is one key process characterizing the Internet.⁵¹ It enables corporations to get feedback from consumers quickly and without intermediaries. This notion of interactivity was thus made ever more important by the rise of social media, which encourage corporations to communicate with the consumers, instead of communicating to them, hence introducing a two-way communication system. This proves to be beneficial to women’s sports, which can rely on the Internet to build a community for their fans.⁵² This does not, however, mean more coverage by media companies online (i.e. websites of corporations that made a name thanks to another medium, such as the New York Times or ESPN).

There are few studies analysing gender sports coverage on the Internet. Some content analyses comparing women’s to men’s college sports were found. Cunningham was the first to offer ‘A New Look at an Old Problem’ by quantitatively analysing the content of NCAA men’s and women’s tennis websites.⁵³ He found that women received greater coverage than men in the number of articles and in their length. However, other analyses have confirmed the gender gap and the hegemony of male sports discussed in past literature.⁵⁴

Because the Internet has introduced a new kind of interactivity, new platforms, social media in general, including Twitter, allow women’s athletics to reach its fans directly, which could help its breakthrough in the American sport industry. As discussed above, Twitter has become a leading social medium in 2008. Consequently, there are only a few studies about the use of Twitter in sports. However, early research shows that not only do corporations use Twitter for self-promotion purposes,⁵⁵ so do athletes and teams.⁵⁶ Twitter is also browsed by mass media journalists who are looking to break original stories before anybody else.⁵⁷ This suggests that women’s sports advocates, who are seeking more media coverage to battle the marginalization of women’s athletics by traditional media, should be using Twitter in the search for exposure. In the first draft of a groundbreaking study, Calhoun and Houghton revealed that is exactly what female athletes and teams are doing.⁵⁸ Documenting Twitter presence among professional teams and athletes, the two Minnesota doctoral students found a strong presence of female athletes and teams.

Summary and conclusions

Accordingly, research shows that women’s sports suffer from a lack of coverage both in the amount of stories and their quality, but that research has mainly focused on traditional media in general. Calhoun and Houghton conducted one of the few studies focused on Twitter and have revealed a strong female presence among professional athletes and teams on the micro-blogging website.⁵⁹ Studying the online coverage of women’s sports by what is supposed to be a gender-neutral governing body has yet to be done. This study’s author thus seeks to lay the first stone by defining whether the USSF offers more exposure to men’s soccer than women’s at a time when women’s soccer’s most important international event is underway.

Research questions

Based on the previous literature, this study will seek to answer these research questions:

RQ1: What themes emerged from the official USWNT Twitter coverage from the USSF immediately before, during and immediately after the 2011 Women’s World Cup?

RQ2: How did the USSF frame women’s soccer to the general public, as opposed to women’s soccer fans? In other words, how did the tweets of the general USSF Twitter account (which had more than 253,000 followers on the first day of the study) compare to those of the USWNT account (about 12,000 followers)?

Method

A content analysis of two Twitter accounts was used to analyse the micro-blogging media coverage of the USWNT immediately before, during and immediately after the 2011 women’s soccer World Cup held in Germany from 26 June to 17 July 2011. The Internet has added advantages and challenges to carrying out a valid and reliable content analysis. Although the web offers new content to analyse and search engines to make the search easier than ever, the nearly endless amount of content found on the medium presents difficulties in terms of selecting a sample to analyse.⁶⁰

Both Twitter accounts examined are official US Soccer accounts. One, @ussoccer, is the general Twitter account for the USSF, while the other, @ussoccer_wnt, is exclusively reserved for the national women’s soccer team. On 16 June 2011, the first day of the sample, the general account had more than 253,000 followers. In contrast, the USWNT account was followed by only 12,000 people. Although the USSF has an account dedicated to the USWNT and another to Youth National Teams and the US Soccer Development Academy (@ussoccer_ynt), at the time of this study, there was no official account for the men’s national team.

The purpose of this research is to determine whether the USSF is, similar to traditional media, presenting the women’s game in a way that would indicate it is less important or more trivial than the men’s game. This could happen through under-representing women’s soccer in the number of tweets, even at a time when women’s soccer should be treated as more important than its male counterpart on the international stage given the salience of the women’s World Cup. The tweets posted to the account with a smaller following, which is devoted solely to the USWNT and had only about 12,000 followers at the start of the study, will be analysed to answer RQ1. It will also serve as the baseline of USWNT news, to which the tweets of the general account will be compared in order to answer RQ2.

