Some of you may be familiar with the famous thought experiment know as Schrödinger’s cat. Here’s a handy video if you want to cat-ch up. Essentially a cat is put in a wooden box with an item that has a 50% chance of killing it in the next hour. At the end of the hour, how can we know whether the feline is alive or dead without looking inside the box? Therefore, according to quantum physics, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead. Bear with me on this…

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SheGulls Podcast member Aby, in accordance with these basic principles, has nicknamed Brighton Women’s new home inside the city limits as “Schrödinger’s stadium”. We’ve been told about it enough times, heck a council motion was put forward in October 2023 to agree to the proposed project, but here we are in 2026 and never mind coming along – the fans don’t even know where it will be yet!

To say this isn’t a source of frustration for Albion Women’s fans would be an understatement. Initial suggestions put the timeline for completion at the 2026/27 WSL season, but this was soon pushed back to 2027/28. As a spade hasn’t so much been inserted into the ground in anger yet though – even that seems incredibly optimistic. Perhaps we are waiting for the cushion of the full announcement to soften the blow of another delay?

We are a patient fanbase, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we’re all still anticipating this great push to achieve a top four finish in the league, or an appearance at a cup final at least. The wait dear reader, continues…

Strangely enough this piece isn’t so much about the stadium itself but the bothsidesism going on amongst the women’s football media and a subsection of the fans with regards to women’s specific sports stadia. What do I mean? Well allow me to elaborate…

I personally have sat on two advisory panels in discussion with major architecture and sports consultation agencies that have discussed women’s specific sports stadia. One thing has been absolutely unequivocally agreed upon in both, we don’t want to be the men’s game, we deserve something separate, and it should cater for or be built for our needs.

In some instances that may include the option to retrofit an existing stadium with additional facilities, more female toilets for example, family-specific areas, sensory rooms, buggy parks, breastfeeding areas and more. Ultimately this is going to be limited by the capacity of said stadium (generally the corresponding men’s team ground) to accommodate these changes, the cost to do so, and whether it is financially or logistically viable.

Let’s take a hypothetical example. Club X has a men’s ground with an average attendance of 30,000 for men’s team matches, of which 10% are women. The club has women’s toilets, of course, to cater to those 3,000. However, next week Club X’s women’s team is playing Chelsea – there are expected to be 15,000 in attendance – 50% are women. That is 7,500 women – and therein lies the problem – they now need to triple the amount of women’s toilets whilst the majority of men’s toilets will be underused or at least underutilised. In some cases Club X will be so big, their toilets can cope either way, or they can build more, but that is not a universal option. Apologies to all for the toilet talk.

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The truth is football stadiums are catered towards men, they just are, I’m one, and for the most part – I get on ok with them. If I put myself in the shoes of my wife though, or my daughters, I can see that they are often distinctly uninviting concrete places where men go on the weekend to knock back a few pints and shout as loud as they can at their team and/or the referee – good or bad, with a side order of swearing.

Can you put a smiley face on a brick and call it Mr. Brickypants, of course you can, but it’s still a brick. Male-oriented stadia can become welcoming to a women’s football fan, but not every stadium, and not every fan. To simply state that all women’s teams should play in their equivalent men’s team stadium is a reductive fallacy.

Does that mean every single women’s team, or WSL team specifically, should build its own stadium? Absolutely not. Some have the facilities to thrive already, some lack the space, some don’t have the funds, or simply don’t want to allocate that budget to their women’s team – which for the most part are (sadly) still loss-making enterprises.

However, for teams like Brighton there is an alternative. Create a stadium from the ground up and consult with fans about what women’s football supporters want. Engage the community, engage the players and the staff – build it for them and we can all grow together. That’s the plan anyway, and I think it’s a good one – I’d just like it to hurry up and come to fruition.

Are people really out there saying that they’d rather not have a blank canvas to work from? That they don’t want a purpose built women’s sport stadium and would rather shoehorn a women’s team into an ill-fitting men’s ground where the stands are a quarter full and you can hear a pin drop (see Everton vs Brighton at Goodison on Friday night)? How is that positive? What do those ‘optics’ look like?

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If you want to boil it down to brass tacks the constant back and forth about what is ‘good for the game’ has to stop. You cannot say that you’re championing women or women’s supporters when you want them to use traditionally male-oriented venues, suitable or not, because it fits some form of agenda. Be open to learning about how things can and will work differently in different places for different clubs and for different reasons.

I hope this has been helpful, or at least thought provoking. If anyone has any thoughts do send them to me at shegullsbhawfc@gmail.com – this topic does deserve discussion and the eye-roll bad faith comments I’ve seen online just don’t do a complex situation justice.

Also – if you’re interested in finding out more – one of the companies I worked with, Trivandi, put together what I have previously referred to as “the Bible of women’s football stadia” AKA ‘Game Changers’ which you can read HERE.

Until next time…