Mary Earps’ book furore illustrates how women’s football fandom can turn toxic | Jonathan Liew

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?Write day and night like you’re running out of timeEvery day you fight, like you’re running out of timeKeep on fighting in the meantime …”Hamilton (2015) But let’s leave Mary Earps to one side for a moment. Let’s leave Hannah Hampton and Sarina Wiegman and Sonia Bompastor, and who did what, who said it when. Let’s talk about you. How do you feel you’ve conducted yourself during the past few days? How would you rate your words and actions? To what extent do they stack up against your own personal morals and values? When the time comes to write the chronicle of the Great Mary Earps Book Furore of late 2025 – a chronicle that, on reflection, Earps should probably not attempt to write herself – what will they say of your role? Will they say you carried yourself with dignity and class? Or will they say you spent your time lapping up the hectares of coverage, revelling in the drama, indulging in the discourse, firing off bombs in the group chat, furiously scrolling your feed, expressing blunt and forthright views about people you’ve almost certainly never met? Related: Mary Earps extract: ‘I felt sick and anxious. Then came the words I’d waited 12 months to hear’ This has, after all, been one of the main incongruities of the whole affair. Time and again you hear the view that Earps’s new autobiography and the subsequent fallout has been a sad and regrettable episode all round, an unnecessary controversy that benefits nobody in women’s football. This is not what we should be talking about, argue many of the same people who can’t seem to stop talking about it. Nobody is enjoying this, insist the journalists and pundits and terminally online fans who – weirdly – seem to be enjoying this quite a lot. And perhaps this has to be the uncomfortable starting point for any discussion of the Earps book, or at least the parts serialised in the Guardian over recent days. We do enjoy this. This is, in fact, the sort of thing everyone likes to see. Feuding goalkeepers, clattering egos, dirty laundry, tribal beef, the fall from grace, the sweet licentious thrill of the social media tidal wave. Your tweet on how Natalia Arroyo’s 3-5-2 has totally transformed Aston Villa’s shape and energy off the ball sank without trace. Never mind: here comes Earps and her incendiary ghosted prose to save us all. In short, everyone seems to have done quite well out of this. Earps and her publisher can luxuriate in a flurry of book sales. Hampton has managed to emerge as the hero of the piece largely by saying nothing at all and continuing to play like the best goalkeeper in the world. The content creators have eaten and left no crumbs. At which point it is probably worth dwelling a little on the culture we have all played a part in sustaining here, a culture that arguably generated this lucrative dispute in the first place. Let’s begin by rewinding a couple of years, to an era we probably have to describe as the Earps Supremacy. Fresh from Earps saving a penalty in the World Cup final and taking on a global sports giant over its refusal to stock women’s goalkeeper jerseys, Earpsmania was at its very peak. Bolstered by a huge publicity campaign and a battery of soft-focus interviews, she surged to victory in the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, ahead of Stuart Broad (won an Ashes Test and retired in a blaze of glory) and Katarina Johnson‑Thompson (world heptathlon champion). Bear in mind that about 18 months earlier, before Euro 2022, hardly anybody outside women’s football had really heard of her. Had Earps earned this wave of adulation entirely on the strength of her goalkeeping skill? Of course not. This was a God cult built at least in part on optics and personality, or at least the personality projected on to her by the media and those who consume it. And whatever you thought of Earps then, whatever you think of her now, this is basically a very weird thing to happen to any human being, an experience that probably shapes a person in important and not entirely healthy ways. This is the element of women’s football fame that is tonally different to its equivalent in the men’s game. It is an intense and often flagrantly exploitative process, a stampede of brands and broadcasters and – yes – publishers all demanding their square foot of access, with the acrid subtext that the good times are short and the winds of public favour fickle and, you know, better cash in while you can. Bear in mind, too, that for all her success on the pitch Earps is not a multimillionaire, is not set up for life, a 32-year-old shot-stopper in an age where her profession is rapidly evolving beyond her, lacking the wealth and institutional support that a male footballer of equivalent stature would enjoy. And of course none of this is to defend her comments or her interviews or her choices or her timing. This is a grown adult who can advocate for herself. The point is: what sort of star did we expect to emerge from an industry and an economy centred around the personal brand and the social media algorithm, its veneration of raw emotions, stan culture, exemplary iconography, empty “girlboss” slogans and bare female flesh? “Your reputation is everything in women’s football,” the former England defender Gilly Flaherty observes in an episode of the Counter Pressed podcast. And for all its exponential growth this remains a relatively small world, where a few voices hold disproportionate sway over the discourse, where what matters is less what you did than how a few thousand people on the internet will interpret and portray it. A single out‑of‑context still photo can generate months of memes. Intrusive speculation about players’ partners and sexuality is essentially priced into the existence. And for the most part this is all just content, the stuff that greases the wheels, part of what makes women’s football fandom such a riotous and countercultural space. The embrace of queer culture and mental health discourse offers a striking counterpart to the corporate conservatism of the men’s game. But perhaps we are also wilfully blind to the ways in which it has the potential to turn toxic, the ways in which women’s football fandom can borrow from the worst elements of reality television and pop music, turning sport into disposable human drama. Ironically, it is Earps who has offered one of the more insightful testimonies of what it must be like to inhabit this world. “Women’s football has entered into a space that has become a bit like entertainment, so your life gets picked apart for people’s amusement sometimes,” she said in a BBC interview this week. And yes, Earps may have profited from playing the game she decries. All the same: she’s got a point.