The tweets on each account were recorded once a day, starting on 16 June, 10 days before the World Cup’s kick-off, and ending on 27 July, 10 days after the championship game of the tournament. Data collection totaled 42 days and 1560 separate tweets. The tweets on each account were recorded each day of the sample at 7 pm EST to ensure the end of the day’s competition in Germany (where 7 pm EST was 1 am the following day). To gather the data, the researcher first saved each Twitter account’s page as a PDF file. Every link displayed in a tweet (leading to a text, a picture or a video) was opened in a separate browser tab. Texts and pictures were saved as PDF files and videos were captured using Download Helper with Firefox.

Once all data were collected, the content was coded by the author and an extra coder, who was first introduced to the coding process with an instruction sheet and then trained by coding about two dozen random tweets with the author. Using a random 10% of the data, inter-coder reliability was calculated at 96.44%. The unit of analysis was a single tweet. Coding indicated the source (@ussoccer or @ussoccer_wnt); the team discussed in the tweet (USWNT, any other women’s soccer team, USMNT, any other men’s soccer team or multiple/mixed); the format of the tweet (whether it was a basic update or whether it was a re-tweet (RT) and/or contained a link or a picture); the type of coverage it provided (live coverage, pregame coverage, postgame coverage, update on a team or athlete, trivia or other kinds of games sponsored by the USSF for its fans, etc.). When the tweet contained a link to an exterior website, the type of the page was identified as being in one of eight categories: a ‘traditional media story’ when it was part of a traditional media outlet’s website, such as ESPN, ABC or Sports Illustrated, a ‘USSF page’, which is part of either the USSF’s official website or one of the affiliated blogs, a ‘USSF video’ posted by the federation, a ‘YouTube page’ that contains several videos, a ‘video’ posted by anyone but the USSF, using YouTube or any other service, a ‘social network’ when the link directed to Facebook, Flickr or any other social network except YouTube, a ‘blog’ that is not affiliated to the USSF’s official website, or ‘other’, which happened when the link directed to Ticketmaster to buy tickets to a game, for instance.

Furthermore, pictures and videos were counted regardless of whether they were posted directly on Twitter or they were part of an exterior page tweeted. Each was coded as belonging to one of seven categories: ‘context of sport’ when it showed athletes and/or coaches during a game or at practice; ‘emotions’ when it showed athletes’ and/or coaches’ joy about a victory, distress after a defeat, pain after an injury or any other emotional state produced by sporting action; ‘press duties’ when it showed athletes and/or coaches answering the media or getting ready to appear on a television show; ‘pose/portrait’ when it depicted athletes and/or coaches posing for pictures outside of a field or training facility (e.g. environmental portrait), or in the case of a video, when it introduced us to athletes and/or coaches, sponsorship/ad when players and/or coaches appeared in an ad or a sponsor’s message; and ‘headshot’ if it was a mug shot of a player; or finally ‘other’, when the picture and/or video did not fit in any other category. Examples of ‘other’ visuals are photos of the team’s bus, photos of fans, fan-made videos, landscape pictures or videos, etc.

Finally, coding indicated whether the tweets or the web pages, pictures and videos they linked to contained a reference to an athlete’s family status, and whether the athletes were hypersexualized, i.e. portrayed as sexual objects rather than athletes. The data were then compiled using SPSS 18.0 for Mac. Because the study captures the entire population under study (all of the USSF’s World Cup coverage on Twitter), there is no need for inferential statistics, as measured differences in percentages were actual differences, not projected differences based on a sample of the coverage.

Findings and analyses

RQ1: What themes emerged from the official USWNT Twitter coverage from the USSF immediately before, during and immediately after the 2011 Women’s World Cup?

The USSF tweeted 832 times via the USWNT official Twitter account during the time period of this study. Although the periods immediately before and after the women’s World Cup count 20 days together, that is only two days less than the actual competition, 689 of these tweets were sent during the World Cup. Only 59 tweets were posted in the 10 days leading to the World Cup and 84 in the 10 days following the end of the competition.

About 10% of the tweets contained a picture, more than two-third of which, further analysis revealed, were either depicting athletes fulfilling their press duties or shots of anything but the team: landscapes, stadiums, fans, buildings, etc. About 15% of the tweets contained links to exterior websites. Among those, about 70% directed the followers to a video, YouTube page or a social media site. In contrast, only 17% of the links directed to the USSF’s official website and 15% were traditional media stories.

