Loaded with star power and more competitive than ever, this Women’s World Cup promises to be one of the greatest World Cups ever played. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, the battles off the field to remedy the pay and working conditions inequities that plague women’s soccer are fiercer than ever. We preview the tournament, which begins Friday in Paris.
Neil W. Blackmon
I don’t know if people truly search for meaning or if they simply seek out moments where they can feel the complete, exhilarating thrill of being alive and also like they may die all at once. Maybe the answer is both. In any event, the thin line between unbridled joy and deep-seeded despair is part of the reason people are drawn to sports generally and, even divorced from its aesthetic appeal, why soccer especially is beautiful.
The grandest stage in soccer– and as such, in sports, given the global popularity of the game– is the World Cup. And the best World Cup, the one the most removed from the malfeasance, structural corruption, greed and plunder that characterizes not just FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, but the contemporary global order, is the Women’s World Cup. Another one of those begins Friday.
It’s also the World Cup where you see more honest play, less diving, less gamesmanship and more sporting behavior. The Women’s World Cup is a joy to watch.
World Cups are more sporting symphony than self-sufficient event. To have a full-sense of the scale of one, you not only have to see it played but consider where it is played.
The World Cup is never separated from its setting.
The South African World Cup of 2010 was one the first that captivated an entire American continent, with ESPN even hosting an event in Bristol to introduce the US team to the country on a live Sportscenter. The tournament was a dream of Mandela’s, but one steeped in a fierce debate about opportunity costs and whether the value to a healing nation of hosting the world could justify the economic costs at a time of post-Apartheid austerity.
In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup even as families of the desaparecidos staged protests of the junta that had overthrown Peron in the plazas of Buenos Aires.
In 2014, it was impossible to escape the street murals protesting a government privileging “futbol over the favelas” as I walked the streets of Natal and Manaus, two cities where the US played group stage soccer. These protests themselves were simply extensions of large-scale protests throughout Brazil that started a summer earlier, when Brazilians marched by the thousands in the streets outside mostly empty stadiums hosting cash-grab Confederations Cup games.
The list goes on- and includes, of course- Russia in 2018. Putin cares little for soccer, but loves to make global statements about Russian strength. To him and his kleptocratic regime, the World Cup was a chance to put, among other things, continental criticism about Russian overreach in Crimea, unabashed support for a murderous regime in Syria and election interference questions in the United States in the background. Here, instead, would be Putin’s Russia: vibrant, strong, proud, with billions of eyes on them, from from the glorious Krestovsky Stadia in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg to the glass domed Cosmos in Samara.
This World Cup is no different.
France, the recent subject of terror attacks in Lyon is a country still very much front and center in a bitter and essential debate about immigration and “otherness.” Just a year ago, a summer after Marine Le Pen notoriously asked whether this particular group of French players, led by seven dual-passport holders and sixteen players who are second-generation or newer French citizens, was “French enough” to adequately exemplify France, the answer was a resounding “Yes”, as France won the Men’s World Cup.
The best French players at that tournament, just as they were when the French won on home soil in 1998, were of African origin. The role of Zidane, the master of 1998 who danced gracefully through the Brazilian defense like a Bastille Day reveler gliding through the streets of Paris, was played by Paul Pogba, a product of Guinean immigrants who settled in the suburbs of Paris. The role of industrious midfielder Patrick Vieira was played by N’Golo Kanté, the quiet, space-eating, son-of-Malian immigrants who to opponents, was mostly the son-of-other-things. Behind these two players and the incandescent brilliance of the young Kylian Mbappe, France stormed to victory, Le Pen be damned.
The French Women’s team isn’t quite as diverse, but there is plenty to be in love with, from the dynamic young star Delphine Cascarino to the Vieira-esque Amandine Henry, who provides the soul and spine to a French midfield that clamps and constricts opponents into submission.
Last summer, France’s wonderfully diverse team took the world by storm, saving their most fluid football for last in winning the country’ second star.
This summer, they host a World Cup that promises to be the best yet, a showcase of both the growth of women’s soccer globally and an advertisement for why we need even more investment in the women’s game. The French women are good enough to unify the belts, something that’s never happened.
If not, well, we’ll always have Paris.
