Women’s Aid awareness campaign on domestic abuse during the World Cup has been a success - Ella Adams

Women’s Aid has done the opposite.

Its current campaign, Countdown to Kick Off, reframes one of football’s most familiar rituals: waiting for the match to start. But Women’s Aid has made it clear that this particular countdown is not about the opening whistle. It is about what can happen after the final one.

The campaign highlights the thousands of women and children who do not look forward to major football matches but instead fear what may happen when he comes home.

This message builds on the charity’s previous World Cup campaign, He’s Coming Home, which remains one of the clearest examples of attention-grabbing, disruptive PR in recent years.

At the height of the country’s deafening obsession with the most famous of football songs, the charity put a finger to its lips and flipped it on its head.

The advert itself followed a woman preparing for her partner’s return home after a match, initially appearing exciting before revealing a much darker truth. For some women and children, a major football game does not bring excitement. It brings fear.

That fear is not abstract. Research from Lancaster University found that reports of domestic abuse increased by 38 per cent when England lost a game, and by 26 per cent when England won or drew during major tournaments.

More recent figures show the wider scale of the issue: the Office for National Statistics estimated that 3.8 million people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025. Of those, around 2.2 million were women. Police also recorded more than 1.35 million domestic abuse-related incidents and crimes in the same period.

It's important to remember that ONS and police domestic abuse figures aren't directly comparable because they're measuring different things. ONS data is based on anonymous surveys, so it captures abuse that often goes unreported, while police statistics only reflect incidents that are reported and officially recorded - meaning they represent just part of the overall picture.

So, when Women’s Aid connects domestic abuse to football, it is not blaming the sport. It is exposing how existing patterns of abuse can intensify around big moments, particularly when alcohol, heightened emotions and post-match tensions collide.

The responsibility remains entirely with perpetrators, but the campaigns force the public to acknowledge a reality that often sits behind closed doors while the rest of the nation is digesting the result of the game.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the campaign is that football clubs are helping amplify its message. Rather than seeing it as an attack on the sport, clubs have recognised their role in tackling domestic abuse.

Fulham FC's support for Women's Aid's No More Years of Hurt campaign during Euro 2024 showed that football can celebrate the game while also confronting the serious issues that can surround major tournaments.

Ella Adams is a PR and social media executive at Source Marketing.