Almost 15% of the tweets were re-tweets. The originals came from media outlets such as ESPN, which aired all of the World Cup games, sponsors such as Nike, or celebrities, including television host Ellen DeGeneres, President Barack Obama or the players themselves. Unsurprisingly, considering the distribution of the number tweets, most RTs happened during the actual competition, and most pictures and links were posted in the same phase.

More than two-thirds of the tweets were basic tweets that did not contain any pictures or links. Most of these basic tweets consisted of game coverage – pregame, live and postgame, which constituted nearly 58% of @ussoccer_wnt overall amount of tweets. Updates on the team were also posted at regular intervals. USSF representatives also used Twitter to interact with their audience by starting trivia games as well as asking and answering various questions. Additionally, about 20% of the tweets fell under the category of ‘other’, which includes tweets introducing the followers to players with the ‘players profiles’ videos but also random tweets such as those about the beauty of Austria or Germany, fun facts, or the rules of the World Cup and the sport of soccer itself (Table 1).

Table 1. Type of coverage by period, provided by ussoccer_wnt tweets.

	Before World Cup		During World Cup		After World Cup		TOTAL
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Live coverage	0	0	394	47.36	0	0	394	47.36
Pregame coverage	0	0	41	4.93	6	0.72	47	5.65
Postgame coverage	0	0	32	3.85	4	0.48	36	4.33
Update on team	29	3.48	60	7.21	40	4.81	129	15.50
Trivia/game	2	0.24	16	1.92	0	0	18	2.16
Spoiler/follow	0	0	2	0.24	0	0	2	0.24
Answer question	1	0.12	30	3.61	11	1.32	42	5.05
Other	27	3.25	114	13.70	23	2.76	164	19.71
TOTAL	59	7.09	689	82.82	84	10.09	832	100

When a tweet contained a link to an exterior webpage, the story was most likely to be an interview (more than 40% of the time) or hard news (about 20% of the time), that is straightforward information without any editorial embellishment. Examples of hard news include a tweet announcing that the USWNT had landed in Europe for the World Cup and tweets announcing results of games. Feature stories and advertisements (or sponsor messages) each accounted for another 10% of the links found in the tweets. Playful montages and videos accounted for a mere 3% of these linked pages, providing evidence that the tweets did not greatly trivialize the sport or its players (Table 2).

Table 2. Format of exterior stories with link tweeted by ussoccer_wnt, by period.

	Before World Cup		During World Cup		After World Cup		TOTAL
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Hard news	3	2.38	13	10.32	7	5.56	23	18.26
Feature story	5	3.97	6	4.76	2	1.59	13	10.32
Interview	7	5.56	35	27.78	9	7.14	51	40.48
Fun Montage/video	0	0.00	3	2.38	1	0.79	4	3.17
Picture album	3	2.38	2	1.59	0	0.00	5	3.97
Ad/sponsor	7	5.56	5	3.97	1	0.79	13	10.32
Other	1	0.79	10	7.94	6	4.76	17	13.49
TOTAL	26	20.63	74	58.73	26	20.63	126	100

Note: The percentage figures in this table were calculated within rows only.

An analysis of the visuals either directly tweeted by ussoccer_wnt or linked through @ussoccer_wnt (Table 3) revealed that the most often posted visuals were portraits, that is pictures of players posing or videos drawing the profile of one or several players. Players were also frequently shown in a ‘sport context’, meaning they were participating in a game or practice, or they were fulfilling their ‘press duties’, as professional athletes. Visuals of players answering questions from the press, or getting ready to do so, were repeatedly used after the World Cup, when the USWNT returned to the US and made the rounds on the talk show circuit. Many visuals did not fall into any of the categories identified because they did not include any players or coaches, but instead featured landscapes, stadia, fans, buildings, US soccer merchandise, etc.

Table 3. Type of visuals by period, either directly tweeted by ussoccer_wnt or part of a link tweeted by ussoccer_wnt.

	Before World Cup		During World Cup		After World Cup		TOTAL
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Sport context	30	8.57	33	9.43	2	0.57	65	18.57
Emotions	2	0.57	26	7.43	2	0.57	30	8.57
Press duties	2	0.57	19	5.43	28	8.00	49	14.00
Pose/portrait	10	2.86	56	16.00	6	1.71	72	20.57
Ad/sponsor	9	2.57	8	2.29	0	0.00	17	4.86
Headshot	0	0.00	0	0.00	1	0.29	1	0.29
Other	37	10.57	69	19.71	10	2.86	116	33.14
TOTAL	90	25.71	211	60.29	49	14.00	350	100

Note: The percentage figures in this table were calculated within rows only.

Finally, hypersexualization was found in a mere two tweets while only 16 tweets contained a reference to an athlete’s family status.

In sum, while the @ussoccer_wnt account was not lively before or after the World Cup with an average of six to eight tweets posted per day, respectively, it was very active during the competition with 689 tweets, or 31 per day. These tweets were mostly basic updates; however, about a quarter of them contained links to more content, such as a picture or an exterior website. The stories linked in the tweets were mostly serious interviews, news reports and feature stories, which generally did not trivialize the athletes or the sport of women’s soccer. Most visuals depicted the players in a professional manner with no hint of hypersexualization, while still attempting to show the athlete under an artistic light with poses and portraits. This contrasts greatly with previous findings in studies of traditional media.

RQ2: How did the USSF frame women’s soccer to the general public, as opposed to women’s soccer fans? In other words, how did the tweets of the general USSF Twitter account compare to those of the USWNT account?

The USSF posted 832 tweets via the specific USWNT Twitter account during the length of this study. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these tweets (about 96%) were about the USWNT (Table 4). Meanwhile, only 728 tweets were posted on the general USSF account. More than half of those 728 related to men’s soccer. It should be acknowledged that the first phase of this study (immediately before the World Cup) coincided with the end of the men’s biggest continental competition, the Gold Cup. As a result, almost half of the @ussoccer tweets (362 or 49.73%) were written before the women’s World Cup even began. Among those 362, only 10 (2.76%) were about women’s soccer. However, only the last three Gold Cup USMNT games were played during this study, while the USWNT played six games during the course of this study. While the women’s team played twice as many games as the men’s team during this study, it received only half of the coverage the men’s team did on the general USSF Twitter account. Chi-square analysis confirmed this gender gap by revealing a significant difference between the general account’s coverage of men’s and women’s soccer (mixed stories excluded from this analysis) and what would be expected to occur by chance: χ²(1, N = 704) = 30.278, p < .001.

Table 4. Concerned team, by source.

	ussoccer		ussoccer_wnt		TOTAL
	N	% of ussoccer	N	% of ussoccer_wnt	N	% of both accounts
USWNT	278	38.19	800	96.15	1078	69.10
Other women’s team	1	0.14	15	1.80	16	1.03
USMNT	375	51.51	3	0.36	378	24.23
Other men’s team	50	6.87	0	0.00	50	3.21
Multiple/mixed	11	1.51	9	1.08	20	1.28
N/A	13	1.79	5	0.60	18	1.15
TOTAL	728	46.67	832	53.33	1560	100

Note: The percentage figures appearing in the ‘total’ row were calculated within the row only.

Both Twitter accounts used basic tweets the most, but the USWNT account posted more than twice the number of pictures (9% of tweets) than did the general account (4%), while the general account posted more links to exterior websites (21%) than did the USWNT account (15%). On the general account, though, only 23.33% of the pictures and 42.95% of the links were about women’s soccer. Re-tweets were also more frequently used on the general account. Further analysis revealed that almost half of the general account’s RTs (45%) were originally posted by the USWNT Twitter account or a member of the USWNT.

Figure 1 shows the type of coverage both Twitter accounts provided during the length of this study. It may be noted that the general account provided more live coverage during the women’s World Cup than it did for men’s Gold Cup games preceding the women’s World Cup. However, it must be acknowledged that the USMNT played the Gold Cup final on 26 June, which was the first day of the women’s World Cup. As a result, while the general account included 312 tweets covering games during live competition, and 194 of those were posted during the World Cup, 62 of these 194 were about the USMNT, not the USWNT. All in all, during the length of this study, the general account devoted 179 tweets to the live coverage of the three USMNT games, but only 135 tweets to the live coverage of twice as many women’s soccer games. Additionally, even though @ussoccer has tweeted about the USWNT account, encouraging people to follow it, the governing body did so only six times during this study period: twice before the World Cup and four times during it, three of which were on the same day, as the team was about to play Brazil in the quarterfinals.

Figure 1. Type of coverage by source and by period.

When a tweet contained a link to an exterior webpage, the story was most likely to be an interview when posted on the USWNT account, and hard news or a feature story when posted on the general account (Table 5). However, only 16% of the hard news and 41% of the feature stories tweeted by @ussoccer was about women’s soccer. In contrast, all but one of the fun montages/videos were about women’s soccer. In total, @ussoccer posted eight fun montages or videos, twice as much as on @ussoccer_wnt. This implies that the USSF tends to trivialize women’s soccer more when addressing the general public than when addressing the USWNT fans. Despite this trivialization, hypersexualization of athletes was virtually non-existent with only three tweets across both accounts. It is worth noting though that all three tweets were about female athletes. In the same vein, although only 29 tweets (of the 1560) contained a reference to an athlete’s family status, 25 of those (86%) were about female athletes.

