The soundtrack of the women’s Euros was happiness … and some men can’t cope | Barney Ronay | OneFootball

“You can’t stand their voices? ALL women’s voices?” “Yes.” “Are you married to a woman?” “I am. And she feels the same.” Hmm. To be fair to Dave from Egham, whose name has been changed to protect the confused, the whole setup here was pretty bleak. It was Dave’s destiny a week on from England’s victory at Euro 2025 to find himself going viral after an appearance on LBC radio.

In the clip Dave objects to the sound of all women’s voices, even if they’re Adele or Billie Holiday. Specifically he objects to women talking about women’s sport, which Dave hates because it is being thrown down his throat, and thrown down his throat to the extent he has to ring up a radio station and talk about the women talking about the women’s sport, simply to disentangle its tendrils from his throat, to steal a few gargling, sputtering final breaths.

What are we supposed to do with this? In Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, which is the best history of the world even when it’s wrong, he suggests that language evolved because humans were driven by the ice age into caves, forced to find ways of sharing social spaces, that this miracle of industry, sociability, turnip production schemes, and ultimately beauty, poetry and abstract thought, evolved out of a closeness driven by basic human survival.

You feel a bit for the cave-human in this context. What have we done with this miracle of human connection? Two million years on, here we are on a radio station designed solely to mainline endless gabbling voices into your weepingly overstuffed consciousness, listening to a man talking in an endless gabbling voice about how the endless gabbling voices torture him, although only voices with undescended larynx folds describing sport, as agreed with by Mrs Dave, who is definitely not a broom handle with a wig and a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

And yes, it is easy to laugh at Dave, although not perhaps to dismiss him completely. In part because he isn’t even the least sympathetic person in the clip. That role is occupied by the host, who looks like what happens when a pomegranate with a notably overblown sense of self-regard has somehow grown a goatee and worked out how to sit in a chair, and who clearly knows he has a live one on his hook, that this is rage-content gold, and who reels Dave in like a mutant farmed salmon.

But also because while Dave’s pain may be misguided and unprocessed it is also telling us an interesting thing about all this. I got to watch the Euros as a fan, a rare pleasure when you work as a reporter. It was really fun, a chance just to enjoy the games and get to know the players and support whoever was good.

The standard was high. The women’s game at this level has distinctive patterns, a pass-and-move sport, a business of close angles and sudden transitions. Often the matches were two or three things at once like an English summer’s day, ranging in a single sitting from slick zippy combinations, to endurance-race wrestle, to shootout drama.

The TV coverage was good. The whole thing has calmed down from the early days of being forced to justify its existence, the cult-like vibe where everyone has to be inspirational all the time and the studio chat could feel like an evangelical church coffee morning.

The pundits were agreeably cutting when England stumbled. Ellen White is just a really good analyst. Nedum Onuoha was an excellent selection. It was very easy to get lost in it all. Even if, after a while, there was a sense of absence, a missing static field, a tonal difference that Dave does identify, albeit incorrectly.

The missing noise here was: noise, the familiar sounds of rage, pain and betrayal. Instead the tone of the women’s Euros was happiness. The players were courteous. Nobody hated anyone else. England wished Spain well on the eve of the final.

Mainly it was all just seductively unencumbered, operating in its own energy field, a pitch that became more distinct as the endless gurgle of the Premier League reasserted itself this week. And yes, the klaxon is sounding here. Don’t define women’s sport by men’s sport! But what about the other way round? Because the Euros also illuminated something about men’s sport that feels both blindingly obvious and a little strange in its own right.

Why is men’s football defined so powerfully by rage and pain? Why does it reach for these emotions reflexively at every turn? This, I believe is what Dave is really talking about. He doesn’t find women’s sport alien because the voices are women’s voices. He finds it strange because they’re happy, because they’re not talking about the usual things, reaching for that hammy old emotional compass. Is it real if it doesn’t hurt?

The women’s Euros seemed able to operate without this burden of history. Even victory in a big tournament was a joyful thing, not a grimacing, howling assertion of some lost sporting identity. Nobody was being flame-throwered here, no hurt expunged. For those of us afflicted with that endless backbeat of fear and rage it was like the moment the free jazz quartet in the corner of the bar stops playing and suddenly you just get to enjoy your cocktail.

The fact is men do sometimes love to fetishise their own pain, their capacity for powerful emotions, to create a sense of quest. Men’s sport has been defined by longing, disappointment, catharsis. This is its cultural heritage. Men like to yearn, to feel tribal. What do I have without my minor chords, my bruises? This vision of winning demands wounds, a narrative of redemption. The Southgate-era men’s team confronted this by falling into a state of premature enragement when it looked like victory might actually be possible. Stop winning wrong. Win more English.

And, yes, none of this makes sense in outline. Heroic men aren’t tortured by female voices talking about sport. John Wayne isn’t storming out of the living room because Gabby Logan is on. But then nothing really adds up about the Dave-style objections to women’s sport receiving coverage.

Dave says women’s football is being thrown down his throat. Well, maybe, but everything is being thrown down your throat. Men’s football, the bacon double whopper, walk-in baths, the car that won’t make you happy. We live in a down-your-throat culture. Why is a few weeks of women playing a ballgame a problem? And not, for example, Pringles or Nigel Farage.

There is the objection that women’s football is parasitic on men’s football, that it is not yet commercially self-sufficient. Who cares? This is what growth is. You invest. Currently men’s football is subsidising iffy agents, supercars and money laundering. Why should it not also fund something that’s going to make people kick a ball, be active, feel pleased? What else is sport for, if not that?

And this is commercially sensible growth, growth that doesn’t destroy stuff or distort existing leagues or glorify Gianni Infantino. There are no disbenefits to women’s sport being allowed to grow, nothing bad you can point to. Which is fine. But how are we supposed to cope with that?

Some parts of the football media have done their best to contort success at the Euros into a more recognisable shape. England won by digging in and being determined. Yes, this is how we beat foreigners now. With will and spirit and traditional values. Sarina Wiegman as wing-commander Charles Reep, Chloe Kelly as the evacuation of Dunkirk. Lucy Bronze and Stuart Pearce, every single one of their limbs broken, standing on the Dover cliffs, waving a single flapping femur in salute to the skies, Does this work? Can we run with it?

Really, though, it is simply a process of accommodation. What Dave from Egham is really telling us is that the time is now past where it’s worth broadcasting this stuff. It is simply rage in the dark. It will pass. More vital right now is that sense of clarity around the women’s team, of something existing in its own clean, clear square of light. Can it be preserved?

This England group is at a perfect stage in many ways, halfway in and halfway out of its own period of growth. There are still players there who came up in the old days of bandaging their own strains and getting buses to training. There will of course be a fall, a time where there is nostalgia for the current success. But there is also a chance here to subvert this paradigm, to retain that sense of connection, of a victory that felt like happiness not vindication, pleasure not the release from pain, and that was carried to us by women’s voices.

Header image: [Illustration: Matt Johnstone]