Rangers boss calls on rivals to 'come together' after another disappointing Hampden attendance

Rangers head coach Jo Potter celebrates her side’s Scottish Cup win at Hampden Park. Cr. SNS Group.

Rangers boss Jo Potter has called on her SWPL rivals to ‘keep pushing the women’s game’

Rangers head coach Jo Potter urged the country’s clubs to ‘come together’ in order to grow the Scottish Women’s Premier League after just over 4,000 fans attended their Scottish Cup final win over Hearts at Hampden Park.

Goals in each half from Rachel McLauchlan and Lizzie Arnot ensured her side took home their second domestic trophy of the season. However, another disappointing attendance for a major trophy final at Hampden proved there’s still work to be done when it comes to growing the women’s game in Scotland.

“We need to keep pushing,” said the Rangers boss. “At one point it was every other post in England. You’ll always have people that are going to say ‘I don’t want to see this’, but on the flip side of that, the more people you’re reaching, the more times we can just advertise it all the time - then there’s only one way it is going to go.”

A historic deal with Sky Sports and the SWPL was reached September 2022 and was hoped to be game-changing for Scottish Women’s Football. However, just a handful of Scottish women’s games have been broadcast since. The women’s national team have also played their games exclusively at the Mount Florida based stadium for the last two and a half years, while the Scottish Women’s Cup semi-finals and Sunday’s final were moved to the home of Scottish football earlier this year.

However, outside of the 15,320 crowd that attended Scotland’s defeat to the Lionesses in the UEFA Nations League, attendances at Hampden have been low in numbers. Hearts' 3-0 victory over Spartans in the Scottish Cup semi-final last month was watched by under 1,000 at the national stadium.

Rangers Manager Philippe Clement and Rangers Womnen Head Coach Jo Potter were deep in conversation following the Gers win over Hearts at Hampden Park. Cr. SNS Group.

In contrast, nearly 40,000 attended Chelsea's home leg against Barcelona in the Women’s Champions League in April, while Arsenal sold 60,000 tickets for a fixture against Manchester United in February - and Potter said Scotland must take inspiration from the work undertaken by the Women’s Super League.

“We’ve seen it down in England. You get the backing right, you push it in the right direction,” said the Rangers boss. “You’ve got Arsenal Women playing their home games at Emirates. They can do that because they’ve sold out every single time they have played there. Arsenal have done a tremendous job of backing their women’s team and showing that if you do it right, it is achieveable.

“It has took a while for that to happen in England. When it first went to WSL in 2010/2011, there was a criteria that you had meet to be professional and everybody wanted to be professional. You’ve got to want to bridge that gap. Teams and clubs have got to want to back it and push it forward. They’ve got to keep going with it.

“We’re going to keep going, us and our rivals are going to keep pushing because we push each other and want to be better, we all want to be the best. So we’re going to keep going in that way but it is important that everybody comes with us or the gap is going to be too big - we can’t let that disparity between top six and bottom six become too big.

“We need to keep going and growing the game together because nobody wants to see that happen. We want it all to go together. It is important for the national team up here and the league to keep pushing together. But the clubs have to want to do it as well as the Scottish FA.

“They extended the Champions League spots down in England because the league is so competitive. It can happen, the growth is there. If you expand with it, the rewards are there. When you do it, you can reap the rewards of it. We need to keep pushing because then the league will get better, we’ll produce better players and get better players into this league.”