Players are unpaid, must provide their own insurance, and clothing offers dubious protection. But there is the TV exposure

Despite getting more TV coverage than most female sport teams could ever imagine, women who compete in the Legends Football League – a form of American football previously known as the Lingerie Football League (no prizes for guessing the selling point) – don’t get paid.

Guardian Australia confirmed with competition organisers that LFL players receive no wages, competitors have no minimum training session attendance requirements and many have never played American football before.

Organisers also confirmed that players must rely on their own insurance, despite the obvious injury risks from a game based on American football.

“Much like every amateur sport, the athletes use their primary insurance for treatment of injuries. The LFL does provide secondary medical services through its network of sports medicine sponsors," a league spokesman said. This means if players suffer a serious injury and are required to have time away from work they are not entitled to any compensation from the league.

Sydney University student Tal Stone attended an LFL training session in 2012 where she was “handed an application form, talent release and ‘Waiver of Compensation’ form”. Stone told Guardian Australia the staff running the training session said the LFL would not be liable if she was injured while training or playing in the league.

“I saw one of the American players on crutches and wondered how she was paying for her treatment,” she said.

Stone was concerned because “at the training session we were encouraged and to a point intimidated to act aggressively towards the other girls trying out. In one girl-on-girl drill, we had the US players circling us shouting at us and trying to rally us to bring harm to the girl we were up against. If we lost, the US players would mock us, and yell ‘you're a pussy’. We were told to ‘pancake the shit out of her’ and told to ‘put her in the parking lot’.

“We were playing on AstroTurf. I still have scars from the burns I got from my skin having contact with it,” Stone said.

Asked about the competitors' uniforms, fashion commentator and author Mel Campbell said she was particularly worried about “cuts and grazes from grinding and bashing their bare skin again helmets, padding or hard artificial turf”.

Campbell also wondered whether the male spectators enjoyed seeing women getting “broken wrists, shoulders, ribs or necks like LFL player Marirose Roach who was rushed to hospital with a broken neck." Campbell believes safety could be improved if players’ uniforms were designed more for protection and less for titillation.

Stone told Guardian Australia that rather than players getting advice on safety, “training ended with a pep talk about how to look sexy on Saturday night. We were told to turn up a couple of hours beforehand for hair and make-up. ”

By contrast with the coverage afforded the LFL, netball was dumped from commercial free-to-air television in 2012 and has since struggled to salvage a deal with Foxtel and SBS. The latter shows a single match at midday on Sundays (which apparently not a single commercial television channel was interested in showing, even at that non-obtrusive timeslot).

Next year's Netball World Cup is expected to bring 17,000 to the grand final in Sydney, but Netball Australia's desperate attempts to find a commercial TV broadcaster have so far come to nothing.

It’s a given that there will be enough men of a certain disposition to watch the LFL games. What is harder to understand is why a woman would engage in this arguably demeaning conduct and not even get paid. Are free labour and sexploitation suddenly appealing if they come with admiration and fame?

LFL organisers said “these athletes absolutely love the sport and their involvement. It’s a shame that their love of the game and commitment to the game is completely overlooked by most of these agenda-driven writers. Remember one very simple point, these athletes chose to compete in the LFL, no athlete has ever been mandated to be part of the LFL and in fact can choose to leave their club at any point.”

While many of the players are high-level athletes, others have little to no experience of playing American football, so it’s hard to swallow the argument that they play purely for the love of the sport.

LFL player Anna Heasman has defended the game, saying: “We are an aesthetically driven society, as much as we like to believe that we’re better than that … It does prove exhausting continually facing the critics and truthfully it seems to be women that are hardest on their fellow women.”

I would like to think I am not the only person who loves watching female athletes for their skill, grace, style and strength. Do most people really not value women’s physicality unless it involves sex, pain and subordination?