Everyday sexism: Gary Neville and Jill Scott swap Twitter accounts – football fans don’t come out looking great

Former footballers Jill Scott and Gary Neville have laid bare the shocking casual sexism that still exists around the game as part of Heineken’s The Social Swap campaign.

The pair may be deadly rivals on the pitch and in the stands, with Scott spending most of her career at Manchester City while Neville plied his trade for cross-town nemesis Manchester United, but they teamed up off the pitch to swap Twitter accounts for a week as part of Heineken’s social experiment. The results were not an upstanding example of the tolerance and acceptance of football fans.

When Neville Tweeted about football as Scott, responses from fans, who assumed they were addressing the Lionesses star and 2011 FA International Player of the Year, included thoughtful debate such as “Get back in the kitchen babe”; “You should probably concentrate on the girls’ league”; “Seems like your brain’s gone missing”, and “Best leave the football to the boys the luv.”

For Scott, who receives these kind of comments all the time when she’s manning her own Twitter account, it turned out the responses were very different when fans believed she was United and England defender Neville. A particular high spot was: “The most objective opinion I’ve seen from you.”

We’re still waiting for Heineken to provide a full breakdown of exactly which Tweets can be attributed to which player, so there could yet be more to come. In the meantime, watch the pair talk about the experiment here: