Neil W. Blackmon
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series of reflections on the Summer of Soccer.
Part I
The World isn’t Catching Up, but US must increase pathways and invest in NWSL to sustain USWNT dominance
Neil W. Blackmon
The game, and with it, a fourth star, didn’t feel in doubt, but the USWNT only led the World Cup Final against The Netherlands 1-0 in the 69th minute when Rose Lavelle, the 24-year-old Ohioan with the silky first touch and speed to burn, latched onto a ball from Samantha Mewis around midfield and began gliding effortlessly toward the Dutch goal, moving as if the only player on the field not stuck in the mud.
What happened next, we’ll talk about for generations.
ROSE. LAVELLE. ???
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) July 7, 2019
A beautiful solo effort doubles the @USWNT's lead in the #FIFAWWC final! pic.twitter.com/ToznvQiuxb
Lavelle’s goal sealed, in emphatic fashion, what was the USWNT’s most dominant World Cup run yet, a 7 game exercise in technical and (dare I say?) tactical brilliance that saw the US not only retain their World Cup title, but never trail for a minute and lead opponents for an astounding 70 percent of the total minutes played. These numbers only begin to explain the sheer scale of American dominance.
They scored 13 goals in their opening match, triggering (that word is purposeful) a theatre-of-the-absurd debate about whether they were too good, whether they were unsporting and disrespectful in scoring too much or celebrating too heartily. Setting aside the fact-driven rebuttals: goal difference is a component of knockout stage seeding at a World Cup and also, you know– it’s the World Cup; the whole debate all felt a bit too morality police for me, a debate unhappily descending from the centuries-old, bad-faith conversations about “a woman’s place”, and I was fortunate enough to go on The Paul Finebaum Show, of all places, to say so. Paul Finebam, perhaps the voice of college football down south, calls himself a “big USWNT fan”, an anecdote that speaks to the range of this team’s cross-cultural appeal.
To win the tournament, the US had to navigate a knockout stage that featured four consecutive European opponents, (arguably) in increasing stage of difficulty, all on European soil.
For months in the buildup, experts back home predicted a quarterfinal against host France in Paris would be this American team’s downfall. The French have the world’s best midfielder in Amandine Henry and, over the course of the World Cup cycle, had beaten the Americans two times in three tries. The US scored in the first fifteen minutes against the French and never truly felt like they were in much danger, winning 2-1.
In the semifinals, the narrative was that finally, Jill Ellis’s lack of tactical acumen would cost the US. After the US bowed out in shocking fashion in the quarterfinals at the Brazil Olympics, Ellis spent most the cycle under intense scrutiny back home. She had lucked into the decisive substitution that won the 2015 World Cup, so the story goes, and Rio, along with her constant tinkering in the two years after the Olympics, were proof she lacked the tactical acumen to keep up with a women’s game that was catching up.
As it turned out, Ellis’s changes won the day in the semifinals, both in her pregame decision to start Christen Press for the injured Megan Rapinoe and her midgame shift to a more defensive formation to help the US stabilize a midfield that had begun to leak against England’s pressure. It was Ellis’s counterpart, Phil Neville, he of Manchester United and Everton fame, who got the tactics all wrong.
In the Final, the Americans faced The Netherlands, the champions of Europe and an object lesson in both how far the women’s game has come and how none of that truly means the world is “catching up” to the USWNT.
The Dutch were debutantes at the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup; only a cycle a later they were European Champions and in the World Cup Final. They defended bravely, but even with a front three featuring a FIFA Women’s Footballer of the Year in Lieke Martens and multiple European club stars, could muster very little getting forward, rarely threatening the US final third.
The Dutch performance, led by midfielder Jackie Groenen (above), as well as their wonderful hordes of traveling supporters, offered an interesting case study in two often commingled concepts: the idea that more investment and infrastructure is key to improving women’s soccer globally and the idea that the world is “catching up” to the United States.
On the one hand, yes, investment, particularly at the institutional, federation level, can accelerate the growth of the women’s game. Maybe that impact can be even greater in nations with football-rich history, such as The Netherlands.
On the other hand, perhaps it is time to stop conflating the idea that investment can accelerate progress and growth with the idea that the USWNT will be easily caught, or that the “world is catching up.”
That idea, at its most well-framed, is articulated as follows: “With proper investment and infrastructure, the nations in South American and Europe will be able to surpass the US quickly and easily, especially given their soccer-rich culture and tactically superior, sophisticated coaching.”
Alex Morgan “sip of tea” vs. England will long be remembered as perhaps the defining World Cup moment for the greatest Women’s team to ever play.
While South America lags sadly behind, we’ve now seen multiple World Cup cycles of increased investment and infrastructure improvements in Europe. The world has now seen the likes of France, England, the Netherlands and increasingly, Spain and Italy, “catch up” and improve dramatically. To be sure, the degree of commitment seen in each of those nations varies, with France and Italy doing just enough to not look bad while The Netherlands have culturally done a great deal to enforce investment and infrastructure equality. But despite these gains, the US has now won the last two World Cups, and vanquished three of those nations on European soil doing it.the central point, that the world is not “catching up”to the United States, remains.
In fact, the US just fielded their deepest, most dominant team yet, and despite the inevitable generational change that by 2023 will usher out the likes of Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn, Carli Lloyd, Ali Krieger and perhaps even Tobin Heath, the US have a younger generation, led by Lavelle, Lindsey Horan, Mal Pugh, Abby Dahlkemper, Tierna Davidson, Andi Sullivan and others that have only just scratched the surface of what they are capable of.
