#lcl

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many women’s football fans are player loyal before they’re club loyal.

Whenever this comes up, I find myself thinking about how different the history of women’s football is from the history of the men’s game.

I was always club loyal in men’s football. That’s how I learned to be a football fan. The club was the constant. The institution. The thing that existed before you and would exist after you.

But that’s not how I found women’s football.

I came into the sport through the 2011 Women’s World Cup. There were hardly any league matches on television. Most weeks, if you wanted to follow women’s football, you had to actively seek it out. The game wasn’t constantly visible.

What I remember are people. The players stayed with me. They were the reason I kept watching. I identified with them. And if you go back even further, I think it becomes easier to understand why so many women’s football fans developed their attachments this way.

That’s where women’s football comes from. Not from giant institutions with generations of inherited support. Not from a media landscape where every match was available at the click of a button.

For many fans, the players were simply the most visible part of the sport. And maybe that’s why I’ve always found the current debate around LCL so interesting.

One of the most common criticisms of the project is that it lacks identity. That people are attached to the players being signed rather than to the club itself. That the project is driven by investment and ambition rather than by a long-established club culture.

I understand that criticism.

At the same time, I think it bumps into something that has always been true about women’s football. For many of us, loyalty started with players because players were often the first thing we could see.

People sometimes talk as if player-driven fandom is less authentic than club-driven fandom. But historically, a lot of women’s football fandom started exactly that way. Many people found the sport through World Cups, Olympic tournaments, European Championships, or individual players long before they formed strong attachments to clubs.

That’s not a weakness of the sport. It’s part of its history.

And that’s where I think the conversation around investment gets interesting. People want more money in women’s football. More professionalism. Better facilities. Better salaries. More visibility.

Then someone like Michele Kang comes along and invests heavily in a club, attracts elite players, and tries to build something ambitious from the ground up.

It’s completely fair to argue that money alone doesn’t create culture, community, or identity. It doesn’t.

But identities also don’t appear fully formed. They have to be built. The clubs we now think of as established institutions became that way because players, fans, and communities spent years creating something people cared about.

So when people say that LCL’s identity is currently tied more closely to its players than to its club culture, my reaction isn’t necessarily that they’re wrong. It’s that maybe this is how these things begin.

I understand why some Barça fans dislike the idea of her leaving. From a club perspective, it feels almost impossible to make sense of. Why leave one of the biggest and most successful teams in the world if you literally are the club?

But if she were to make that move to LCL, it would also fit a long tradition in women’s football of elite players helping new projects gain visibility, credibility, and attention.

That doesn’t mean it’s the right decision.

It doesn’t mean fans have to like it.

But it doesn’t feel completely out of place in the history of the sport either.

Turns out the LCL training ground is a 5 minute drive from my childhood home? I could probably walk there in my sleep.