Women's football has changed massively, says Gabby Logan

BBC and ITV sports presenter Gabby Logan believes that attitudes towards women's football have changed "massively" since the start of her career.

Logan, who had previously been an international gymnast before her broadcasting career, opened up on her career and the challenges she has faced as a woman in the male-dominated world of sport in an edition of the Game Changers Podcast.

England's run to the semi-finals of the 2019 Women's World Cup ignited a wave of interest in the women's game but Logan believes that the improvement of the product has helped her from a broadcast standpoint.

When asked how much women's football had changed, she replied: "Massively. Night and day from when I first started out.

"I regularly present Match of the Day now where there'll be a woman in the director's chair and a woman in the producer's chair. I regularly do the women's football, obviously I'll have all women putting pundits, sometimes a woman, a woman producer, sometimes a man pundit as well, which I quite like.

"I like the fact that men talk about women's football, because I think for a lot of the male audience, it gives them a sense of being able to join in.

"I nipped home for a couple of days during the World Cup I was getting a bit of building work done at home. And my builder, who I love, who's been a builder for years and years.

"And he doesn't really watch a lot of football, but he said to me, when I came home here, ‘Oh my God, that Lucy Bronze, she's unbelievable!!’ And I was like, Carl, have you been watching the women's World Cup?

"And he's like, ‘Oh, I love it. I love it!’ And he wasn't saying that to just kind of like try and patronize or, you know, she's all right, love, isn't she? And I think, well, you know, this is a breakthrough because if men like Carl are watching and enjoying the women's world cup, then that's the journey we've got to go on."

And Logan believes that women's sport should be striving to reach a male audience, rather than limiting itself to just the female section of the population.

"You can't make women's sport just for women to watch. I enjoyed the Gabby Sabatini and Steffi Graf matches at Wimbledon as much as I enjoyed, you know, Boris Becker against Pat Rafter, you know, that's, we're allowed to enjoy both.

"And, and I think that's where women's sports has got to keep pushing, keep pushing to, to make sure its demographic is - that's how sponsorship that's how branding will appeal, you know, across a wider range.

"Nobody wants their market to be so narrow, do they? This is a family thing. And one of the other sights I loved in France was one day I was do my notes. I looked over in the stadium and there was a guy and his daughter, they were at the England game and they'd come over together.

"And they were in a hotel coincidentally. So I was chatting to them later and she was a massive Newcastle fan as well. I mean, I’m a Newcastle fan and the dad wasn't even that into football.

"And I said to him, 'what's your team? And he went, 'Oh, I don't really follow football.' And he'd just brought her. And I was like, that's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, you know? And he just loved her passion so much that he took her out to the game and, and that is priceless. You know, that's what, that's what it has to be like."