Leading Host Broadcaster’s Coverage Of Women’s World Cup

When the FIFA Women’s World Cup begins this week, English sports presenter Kelly Somers will be one of the faces of the host broadcaster’s coverage of the tournament. In an exclusive interview she talked to me about the pressures of being a woman working in the game.

The 32-year-old has become one of the most familiar names in men’s and women’s soccer coverage in recent years working regularly for the BBC, Amazon Prime, Premier
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League Productions and Amazon Prime Sport. For the next few weeks, she will be fronting the Optus Sports coverage of the tournament around the world from Australia.

After working on the men’s Champions League final and UEFA Nations League matches, Somers, a regular host of The Women’s Football Show on BBC, had just ten days holiday before she began preparations to fly to Australia to present coverage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup alongside Australians Amy Duggan and Niav Owens.

Somers will be a lone Englishwoman working with a group of Australians far away from home as the two countries, both among the favorites to win the Women’s World Cup, battle it out, not only for soccer but cricketing supremacy.

“It’s quite inconvenient that it’s on at the same time as The Ashes isn’t it?” she jokes. “I’ve worked for Optus before, they’re all really lovely people. I’m actually really looking forward to going and learning a bit more. I worked for them as a reporter in Russia during the men’s World Cup but I’m really looking forward to going over to Australia and working for them as a presenter on a day-to-day basis and see how they do things.”

Somers will unfortunately not be out in Australia for the duration of the tournament due to prior commitments to cover the men’s Premier League, which begins a week before the Women’s World Cup concludes, something which irritates her. “As someone that really loves the women’s game I would have preferred for it to have started a couple of weeks earlier just so that the sole focus could have been on it.”

The increasing 24/7 nature of the women’s game has increased the demands on those, such as Somers, who present both men’s and women’s soccer. However, staying on top of both games remains a pleasure rather than a pressure for her. “Football is still my main hobby, which can be good and can be bad. The bad side being is you never really switch off from it and sometimes at home, I kind of have to be like, ‘no, I know there’s a game of football on tonight, but I won’t watch it!’ Rarely, actually, do I follow through with that by the way!”

“The positive of that is I kind of consume it all the time anyway, without even realizing. I just consume it because I want to consume it – because I enjoy it. Yes, there’s a lot of keep across. I actually went away on holiday recently where I had a few days where I didn’t listen to anything and then I thought, ‘oh gosh, I don’t want to fall behind’. I think it’s just ingrained in me and is part of who I am.”

As an eight-year-old, the Watford-born Somers was swept along by her school friends in a wave of local fervor as her local team played at Wembley Stadium in the Championship play-off final. Her first sight of the famous old National Stadium had her hooked. The following season, still aged just nine, Somers had her first experience of the profession she would eventually make her own.

“I won a competition to be a journalist in the press box for a day,” she tells me. “There wasn’t many women in those days. It took me actually going into that environment to open my eyes. From then on in, I just knew I wanted to work in football journalism. It just blew my mind that you could be paid to watch this sport that I love so much.”

Now whenever she works, Somers is rarely the only woman in a press room but growing up, she cherishes those pioneers who showed her there was a path into top-level presenting. “I was listening to one of Gabby Logan’s podcasts earlier on and I realized she was one of the people I watched growing up – Hazel Irvine as well. Then, when I was a little bit older, Georgie Thompson on Sky Sports News – even someone like Hayley McQueen – and Bianca Westwood, as a pitch-side reporter, was one of the first as well.”

“So there’s so many women that we have to be grateful for and I hope they look at how many people like myself that are lucky enough to be in the industry and do the job that we are doing now and they look at that with a bit of pride. As brilliant as they’ve been at their job, which is an achievement in itself, they’ve opened doors for the rest of us.”

Being a such high-profile female in the game, Somers has inevitably had to endure sexist abuse on Instagram. Yet unlike some of the players at the Women’s World Cup, she tells me she will not come off social media during the tournament. “I won’t do a blackout, no, because I think part of my job as a presenter and a reporter, particularly in the women’s game, is to keep talking about it, amplify the noise around it to show people what I’m doing, to show them it’s a really exciting sport to be a part of. Let them know where they can watch it.”

“I have done periods where I have come off social media, I did it during Euro 2020 (played in 2021) after England’s first game because sometimes it can be overwhelming. I have had abuse. I had a couple of big incidents which now I look back on as real blessings because it’s made me look at social media in a different way. I only use it for what I want and need it for, and you have to realize that it’s only such a small snapshot of society. People are much more likely to be horrible than nice a lot of the time, sadly.”

The fact that women’s soccer is set to dominate media coverage around the world for the next five weeks will not be appreciated by everyone, particularly those who continue to believe that women’s sport does not justify the global coverage it is set to receive and feel the need to remind everyone.

It is something that frustrates Somers. “There is a corner of social media which will never accept that women’s football is on TV, don’t want it, as they tell us, ‘rammed down their throats’. It’s the same as if there’s a cooking program on TV. I’m not particularly good at cooking. I don’t particularly watch cooking programs, I just turn over.”

“You have a choice. All we’re doing right now is opening the options for people who do like women’s football and do want to watch women’s football and want to watch more football in general. We’re just giving people the choice, before the choice wasn’t there. You can switch over. You don’t have to watch.”

Nonetheless, millions will watch, despite the brinkmanship surrounding the television contracts which FIFA negotiated with many leading nation’s broadcasters, the Women’s World Cup will be available for mass audiences all over the globe. something that was denied to Somers growing up. “I want this generation now to grow up watching women’s football on TV.”

“It’s why I’m really passionate about the BBC having the Women’s Super League on free-to-air television on a Sunday. Little girls will get used to seeing female footballers on their TV, just like they get used to seeing female presenters, just like, for years, we got used to seeing males doing it. It just needs to become normal and something we don’t talk about. I think, day on day, as generations move on, it will be.”