Towards Equal Rights in the Global Game? FIFA’s Strategy for Women’s Football as a Tightly Bounded Institutional Innovation

Abstract

FIFA’s recent (rhetorical) embrace of human rights prominently includes commitments to address gender discrimination and promote gender equality both on and off the pitch. What promise does FIFA’s ‘first-ever global strategy for women’s football’ hold as a means of fulfilling such commitments? A feminist institutionalist approach to this question offers insights into the bounded model of change endorsed by the Women’s Football Strategy. It reveals that the Strategy’s three key objectives serve as ‘common carriers’ for both long-standing institutional interests (in power, profit, and prestige) and newer institutional interests (in women footballers, women’s football, and women in football governance). The assumption that these two sets of interests are mutually reinforcing is brought into question by exposing the ways in which FIFA’s mainline institutional priorities, combined with certain structural features of football governance, blunt the reformist potential of the Women’s Football Strategy. Bounded by old institutional features, the Strategy reflects a partial and incremental, rather than comprehensive and revolutionary, approach to addressing gender discrimination. FIFA’s commitment to human rights therefore remains unfulfilled vis-à-vis women in football.

Keywords: International human rights law; global sport governance; gender equality and non-discrimination; feminist institutionalism; bounded innovation; FIFA; football