Table 5. Format of exterior stories by source.

	ussoccer		ussoccer_wnt	TOTAL
	Total	Including … about women’s soccer (%)	Total	Total
Hard news	37	6 (16.21%)	23	60
Feature story	34	14 (41.18%)	13	47
Interview	25	22 (88%)	51	76
(Edited) Live coverage	2	2 (100%)	0	2
Fun video/Montage	9	8 (88.89%)	4	13
Picture album	13	6 (46.15%)	5	18
Ad/Sponsor	4	4 (100%)	13	17
Other	20	2 (10%)	10	30
TOTAL	144	64 (44.44%)	119	263

Note: The percentage figures in this table were calculated within rows only.

Focusing solely on women’s soccer, an analysis of the visuals either directly tweeted or connected to a tweeted link (Table 6) revealed that those most shown on the general account were players depicted in a ‘sport context’ (40%). Pictures of players posing or videos drawing the profile of one or several players, coded together as ‘pose/portrait’ were a distant second (20%). Both of these styles were also often posted by the USWNT account (about 20% each), closely followed by pictures or videos of USWNT players and/or coaches fulfilling their press duties. As mentioned earlier, the visuals that did not fall into any of the categories identified and were coded as ‘other’ generally did not include anyone from the team but instead depicted things such as landscapes, stadiums, fans, buildings, merchandise, etc.

Table 6. Type of visuals accompanying stories about the USWNT or women’s soccer by source. The visuals included here were either directly tweeted or part of a link that was tweeted.

	ussoccer		ussoccer_wnt		TOTAL
	N	% of ussoccer (%)	N	% of ussoccer_wnt (%)	N	% of both (%)
Sport context	97	40.25	65	18.57	162	27.41
Emotions	21	8.71	30	8.57	51	8.63
Press duties	13	5.39	49	14.00	62	10.49
Pose/Portrait	50	20.75	72	20.57	122	20.64
Ad/Sponsor	4	1.66	17	4.86	21	3.55
Headshot	21	8.71	1	0.29	22	3.72
Other	35	14.52	116	33.14	151	25.55
TOTAL	241	40.78	350	59.22	591	100

Note: The percentage figures appearing in the ‘total’ row were calculated within the row only.

Finally, the main identification of athletes in both the tweets and their attached materials (picture captions and exterior link text) differed based on the source of the tweet, and the gender of the athletes identified (Table 7). Indeed, while male athletes were almost exclusively called by their full name or last name, about 18% of the time female athletes were referred to by their first name alone or by a nickname. While this figure is much smaller than that found by Duncan et al. in their 1994 content analysis of televised coverage (31.5%), it still reveals a major difference between coverage of male and female athletes, and Duncan et al. consider this use of first names or nicknames to be a form of infantilization of women athletes. The USWNT account used nicknames for female athletes much more often than first names, which might have been to create some sort of intimacy with their followers, who as fans of the USWNT would be expected to know the players better than the general public did.

Table 7. Main identification of athlete by gender and by source.

	Full name (%)	First name (%)	Last name (%)	Nickname (%)	Total (%)
Female athletes by @ussoccer	52.63	7.02	30.41	9.94	100
Female athletes by @ussoccer_wnt	38.33	5.84	43.58	12.26	100
Female athletes across both sources	41.90	6.13	40.29	11.68	100
Male athletes by @ussoccer	44.12	1.96	51.96	1.96	100
Male athletes by @ussoccer_wnt	100.00	0	0	0	100
Male athletes across both sources	44.66	1.94	51.46	1.94	100

Note: The percentage figures in this table were compiled using 900 tweets because 660 tweets (348 from @ussoccer and 312 from @ussoccer_wnt) did not make any reference to any individual. These figures were calculated within rows only.

Discussion and Conclusions

This study adds to past research by analysing the gender coverage of US soccer on official federation Twitter accounts. It must be noted that most visuals containing women that were posted to the general account, which is followed by a quarter million people, were of athletes in the context of sport, meaning that they were shown in action during a game or at practice. This contrasts markedly with previous literature that consistently found a hypersexualization of female athletes.

