When Stephen Lyle wanders around the corridors of Channel 4, he is often asked when he, as commissioning editor for sport, is bringing more women’s football to the broadcaster.
England faced Holland in the semi-finals of the European Championship last month and 4.3 million people were watching, then the highest viewing figure for the channel all year.
“My whole mantra was, ‘If England do well, it’s going to really blow up’,” Lyle says of his pitch to convince his bosses that it was worth buying the rights. “I had no worries about the standard of football. I had seen how dramatically it had improved and could be shown primetime on Channel 4.”
England were denied a second successive World Cup triumph by New Zealand
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The Euros were part of a wonderful summer of women’s sport that incorporated