Replies

The great team USA was convincingly outplayed by a 15 year old squad from high school. That tells you all you need to know about the skill level of women’s soccer.

Look at the pictures in the article you posted. The boys are all a head taller than the women. They are not "boys;" they are young men. And they would have been decisively bigger, stronger and faster than the women. Which is why the U.S. women's soccer team, like other top women's teams around the world, scrimmages from time to time with boy's teams. You learn and develop by playing people who are stronger than you.

By the way, people who bring up this game -- and the boo birds do, with regularity -- really should not make reference to a "squad from high school." This was an Academy team. These are elite level players. Most of them were probably two years away from playing D1 college soccer, and some of them will be professionals before long.

I do not know if that game was played before or after U.S. Soccer changed its age rules. Competitive soccer has now shifted to a calendar year basis; all the players born in 2019 are in the same class. The old method, still used by hard core holdouts in rec leagues, tends to align with school age determinations. All players below, say, age 15 as of August 1 or whatever magic date you want to pick, will be deemed U15 for the next soccer year. Which means they will turn 16 during their U15 year.

It should not come as a surprise to you that elite level male athletes, at 15 and 16 years of age, will physically dominate adult women in athletic competition. I doubt the "skill level" was much of a factor. The boys would have won all the 50/50 balls and most of the 60/40 balls, and many of the 70/30 balls, simply because they were faster. Soccer is a "no contact" sport the way basketball is a no contact sports, which means the boys would have knocked the women off the ball with ease. The chance that the women might score on a breakaway would be approximately zero, as the boys would have had the speed to run the play down; a boy on a breakaway would have been uncatchable.

And IMHO, aside from speed, the biggest difference between men's and women's soccer is that the women don't have the leg strength to shoot effectively from distance. The goalkeepers are good; you have to fire a bullet to beat them from long range, and women just don't get that much oomph behind the ball. Yes, there are a few long range goals in women's soccer, but those usually involve a redirection at the goal mouth, and in a few instances the goalkeeper gets screened and doesn't see the shot. Men can shoot from distance. That changes the whole complexion of the game. The women have to work the ball in for closer shots, and bunkering is more effective for the defenses. Huge difference.

I gather that the U.S. women scrimmage against elite boys teams with some regularity. The Dallas game got a lot of publicity because they lost. But the fact is, such games are good practices precisely because the women are at a distinct physical disadvantage. That forces them to play with greater precision to offset the physical factors.

It would be interesting if an academic studying gender differences in athletic performance rounded up all such scrimmages from around the world (the USWNT isn't the only women's team that does this) and broke out the results by age and caliber of the opponent. How do the top international women's teams do against U15 as opposed to U16 and U17 boys teams? How steep is the decline curve, in terms of results? How far can they go before the games become too non-competitive to matter? No top women's international soccer team, for example, would dream of going out and having a serious scrimmage against their country's men's national team. They might kick the ball around for fun and do a little co-rec stuff, but they know better than to think they would be competitive enough to gain anything from such a scrimmage. Just as Serena Williams probably practices against men regularly, but would not dream of actually entering a men's tournament.