Nevertheless, the findings reveal an important gender gap, even without the presence of traditional media gatekeepers. Although the differences in both quantity and quality of coverage between men’s and women’s soccer are not as great as those detected in traditional media between men’s and women’s athletics, they remain. Indeed, the Federation provided a great amount of coverage of the women’s soccer World Cup, especially during the competition and after the good performance of the USWNT, which reached the final of the tournament for the first time since 1999. But this coverage was mostly directed toward the followers of the Twitter account exclusively dedicated to the team. Even though the number of followers for this specific account almost quadrupled from 12,000 on the first day of this study to a little more than 45,000 on the last day, it is far fewer than the number of followers of the general account, which grew from about 253,000 to more than 275,000 in the same length of time.

Although it did not lessen the image of female players via hypersexualization, trivialization or numerous mentions of a player’s family status, the USSF did frame the women’s sport as less important than the men’s in other ways. First, even though the study was purposefully conducted at a time when female soccer was supposed to be prominent because of the international schedule, the USSF’s main Twitter account posted more about men’s soccer than it did about women’s. In the same vein, most pictures and web pages tweeted pertained to male soccer. Furthermore, even though the USWNT played twice as many games as the USMNT during the length of this study, the men’s team benefited from more live coverage than the women’s team did. Finally, there seems to be an infantilization of female players as they are more frequently referred to by their first name or nicknames than are male players.

Some European nations look up to the US and the way Americans accepted soccer as both a male and female sport, while ‘the beautiful game’ is mostly viewed as a male sport on the old continent.⁶¹ Similar to 1999, the 2011 World Cup raised the profile of women’s soccer to headline status both in print and broadcast media. This coverage in traditional media should have bolstered the USSF’s tweeting and the USSF did seem to provide frequent coverage of women’s soccer through Twitter. Additionally, the governing body’s use of the micro-blogging website to post multimedia content, such as pictures and videos, shows it is trying to take advantage of the various Web 2.0 features.

However, if the USSF wants to remain a leader in women’s soccer awareness, the organization should think about using its general Twitter account to tweet about upper level national teams in an equal manner. Instead, it views the main account as the default men’s account, ‘marking’ the women’s team, while the men’s team remains ‘unmarked’ to use Deborah Tannen’s terms.⁶² By doing so, the federation assumes that fans of American soccer, be they American or not, are more interested in the men’s game than they are in the women’s. Can mass media be expected to cover men’s and women’s soccer equally when the governing body of the sport itself doesn’t do so?

The USSF treats women’s soccer as a niche product even at the time of the women’s World Cup. The men’s team benefits from the general username ‘ussoccer’ while the women’s team, which has had much better results in international competitions, since its creation in the late 1980s, than its male counterpart, is treated as a niche product, confined to a few thousand individuals who have to make an extra effort to find the USWNT’s exclusive account.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Toobin, ‘Un-American Activity: The World Cup and Our Problem with Soccer’, The New Yorker, July 3, 2006, 11.

2. Robert Seidman, ‘2011 Women’s World Cup Finals: ESPN’s Most-viewed and Highest-rated Soccer Match Ever Averaging 13.5 Million Viewers’, TV by the numbers, July 18, 2011.

3. Andrei S. Markovitz and Steven L. Hellerman, ‘Women’s Soccer in the United States: Yet Another American ‘Exceptionalism’?’ in Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation, ed. Fan Hong and J.A. Mangan (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004).

4. T. Timmerman, ‘In A League Of Their Own’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Saint Louis, MO), September 21, 2003.

5. Emma Carmichael, ‘Women’s Professional Soccer Escapes Extinction’, Deadspin, December 13, 2011, http://deadspin.com/5867625/womens-professional-soccer-escapes-extinction.

6. Ruth Sparhawk, Mary Leslie, Phyllis Turbow, and Zina Rose, American Women in Sport, 1887–1987: A 100-year Chronology (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989); Michael Messner, Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).

7. Messner, Out of Play.

8. Mary Jo Kane and Susan Greendorfer, ‘The Media’s Role in Accommodating and Resisting Stereotyped Images of Women in Sport’, in Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values, ed. Pamela Creedon (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).

9. Mary Boutilier and Lucinda SanGiovanni, The Sporting Woman (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1983); Kelly Davis and C.A. Tuggle, ‘A Gender Analysis of NBC’s Coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics’, Electronic News 6, No. 2 (2012); Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Michael Messner, and Wayne Wilson, Gender Stereotyping in Televised Sports: A Follow-up to the 1989 Study (Los Angeles: LA84 Foundation, 1994); Susan Tyler Eastman and Andrew Billings, ‘Sportscasting and Sports Reporting: The Power of Gender Bias’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues 24, No. 2 (2000); Michael Messner and Cheryl Cooky, Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlights Shows, 1989–2009 (USC Center for Feminist Research, 2010); Angela Lumpkin and L.D. Williams, ‘An analysis of sports illustrated feature articles, 1954–1987’, Sociology of Sport Journal 8, No. 1 (1991); Terry Adams and C.A. Tuggle, ‘ESPN’s SportsCenter and Coverage of Women’s Athletics: ‘It’s a Boys’ Club’’, Mass Communication & Society 7, No. 2 (2004).

