15 February 2024 , 15:17
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It speaks to the unknown and untapped frontier that women’s football social media once was that Freda Ayisi believed her now signature post-trick dash wouldn’t go down well. Maybe people wouldn’t like it. Or maybe, she feared, they’d think it was silly. And if there’s anything a footballer doesn’t want to be perceived as–especially a woman footballer–it’s silly.
“Then people started saying, ‘Oh the run, the run’,” the former Arsenal and Birmingham City player says. “I didn’t know what they were talking about, because in my head it was normal. It was me. But I realised people enjoyed it.”
Ask Ayisi how she would describe herself – an influencer, a freestyler, a footballer, a combination of all three – and the Charlton Athletic No.9 is reflective. “I'm a footballer who loves watching football. I love anything to do with football, but I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily a freestyler.
“Would you say Ronaldinho is a freestyler? It's freestyling-ish, but not to the extent of what I've seen other people do. I would just say I'm a footballer who enjoys life, really.”
Life, yes, but also the blossoming marriage between women’s sport and social media. At the time of writing, Ayisi boasts just under 650,000 TikTok followers and over 27,000 YouTube subscribers. Her online presence is a cheeky but wholesome amalgam of self-assurance, friendly raillery and the sort of absurd technical football skill that verges on illusion.
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She’s left Arsenal legend Ian Wright speechless (she’s since met him and always says hello when she can), graced a giant Spotify billboard in London, earned the moniker ‘the female Berbatov’ and all the while helped Charlton to the top of the Women’s Championship with promotion to the Women’s Super League at the end of the season a strong possibility.
Ayisi’s version of a double life—full-time athlete, unofficially full-time content creator—is becoming increasingly familiar. Mary Earps might be the first-ever two-time winner of the FIFA Best Goalkeeper award and England’s No 1, but she’s also one of TikTok’s most popular footballers with over 1 million followers and a voracious, uninhibited humour. Chelsea star Fran Kirby showcases her DIY nous to her thousands of followers, while Beth Mead’s dog has become its own internet sensation courtesy of TikTok.
Why this works is multi-faceted. Women’s sport has long trumpeted the authentic, un-sterilised personalities of its players as an alluring quality. An accessible rawness. As the game has grown in quality and demand, so too has the appetite for raw personality-driven content. That commensurate growth has made social media the ultimate coalescence, ripe with opportunity.
According to the Women’s Sport Trust’s most recent report into visibility, the WSL’s TikTok video views have increased 268% year-on-year, while engagements on Instagram videos rose from 3.9m in 2022 to 5.4m in 2023. Women's football games are streamed across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, with online fanbases swelling to enormous sizes. But it's the eyes of players such as Ayisi who play for teams lower down the pyramid which could be ground-breaking.
“I think social media helps the women’s game, brings more attention to it. That’s what’s been needed for years, getting larger audiences to tap into it,” Aisyi says.
“It’s an avenue that women’s football can use to boost the game. We should continue doing that if I'm being honest. People are interested in the person, in the players. If we continue doing that, then it's only going to grow.”
Ayisi didn’t go into the creator's life thinking this way. During the Covid lockdown she sought to turn her boredom into something else and began filming trick shots she’d done since she was a little girl living in south London. Nothing sensational. Yet it was.
“A lot of people where I live, they knew I could do these things,” she says. “But when people began reacting to what I was doing on social media, I carried on filming and posting, and the reception was good.”
Freda Ayisi was called into the England under-23s for a preseason friendly in 2017 (Photo by Jose Breton/NurPhoto via Getty Images)The videos are undeniably impressive, demonstrating Ayisi’s remarkable ball control, footwork and accuracy. But there’s also a level of nostalgia at play. How many childhoods were spent in living rooms, car parks and pitches, mimicking the greats from memory and momentarily channelling an unbeknownst inner Ronaldinho?
“Because even with playing football [for a living], when you do the tricks and go to the park and have fun, you get to escape from the real world,” Ayisi says. “You get to just relax and calm down, have fun. So I feel like that may be the reason why people relate to it. Because whatever troubles you're going through, you could just forget about it. Like when we were kids.”
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For players like Ayisi who have been in the game before the recent influx of investment and professionalism, social media represents immediate possibility and also future stability. Where men’s footballers have long been able to put away post-career nest eggs, women’s players reaching into the final five to six years of their careers today haven’t had the wages or professionalism to be afforded such luxury.
“I feel like I'm definitely in that bracket. Of course, I still need to think about what I need to do after football. But because I've started content creation, I've basically put myself in a good space where I know definitely what I want to do after, whereas before there might have been uncertainty around that.”
The collision of social media and women’s football hasn’t pleased everyone. Not all players have found the increased appetite for glimpses into their private lives flattering. Social media’s para-social relationships (the one-way communication between creator and audience) have led to toxic interactions, such as fans yelling at players for not giving up boots or spending enough time signing autographs after matches.
Ayisi says she rarely experiences such interactions. The odd sexist comment will wriggle onto her page, gawking at her ability “for a girl”, though the frequency is increasingly rare, a combination of the reputation she’s built and her background growing up in south London where she never felt gender held her back from playing football, she says. Even so, Ayisi is aware of the influence her platform yields.
Charlton Athletic are pushing for promotion to the Women's Super League (Photo by Nathan Stirk - The FA/The FA via Getty Images)“At the start, I never used to [see myself as a role model],” she says. “But when I saw the influence on some girls' comments I was getting, that’s when I started realising people actually do watch, young girls do watch, and young girls are excited to see some of the tricks I do.
“I always try to do whatever I can do to inspire, especially as a black girl from south London. I try to motivate the young black girls as well if I can, and just be the face of that,” she says.
Which trick is Ayisi’s favourite is an impossible question, like a kid trying to decide which superhero is their favourite when they all have a good reason to be. Though, her ongoing YouTube series, ‘Road to Promotion’, documenting Charlton Athletic’s potential promotion campaign will likely be a favourite if promotion is achieved.
“This season’s the most competitive we've ever had in the Championship. If you look at the table, the points, everything's so close, and anybody can take the number one spot,” she says.
“I feel like the gap is definitely getting smaller [to the WSL]. Players from the league above are playing in the Championship, and the quality is up there as well. It would be great if the league could be bigger, but we take it step by step.”
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