Late May saw Google leverage the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil by opening ‘The Offside Museum’: a digital museum that aims to recognise women’s role in football’s history and to compile a history of female football and footballers through crowd-sourcing.
The online museum, which is asking users to submit their female football stories through text, photos and video to add to the brand’s digital archive.
The mechanic, which began on 30 May, invites anyone to visit www.offsidemuseum.com to digitally submit their information, photos and stories.
The museum itself, part of Google’s arts and culture programme, is scheduled to open on 24 June: during the France 2019 tournament.
To promote the museum and publicise its call for entries, Google teamed up with creative agency AKQA Brazil on a campaign across out-of-home media, digital and social channels led by an online film focused on highlighting women’s soccer pioneer Lea Campos.
Campos was the first female football referee and was arrested 15 times when women’s soccer was prohibited around the world.
The museum project emerged after Google set out to create a history of women’s football in the lead up to the 2019 Women’s World Cup and found that officially much of that history hardly existed.
This is partly because between 1921 and 1979 women’s football was banned at varying times in certain countries – including in Brazil, France, Germany and the UK – for a range of shameful and ludicrous reasons such as the belief that it could make women infertile, that it could masculinize women, or that it was against their very nature.
Yet, of course, it didn’t actually stop women from playing in secrecy.
The Google museum takes its name from the term that came with these bans: women were considered ‘off sides’ (a term used both during matches and one that also meant to insinuate that women were in an irregular position on the pitch’)
The Offside Museum’s objective is to collect stories about the years of the women’s soccer ban around the world and to showcase the results from the world’s largest crowdsourced search for the undocumented history of women’s soccer.
The campaign was created for Google by a team from creative agency AKQA and the lead spot was produced by Iconoclast and directed by Rafaela Carvalho, with music from Antfood and photography by Livia Wu.
Comment:
Women’s place in history has long gone unrecognised and football is a prime example of this bias.
In recent years, there have been all kinds of approaches to re-setting the historical record – from the trend for Girl Power books to the New York Times ‘Overlooked’ obituary initiative – and this Google project shines the historical spotlight in football.
Astonishingly and ashamedly, between 1921-1979 the Football Association (which at the time was the world’s governing body for the sport), banned women from playing the sport claiming that it was quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.
Nevertheless, women continued to play, but much of that history has gone undocumented.
Google’s not the only brand in Brazil looking to raise female soccer players’ profile ahead of the big event.
Another notable initiative sees Brazilian soda brand Guarana Antarctica launch a campaign that was led by an image bank of women football players which other brands could feature them in their own ads (see case study).
Google isn’t a brand that is often associated with major sports properties, but amongst its more recent sports activations and ambushes is its Google Cloud NCAA March Madness sponsor campaigns from 2019 (see case study) and 2018 (see case study).
Links:
https://www.offsidemuseum.com/
https://www.instagram.com/googleartsculture
https://twitter.com/googlearts
https://www.facebook.com/googleartsculture/
https://abc.xyz/
https://www.instagram.com/google
https://www.facebook.com/Google
AKQA
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