10. Boutilier and SanGiovanni, The Sporting Woman; Davis, and Tuggle, A Gender Analysis.

11. Daniela Baroffio-Bota and Sarah Banet-Weiser, ‘Women, Team Sports, and the WNBA: Playing Like a Girl’, in Handbook of Sports and Media, ed. Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).

12. J.C. Reeser, ‘Gender Identity and Sport: Is the Playing Field Level?’ British Journal of Sports Medicine 39, No. 10 (2005).

13. Caroline McCarthy, ‘Twitter Spreads Like Wildfire, but MySpace Still On Top’, The Social, October 22, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10073531-36.html.

14. Umair Haque, ‘Twitter, SXSW, and Building a 21st Century Business’, HBR Blog, March 17, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/twitter_sxsw_and_building_a_21.html.

15. Noah Arceneaux and Amy Schmitz Weiss, ‘Seems Stupid Until You Try it: Press Coverage of Twitter, 2006–9’, New Media Society 12, No. 8 (2010).

16. Boutilier and SanGiovanni, The Sporting Woman; Duncan, Messner, and Wilson, Gender Stereotyping in Televised Sports; Eastman and Billings, Sportscasting and Sports Reporting; Messner, and Cooky, Gender in Televised Sports; Lumpkin and Williams, Analysis of Sports Illustrated.

17. Nicole LaVoi, ‘The ‘Success’ of Twitter in Promoting Women’s Sports: ‘Show Me the Money!’, One Sport Voice, May 5, 2009, http://www.nicolemlavoi.com/the-success-of-twitter-in-promoting-womens-sports-show-me-the-money.

18. Brian Anthony Hernandez, ‘The Top 15 Tweets-per-second Records’, Mashable, February 6, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/02/06/tweets-per-second-records-twitter/.

19. Robert Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43, No. 4 (1993): 52.

20. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, ‘Gender Warriors in Sport: Women and the Media’, in Handbook of Sports and Media, ed. Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 247.

21. Messner, Out of Play.

22. Adams and Tuggle, ESPN’s SportsCenter and Coverage of Women’s Athletics.

23. Judith Cramer, ‘Conversations with Women Sports Journalists’, in Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values, ed. Pamela Creedon (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 173.

24. Boutilier and SanGiovanni, The Sporting Woman.

25. Lumpkin and Williams, Analysis of Sports Illustrated.

26. Ibid., 16.

27. Dan C. Hilliard, ‘Media Images of Male and Female Professional Athletes: An Interpretive Analysis of Magazine Articles’, Sociology of Sport Journal 1, No. 3 (1984).

28. Eastman, and Billings, Sportscasting and Sports Reporting, 202.

29. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Michael Messner, and Wayne Wilson, Coverage of Women’s Sports in Four Daily Newspapers (Los Angeles: Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, 1991).

30. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Michael Messner, and Wayne Wilson, Gender in Televised Sports: News And Highlights Shows, 1989–2004 (Los Angeles: LA84 Foundation), http://www.la84foundation.org/9arr/ResearchReports/tv2004.pdf; Adams and Tuggle, ESPN’s SportsCenter and Coverage of Women’s Athletics; Messner and Cooky, Gender in Televised Sports.

31. Dan Brown and Jennings Bryant, ‘Sports Content on US Television’ in Handbook of Sports and Media, ed. Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006); Jon Lafayette, ‘WNBA: No High Scorer, but Getting the Job Done’, Electronic Media 16, No. 33 (1997).

32. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Michael Messner, and Wayne Wilson, Gender in Televised Sports: 1989, 1993 and 1999 (Los Angeles: Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, 2000), http://www.la84foundation.org/9arr/ResearchReports/tv2000.pdf.

33. Messner and Cooky, Gender in Televised Sports.

34. Davis and Tuggle, A Gender Analysis.

35. Baroffio-Bota and Banet-Weiser, Women, Team Sports, and the WNBA.

36. C.A. Tuggle, ‘Differences in Television Sports Reporting of Men’s and Women’s Athletics: ESPN SportsCenter and CNN Sports Tonight’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 41, No. 1 (1997).