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Bogart and Bergman references aside, this next month does have a chance to be the greatest World Cup ever played.
In truth, women’s soccer and by turn, the Women’s World Cup, is the best of the sport. As with men’s soccer, the games are competitive and the storylines compelling. The tactics matter too, sometimes a great deal more than in men’s soccer, where entire leagues are built on the idea of overwhelming opponents with athleticism or gegenpressing. But those comparisons are unnecessary because beyond the tactics and technical conversations, though, there’s the simple matter that distilled to its core, there’s a purity, a “for-the-love” element of women’s soccer that sets an example for the world.
Imagine loving something so deeply and investing so much emotional and physical capital in something that you kept going, kept growing, even when you were continually discounted, devalued and dismissed?
That’s women’s soccer in 2019, a burgeoning global phenomenon built almost exclusively by the women who play it, despite condescension and dismissive exclusion from all corners of the earth.
As the tournament kicks off, the reigning World Champions are embroiled in litigation over equal pay and equal treatment back home. This past winter, various members of the US Women’s National Team, led by captains Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn and Megan Rapinoe, filed a federal lawsuit alleging gender and wage discrimination against US Soccer. That lawsuit, which remains in the early pleading and discovery phase, is just the latest salvo in an ongoing dispute between the US Women’s Players Association and US Women’s National Team and US Soccer over what the US Women argue is a different, often inferior double standard of treatment given women’s soccer by the US federation. The US Women initially lodged a wage discrimination complaint against the US Soccer Federation in 2016, in the immediate aftermath of their 2015 Women’s World Cup win and victory tour. It took nearly three years, but the EEOC eventually gave the USWNT a “green light” to sue in federal court, and the US has, alleging that in some circumstances, they receive as little as 38% the compensation of their Men’s National Team counterparts, despite the gargantuan gulf in results and performance between the two sides. The US Women also allege, importantly, that they are not promoted with the same aplomb as the Men’s National team, despite similar revenue numbers and in the main, better attendance numbers.
US Soccer has responded by pointing out, with some justice, that they have long been leaders in the promotion of the women’s game globally, often despite suffering financial losses. They argue that the current compensation structure was part of a hard-fought collective bargaining process the women considered a terrific deal only 30 months ago and that in essence, the US Women are suing over a financial structure of their own making. They also .point to what they believe are market-based realities about the difference in popularity between the men’s and women’s games, and argue that the products simply don’t exist in the same market and thus, don’t require pay equity.
Eventually, the Court will sort these debates out, but it is unusual, even in the cowboys and pirates world of international soccer, to have a defending World Champion on the field that is suing its own federation at home.Talk about playing for the love.
It isn’t just the US Women demanding respect.
One of the game’s biggest stars, Ada Hegerberg of Norway, who doubles as the talismanic leader of European club champion Lyon, is boycotting the tournament altogether. Nearly two years ago, Hegerberg informed the Norwegian Football Association she would not play for country again until progress was made toward equal working conditions and some semblance of pay equity. Not enough progress has been made, so this World Cup is deprived of one of the game’s youngest and brightest stars.
Players like Hederberg and the various Americans involved in litigation with the US Soccer Federation insist it isn’t just about pay.
“Collectively, it’s about more than money. There’s pay equity but there’s also equal conditions: what fields do we train and play on, how do we get there, where do we stay, what are the facilities like, how is the game promoted. It touches on every piece of preparing to play football, not just what we’re paid to play,” do-it-all American Christen Press told TYAC in Tampa earlier this year.
It’s not about money as much as respect and simple decency.
20 years after the 99ers put women’s soccer front and center in the American sporting imagination, these battles are still very real, and as the world readies for its greatest soccer showcase, it’s important to remember progress isn’t always linear.
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Predictably, nowhere is the disparity in treatment between men and women’s soccer more stark than in poorer nations.
The sheer emotional and physical labor of the women that play the sport for those countries is a testament to the purity of the game and the commitment of the women who play to growing it. Many players in France over the next month will leave the tournament and return to part-time or full-time jobs outside of soccer, whether a schoolteacher like France’s Élise Bussaglia or a waitress like Jamaican goalkeeper Nicole McClure, who also plays for room and board on her “professional” side in Northern Ireland.
