Scotland Women: Shelley Kerr and Erin Cuthbert call for commercial boost
- Published
大象传媒 Scotland charts Scotland's last journey to the Women's World Cup
Scotland manager Shelley Kerr says the country has not commercially capitalised "well enough" on their maiden World Cup appearance last year.
Kerr led Scotland to their first ever finals in 2019, while her predecessor Anna Signeul did likewise at the European Championships two years prior.
Despite those achievements, Kerr believes interest in the women's game has not grown sufficiently since.
"You've got to capitalise on the success of the team," she said.
"We didn't do that well enough."
Kerr feels interest and attitudes towards women's football have "evolved" in her time in the game, but she argues that "there's still a lot that can be done".
"We need to expand in terms of getting commercial deals for women's sport," she told Fair Play: The Women in Sport Show podcast.
"You only have to look at newspapers - there's not enough visibility.
"Probably the hardest thing, for the World Cup and before that, was that a lot of journalists weren't that interested in women's football and then all of a sudden you have a bit of success in our country and everyone is all over it.
"I just hoped that would have continued post-World Cup and it hasn't."
'We have to go down a different route'
Scotland striker Erin Cuthbert featured in the launch of the new Scotland kit last summer and the story of her journey from youth footballer to a World Cup finals was prominent on social media.
However, speaking last week in a previous edition of Fair Play, she admitted in terms of the Scotland team, things have gone quiet.
"We don't feel that we have enough opportunities to do things," said the Chelsea forward.
"It shouldn't be one, two or three people who are doing the media; it should be all 23 players because we want everyone to become a household name.
"We felt there would be more opportunities from the World Cup but there hasn't really been, so I think we have to go down a different route as to how we become commercially viable.
"We try to compete so much with men's sports, we complain about back pages, so why don't we have our own marketing campaign instead of trying to jump on the back of men's sports, because we are completely different."