37. Boutilier and SanGiovanni, The Sporting Woman.

38. Duncan, Messner, and Wilson, Gender in Televised Sport: 1989, 1993 and 1999, 16.

39. Ibid.

40. Adams and Tuggle, ESPN’s SportsCenter and Coverage of Women’s Athletics, 245.

41. Christine Baker, Why She Plays: The World of Women’s Basketball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 151.

42. Alina Bernstein, ‘Is It Time for a Victory Lap? Changes in the Media Coverage of Women in Sport’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37, No. 3 (2002); Hilliard, Media Images.

43. Baroffio-Bota and Banet-Weiser, Women, Team Sports, and the WNBA; Bernstein, Is It Time; Neal Christopherson, Michelle Janning, and Eileen McConnell, ‘Two Kicks Forward, One Kick Back: A Content Analysis of Media Discourses on the 1999 Women’s World Cup Soccer Championship’, Sociology of Sport Journal 19, No. 2 (2002); Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Michael Messner, ‘The Media Image of Sport and Gender’, in MediaSport, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (New York: Routledge, 1998); Duncan, Messner, and Wilson, Gender In Televised Sports: News And Highlights Shows.

44. Bernstein, Is It Time.

45. Lea Ann Schell, ‘(Dis)Empowering Images? Media Representations of Women in Sport’, Women’s Sports Foundation, May 9, 2009, http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/Content/Articles/Issues/Media-and-Publicity/D/DisEmpowering-Images--Media-Representations-of-Women-in-Sport.aspx.

46. Helen J. Lenskyj and Mary Jo Kane, ‘Media Treatment of Female Athletes: Issues of Gender and Sexualities’, in MediaSport, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (New York: Routledge, 1998).

47. Duncan, Messner, and Wilson, Gender in Televised Sport: 1989, 1993 and 1999.

48. Messner and Cooky, Gender in Televised Sports.

49. Baroffio-Bota and Banet-Weiser, Women, Team Sports, and the WNBA.

50. Hilliard, Media Images, 260.

51. Raymond Boyle and Richard Haynes, ‘New Media Sport’, Culture, Sport, Society 5, No. 3 (2002).

52. Stephen Burt, Shot Clocks: Poems and an Essay for the WNBA (New York: Harry Tankoos Books, 2006), 30.

53. George Cunningham, ‘Media Coverage of Women’s Sport: A New Look at an Old Problem’, Physical Educator 60, No. 2 (2003).

54. Coyte C. Cooper and Brandon D. Cooper, ‘NCAA Website Coverage: Do Athletic Departments Provide Equitable Gender Coverage on Their Athletic Home Web Pages?’ The Sport Journal 12, No. 2 (2009); Edward Ted Kian, Michael Mondello, and John Vincent, ‘ESPN – The Women’s Sports Network? A Content Analysis of Internet Coverage of March Madness’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 53, No. 3 (2007); Michael Sagas, George B. Cunningham, Brian J. Wigley, and Franck B. Ashley, ‘Internet Coverage of University Softball and Baseball Websites: The Inequity Continues’, Sociology of Sport Journal 17, No. 2 (2000).

55. Svetlana Rybalko and Trent Seltzer, ‘Dialogic Communication in 140 Characters or Less: How Fortune 500 Companies Engage Stakeholders Using Twitter’, Public Relations Review 36, No. 1 (2010).

56. Brett Hutchins, ‘The Acceleration of Media Sport Culture: Twitter, Telepresence and Online Messaging’, Information, Communication & Society 14, No. 2 (2011).

57. Ibid.; Brett Hutchins and David Rowe, ‘Reconfiguring Media Sport for the Online World: An Inquiry into ‘Sports News and Digital Media’, International Journal of Communication 4, No. 1 (2010).

58. Austin Stair Calhoun and Emily J. Houghton, ‘Examining Elite Sport Representations in Social Media: Conceptualizing Twitter’, (presentation, Sixth Conference of the European Association for the Sociology of Sport, Rome, Italy, May 27–30, 2009.

59. Ibid.

60. Roger D. Wimmer and Joseph R. Dominick, Mass Media Research: An Introduction (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage, 2011), 178.

61. Yves Montuelle, ‘Le football féminin est plus propre’, L’Express, July 12, 2011, http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/sport/football/le-football-feminin-est-plus-propre_1011556.html.

62. Deborah Tannen, ‘Marked Women, Unmarked Men’, The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 1993, http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/nyt062093.htm.