“Global inequality is vast and apparent in soccer, but however foolish, we’d like to think the soccer field is also a great equalizer,” one Jamaican player told me last week, declining to allow me to identify in the piece due to fear of federation reprisal.
She’s right and in fact, as profiled last month by Jere Longman in the New York Times, the Women’s World Cup can often highlight the disparity between the richest and poorest countries more than the men’s tournament, because as a general matter, investment in women’s athletics isn’t a high priority for poorer countries.
American and Norwegian players are rightly wondering about training conditions, travel arrangements, pay structure and national investment in their women’s programs.
In Jamaica, the hope is often just that the hotels get paid for and, heaven-willing and the creek don’t rise, the flights are coordinated.
In CONCACAF (the North American and Caribbean region) alone, tales of inequality are legion. Four years ago, Trinidad and Tobago nearly qualified for the World Cup despite sleeping in an airport the night before a training, waiting on money from the federation that never came. Trinidad’s federation president, who had replaced the notorious FIFA crook Jack Warner, apologized but the scene repeated itself the following year in Olympic qualifying, when Trinidad and Tobago’s qualifying team arrived on different flights, finally assembling less than a day before the qualifying tournament began. They nearly qualified anyway.
Haiti’s national team hosted bake sales and chicken cookouts to raise travel money, which is fine for a small town club team trying to play a holiday tournament, but a rather staggering and instructive aside when talking about a national football federation.
The inequality isn’t just seen among the sport’s traditional minnows.
In CONMEBOL, one of the two most powerful men’s football federations in the world, Argentina and Chile, two of the globe’s best football teams in men’s soccer, are nascent and unknown commodities on the women’s side.
How does such a huge gulf in class happen?
It’s really just a simple matter of enforcement, says Jennifer Vásquez, a Chilean-American sports and entertainment attorney who will travel to France next month to cheer on both her adopted country and, for the first time, Chile, who are one of four debutantes in France.
“Technically, FIFA provides monies to federations specifically earmarked for women’s football and development, so a place like Chile should have the resources and infrastructure to be globally competitive in women’s football,” Vásquez tells me. “But there’s no carrot and stick, no compliance regime that punishes federations who take the money and run.”
After hosting the first Women’s World Cup, China used modest investment and an intense state-mandated physical education training regimen to compete, which worked for a little more than a decade. China may not produce the most technical players, but they used fitness, physicality and the masterful Sun Wen to compete with the world for over a decade.
Eventually, the world soared past them, but to their credit, China’s responded, becoming one of the first federations to mandate teams in their top professional leagues to start women’s clubs as well. This, coupled with fresh investment in technical academies and coaching clinics, has paced a mild Chinese revival, one that should be exemplary to much of the world, both in places where the women’s game remains woefully behind and in places where success is constant and sometimes, taken for granted. Whether this new wave of investment and development means China advances out of the quarterfinals for the first time since 1999 remains to be seen.
But it is a start.
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Speaking of starts, there has been some progress on the advertising front.
This French World Cup has already seen a number of immense sponsorship campaigns, from Nike (who released this breathtaking advertisement below) and VISA and others, as corporations line up to take advantage of soaring European interest in women’s soccer and the always reliable US Women’s National Team television markets.
As an outsider, it would be tempting to look at the advertising hype around the Women’s World Cup and wonder about the claim that the game isn’t promoted with aplomb, especially in the United States and Europe. One might be forgiven for thinking that the market trend seems to be that moving forward, Women’s World Cups and in turn, women’s soccer in some capacity, will likely to occupy a larger portion of the world’s imagination.
Let’s hope so.
But there’s always the more cynical view that World Cup sponsoring corporations like Nike, VISA, Barclays, Commerzbank and Budweiser are here to strike while the iron’s hot and will bail when the game needs them most.
As Caitlin Murray discusses in her marvelous new book The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who changed Soccer, at least one women’s professional league, the Women’s United Soccer Association (and arguably its successor, WPS) failed for this very reason. Corporations were more than happy to strike while the iron was hot– injecting capital into the women’s game when the world was paying attention. They weren’t willing to spend and invest when things got hard and the debate shifted from league start-up to sustainability. This type of angel investment and corporate cash saved MLS early this century; to date, it hasn’t helped save professional women’s soccer.
