Roberts, William M.Sehrawat, Kunal2026-11-122026-11-122026-11https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18772This thesis investigates the systematic reproduction and contestation of gender inequality in the global football ecosystem across three interconnected domains: institutional governance, traditional media representation, and digital social media discourse. Formal structural barriers to women’s participation have been removed, yet profound disparities in resource allocation, structural visibility, and institutional recognition remain. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological framework of field, habitus, and capital, this study aims to uncover how the global football field remains organized by patriarchal logics that systematically devalue female athletic legitimacy. Methodologically, this study used qualitative methods and a multi-source approach, drawing on a total of 1,680 public documents. The data consisted of 1,200 social media posts from Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and 480 institutional and mainstream media documents, such as FIFA annual reports, governance documents, benchmarking documents, and news articles. Thematic coding, qualitative content analysis, document analysis, and critical discourse analysis were used for all data analysis with NVivo. Empirical results show how market-oriented football decision actors use rationales to create a deficit of economic capital for young women, and how the feminine relation to sport, typically taken for granted in traditional sports media production, does not grant symbolic capital to young women. At the same time, the digital space becomes a space of intense contestation, as the female athlete and the organic fan use cultural capital to make themselves known as alternative counternarratives to the conventional one, to push for institutional responsibility, and as actors of digital violence and performance-based deprecation, to enforce the conventional boundaries between the two genders. Ultimately, this thesis posits that policy changes alone are insufficient to attain gender justice in sport. Rather, achieving sustainable equity requires a holistic reconfiguration of capital distribution and institutional control.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis