When the FIFA Women’s World Cup begins this week, English sports presenter Kelly Somers will be one of the faces of the host broadcaster’s coverage of the tournament.
When the FIFA Women’s World Cup begins this week, English sports presenter Kelly Somers will be one of the faces of the host broadcaster’s coverage of the tournament. In an exclusive interview she talked to me about the pressures of being a woman working in the game.
The 32-year-old has become one of the most familiar names in men’s and women’s soccer coverage in recent years working regularly for the BBC, Amazon Prime, Premier PINC League Productions and Amazon Prime Sport. For the next few weeks, she will be fronting the Optus Sports coverage of the tournament around the world from Australia.
After working on the men’s Champions League final and UEFA Nations League matches, Somers, a regular host of The Women’s Football Show on BBC, had just ten days holiday before she began preparations to fly to Australia to present coverage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup alongside Australians Amy Duggan and Niav Owens.
Somers will be a lone Englishwoman working with a group of Australians far away from home as the two countries, both among the favorites to win the Women’s World Cup, battle it out, not only for soccer but cricketing supremacy.
“It’s quite inconvenient that it’s on at the same time as The Ashes isn’t it?” she jokes. “I’ve worked for Optus before, they’re all really lovely people. I’m actually really looking forward to going and learning a bit more. I worked for them as a reporter in Russia during the men’s World Cup but I’m really looking forward to going over to Australia and working for them as a presenter on a day-to-day basis and see how they do things.”
Somers will unfortunately not be out in Australia for the duration of the tournament due to prior commitments to cover the men’s Premier League, which begins a week before the Women’s World Cup concludes, something which irritates her. “As someone that really loves the women’s game I would have preferred for it to have started a couple of weeks earlier just so that the sole focus could have been on it.”
The increasing 24/7 nature of the women’s game has increased the demands on those, such as Somers, who present both men’s and women’s soccer. However, staying on top of both games remains a pleasure rather than a pressure for her. “Football is still my main hobby, which can be good and can be bad. The bad side being is you never really switch off from it and sometimes at home, I kind of have to be like, ‘no, I know there’s a game of football on tonight, but I won’t watch it!’ Rarely, actually, do I follow through with that by the way!”
“The positive of that is I kind of consume it all the time anyway, without even realizing.