As for the advertisements themselves, by and large, they are imperfect but wonderful.
In my own reading of the Nike advert, I wonder if it focuses too much on the responsibility of the players to grow the game, alone, isolated on the field without collaborators.
My second grader, on the other hand, adores the Nike Ad– she’s asked to watch it daily. She’s not my sole barometer for what’s “cool” these days, but she’s one of them. If she likes the ad because of what it suggests is possible, that’s something. At seven, her favorite part of the advertisement is when she sees a woman on TV coaching Barca. There’s merit in that visualization, of seeing what is socially written off as impossible, I think. Or at least there is in the eyes of one seven year old American holding midfielder.
The best advert, though, is probably the German Commerzbank spot, which features the immaculate Dzsenifer Marozsan and young star Lea Schüller, among others, defiantly rattling off the German national team’s many accomplishments while suggesting Germans “don’t even need to know their names” so long as they know “they just want to play their own game.” It’s a stunning call for gender parity, and one I find moving ahead of a World Cup Germany, somewhat forgotten among the hype over England’s Lionesses and host France, could also very well win.
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But who will win?
The United States enter motivated and resolved after a disappointing Olympics in Rio.
There are questions, though.
Will the United States fight off questions about their defense, the health of their central midfield and Jill Ellis’s curious tactics and complete the “tour-de-four?” The Americans are the deepest team in the field, which is nothing new, but this time, they come with an in-her-prime Alex Morgan and one of the world’s most magical players in Tobin Heath, who is a hold-your-breath-every-time-she-touches-the-ball highlight factory that could be America’s winning edge in France.
Then again, I don’t know if Lindsey Horan is healthy, don’t know if Becky Sauerbrunn has one more glorious run in her to steel that defense and in a big game, do I really trust Ellis to get the tactics right? It feels like too many questions, even if it is hard to pick against Americans playing with a chip on their shoulder.
England won the SheBelieves Cup, an annual statement-making competition among four of the world’s best teams, with ease. Their captain, Steph Houghton, remains one of the world’s most vital players,as Americans were reminded this spring.
Houghton is also one of the most marketable and well-compensated footballers in Europe, earning pay well above many of the USWNT stars based in the NWSL. Like American star Alex Morgan, Houghton has lamented that at times her marketability is about more than football.
“We don’t have the luxury of just being footballers,” Houghton told TYAC in Tampa this spring. “There’s an expectation of what we will be off the field and how hard we must work to advance the game that hasn’t changed.”
Houghton leads a Lionesses side that remains steely as ever in defense but crosses the Channel with an improved attack and bite in the final third that changed the narrative for them at the SheBelieves Cup. England’s manager, Manchester United and Everton legend Phil Neville, was a controversial appointment thanks to some antiquated gender equity views he expressed in a series of tweets while still a player, but the Lionesses star Jodie Taylor is among the players who defended her new boss when we spoke this spring.
“We have a winning culture, accountability and a respect and he demands that. People fear us now, but every moment is earned in football, you can’t take any of it for granted,” Taylor said. “(Neville) prepares us with an urgency that emphasizes that, which we will need this summer.”
For months, I fancied England to win, but I’ve almost talked myself into it being host France, who have the talent to best the United States in a prospective quarterfinal and, having defeated the Americans in two of their last three contests, know they can win. No country has ever held both titles at the same time. Henry, Eugénie Le Sommer, Gaëtane Iza Laure Thiney and Élise Bussaglia give Les Bleus the star power you need to win. I just don’t think they get through an American team that arrives in France angry, still thinking about that (by their impossible standards) disappointing quarterfinal exit at the Olympics.
If not France, who?
It’s a cop-out answer I suppose, but it wouldn’t be a World Cup if someone didn’t suggest that for the next month, twenty-two women will chase a ball around on a number of different fields for ninety minutes at a time and in the end, the Germans will win.
That could be wrong, of course. Pre-tournament predictions are mostly forgettable.
What won’t be is this tournament.
Neil W. Blackmon is co-founder of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.