In other words, the world is improving, and with investment and infrastructure and eyeballs, will improve more. But the United States aren’t going anywhere.
Title 9 gave US Soccer an immense head start, and programs like FSU exude professionalism in infrastructure and culture. But the US must find other pathways.
This isn’t to say the US can’t be caught, even if it won’t be easy.
There are things the US undoubtedly must do to sustain their dominance.
As other countries invest more, they can lean into outstanding soccer cultures and more vitally, infrastructure. Seven of the eight quarterfinalists came from Europe, and increasingly, their players play at European clubs where the women have access to the infrastructure that feeds dominant men’s teams. This matters greatly, and is a challenge in the United States, where college soccer remains the predominant pathway to the national team.
Yes, thanks to Title 9, women’s college soccer has thrived, giving the US a feeder system that delivered a huge headstart. Contrary to a too common assertion, college soccer is good soccer, too. College soccer programs have competitive cultures and, at the elite programs, excellent facilities and support staff. But it’s hard to replicate European professionalism and in fact, this is a common lament and refrain from US players who spend time in Europe, including players like Alex Morgan and Christen Press, who competed at elite collegiate programs.
But college soccer has its limitations as well. The US need to be proactive in their response to rising European club culture, and need to improve and diversify the pathways to not only the women’s national team, but the NWSL. As with the men’s game, improving access to the sport for underserved communities is a huge challenge. Pay for play is equally problematic in the women’s game and perhaps, in some areas, even more challenging due to simple club numbers.
Alex Morgan was right to criticize the model last week, telling Soccer By Ives that the “pay-to-play model…is getting worse in soccer than when I played competitive soccer (growing up),” and that “we’ve made youth soccer in the U.S. more of a business than a grassroots sport.” The game costs too much to access, a problem that Morgan correctly argues is “detrimental to the growth of the sport in America.”
Currently, the most skillful, technical members of the national team, players like the majestic Tobin Heath, the profoundly competent in all areas Press or the complete midfielder Lindsey Horan, come from upper middle class to wealthy backgrounds where, sure, families made sacrifices, but the financial burdens of accessing the sport were not prohibitive.
Stories like those of Clint Dempsey, a working class Texan whose family made immense sacrifices just to help him play youth soccer and who still needed to make the most of a midmajor college soccer offer to have any chance of being discovered, are just as rare in women’s soccer as in men’s. The reality as it relates to women’s soccer is we don’t talk about the problem enough because the US Women win despite a system set up to exclude large swaths of the population. There are, as Bill Plaschke recently documented at the LA Times, clubs trying to reverse this systemic problem, but at present, it’s safe to say there aren’t enough of them. This problem isn’t unique to American players of Latin and South American descent either; it’s arguably even more pronounced in black communities and in the rural south.
To keep elite global talent like Sam Kerr, the NWSL will require continued injections of corporate capital.
Finally, there’s the matter of the NWSL, the top domestic professional league, and by extension, women’s professional soccer in America generally.
It is vital to American women’s soccer’s long-term position as a global power that the United States improve and maintain a sustainable, high-level domestic professional league. This requires continued investment from US Soccer, to be sure, but more critically it requires new injections of private capital, especially from corporations like Budweiser, whose investment in NWSL was as vital a story as any in Women’s Soccer to emerge from the World Cup this summer. The NWSL has built a family-friendly brand, which is a positive thing, but there needs to be corporate investment that sells the league to young adults and grown-ups too, something a beer sponsor certainly helps do. More investment like that, coupled with owners who are willing to suffer early losses, is essential to long-term sustainability.
With increased capital, the league could contemplate important salary increases that offset early retirements or the unfortunate choices women often have to make between motherhood and career. What’s more, with European women’s league improving and bigger global brands like Barcelona, Manchester City, Bayern Munich and others becoming increasingly involved in the women’s game, the NWSL requires more investment to continue to lure- and keep- the biggest brand names in the game- the type of players that drive corporate sponsorship to women’s soccer to begin with.
Two weeks ago, I had the chance to chat with Claire Emslie, a Scotland international who had just made the move from Manchester City of the FA Women’s Super League to the NWSL. She played half an hour in her first match, a 1-0 Orlando Pride win over Sky Blue FC, but it took all of two training sessions and a half hour for her to notice the difference in quality.
“The thing about the NWSL you notice is the general evenness of the level of play,” Emslie said. “There are no weeks where one team is clearly superior to the other. The games are tight, only a moment or two separates most teams. You play in a lot of close games. You notice it overseas, where everyone pays attention to the NWSL and marvels at its parity. But you see that the competitiveness is real when you arrive and train and play.”
That’s high praise, and one reason that while NWSL doesn’t have the strongest club team in the world, it remains a great home for members of the USWNT, who individually carry tremendous marketing value for the league but also are challenged by the level of play on a week-to-week basis.
But that parity won’t last forever, and we could see wholesale departures of the league’s best talents in the near-term if current trends continue.
That would be a pity, and long-term, it would be a threat to US dominance.
One cruel irony in women’s soccer is that it is often casual fans, the folks that latch onto women’s soccer once every four years, who enjoy US dominance most. For the most part, American soccer journalists and fans who cover women’s soccer more closely are too busy lamenting the imminent downfall of the USWNT or declaring that the coach is terrible when the US only win 1-0. Hopefully casual fans become more serious ones, or at least take the challenges facing women’s soccer in the United States seriously.
If they do- if we do– the 2019 US Women will not only be remembered as the team that fought for equal pay and was the greatest women’s team to ever play. They’ll be remembered as the team that dragged women’s soccer in America into its brighter, better future as well.
Neil W. Blackmon co-founded The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.