Contemporary attitudes to women’s football in Israel

The development in women’s sports in general, and women’s football in particular, has attracted extensive research due to, among other things, the high popularity of football, which functioned as an exclusively male domain for many years. This article examines attitudes towards women’s football in Israel, reflected in readers’ comments to related sport news items. Analysis of the responses to all the items related to women’s football posted in 2019 on sports and news websites, reveals mechanisms of fierce resistance manifested in disparaging and degrading attitudes towards women’s football and all factors involved in this sport. Some commenters emphasised women’s anomalous presence in football by restricting women to roles in the domestic and sexual spheres, while others explained women’s presence on football pitches by obliterating the gendered nature of women’s football, even to the point of equating the women with animals and beasts. Yet others blamed women players for the discrimination they experience on the football pitches, identifying the cause as ‘feminist terror.’.