Posted on 06/11/2015 11:11:05 PM PDT by nickcarraway
This week, the U.S. women begin their quest to win the World Cup, a feat they haven’t accomplished since July 10, 1999. More than 90,000 people attended the match that day at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, while 40 million watched on TV. I watched, too, from a stuffy, third-floor apartment in a Somerville triple-decker; I covered my eyes as Brandi Chastain buried her penalty kick in the goal’s top-right corner, lifting the U.S. to victory over China.
As a player, I didn’t have one thousandth of Mia Hamm’s talent, but how her team captured my imagination. Sally Jenkins, of the Washington Post, said it best in the HBO documentary, “Dare To Dream”: “Everybody forgot that they were chicks … the idea that these were athletes, as opposed to female athletes.”
Women have been fighting for lasting equality in sports ever since.
American sports fans prefer their superstars to look like superheroes (LeBron James is worthy of a Marvel comic). But the U.S. women’s national team, with their shocks of blond hair, long ponytails and blue fingernails, could be mistaken for faster and fitter versions of normal people. As my husband, a dedicated women’s soccer fan, said, “They look like girls I went to high school with.” Don’t be fooled: These women are far from normal. They are finely tuned, exquisitely trained machines.
But the women’s team just isn’t getting the attention or respect it deserves. Especially if you compare it to the promotion the U.S. men — a thoroughly mediocre team, at least by global standards — received in the run-up to the World Cup last year (see: “I believe that we will win”).
I do not begrudge the American men the spotlight, but the facts are hard to ignore: Their best-ever result in a World Cup was third, in 1930. In more recent memory — the 2010 and 2014 tournaments — they’ve barely made it to the knockout stage.
The U.S. women, meanwhile, are consistently among the best teams on the planet. They’ve won the World Cup twice (in 1991 and 1999) and made it to the semifinals in all six women’s World Cup tournaments. In between, they’ve also won four Olympic gold medals. (This year FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. a 26 percent chance of winning the whole shebang, second only to Germany, at 32 percent.).
The pay disparity between men and women, while deplorable overall, is even worse in professional soccer. Abby Wambach — the heart and soul of the American team and the all-time international leading scorer for men and women — made about half of what the U.S. men’s captain did (bonus points if you know his name).
And don’t even get me started on FIFA, soccer’s international governing body. In addition to being a corrupt organization (as we now know all too well), it’s also one of the most sexist. In a recent piece in The Guardian, Penny M. Venetis, executive vice president and legal director of Legal Momentum, called the gender discrimination at FIFA “extreme enough to violate the law in almost every country where FIFA tournaments are played…”
The current women’s team hasn’t been ignored, not exactly. They have received some media exposure: a recent New York Times profile on veteran Wambach, a Sports Illustrated cover and a new flashy spot by Nike. But by and large, the world’s biggest women-only sporting event feels like a secret — a cute sideshow relegated to the backlogs of espnW. There’s no official Women’s World Cup app, for example, and the tournament isn’t even included in apps made by FIFA, ESPN or Fox Sports (the network broadcasting this year’s Cup). ESPN’s preview show last Friday night was delayed an hour and a half, to accommodate the end of a college baseball game (and not even a good one: the Florida Gators beat the Florida State Seminoles 13-5).
One could reasonably argue that more attention is given to the men’s World Cup than the women’s, because the men draw more viewers, and more advertising dollars. That may be true, but in the U.S., the argument isn’t airtight. The 1999 women’s final is the second most-watched match in American history (just behind the 2014 U.S. men-Portugal game), and more people watched the 2011 World Cup final between the U.S. and Japan than the Kentucky Derby. Excitement around the women’s national team has given birth to three professional leagues, including today’s Women’s Premiere Soccer League (WPSL). And the women’s team — especially that 1999 team — played a huge role in inspiring kids, and girls in particular, to play soccer. According to Youth Soccer, player registration jumped from 2.3 million in 1995 to over 3 million by 2000, and enrollment has continued to rise.
The summer of 1999 seems like a lifetime ago. But now, as the mom of 17-month-old twin girls, I have even more reason to seek out examples of tenacity and strength, especially when it feels like the most prominent expression of womanhood is posing for the cover of Vanity Fair.
Canada will play host to 24 national teams over the next month, with the final scheduled for July 5 in Vancouver. In spite of a lawsuit brought by players against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association, teams will play the entire tournament on turf, a rubber and plastic surface that’s hotter (20 to 30 degrees by some estimates) and tougher on players’ bodies. No matter. Wambach will spear countless balls off her forehead. Megan Rapinoe will send balls sailing the length of the pitch. Christie Rampone will chase down breakaways, because at 39 (and a mother of two), she’s still one of the fastest people on the field. Let’s celebrate these players not for being women, but for being powerful athletes. Watch them run, sweat and tackle.
Women’s sports is boring. Who wants to see the equivalent of men’s high school sports?
The idea of sports is to watch the best gifted athletes compete and genetically women are not that.
Pray America is waking
You mean men are bigger, stronger, faster, etc.? Stop the presses!
I have two soccer playing daughters. We get to several professional games a year, both men's and women's. (It's probably better for young girls to be watching the women's teams, because the games are different, and always will be, and the women are playing the game with which the girls can identify.) The men's and women's games are both enjoyable in and of themselves. I do not understand why some people think it has to be an adversarial or competitive comparison.
Point of view is probably important. A lot of people live in tv land, and that goes double for sports. They look at the professional or major college games in all sports, which become their sole point of reference. The perspective of participants, and parents, is very different. 99% of the soccer I watch is on the sidelines, watching my daughters play. By the time my older daughter was 13, she had graduated to playing real soccer, on a reasonably competitive team. If one can enjoy the game at that level, one can certainly enjoy the women's professional game as well.
Of course, I only watch games in any sport if I have a rooting interest. I'd rather watch a high school game where I know some of the players than two random professional teams. Cheer for the local team; cheer for the U.S. team. The U.S. women's national soccer team has always been among the best in the world. The U.S. men's team is a respectable second tier team (with two impressive wins this past week). If you can cheer for U.S. women sprinters, swimmers, gymnasts, and skaters in the Olympics, why do you find it difficult to cheer for the soccer players, who are also bringing home the gold?
The men are bigger and stronger in all sports. This doesn't mean that the women shouldn't play, or that people shouldn't recognize excellence. Building women's sports into a better paying proposition is a separate question, for another day.
“For criminal sake who pays any attention to soccer no matter which sex is playing?”
Holy frejole! You mean guys play soccer too?
Perhaps, but the men's team would run circles around the women's team.
This is pretty much the case for all women's sports - yes, there are good teams, but just as lesser professional sports leagues don't get the same attention as the top-tier leagues, who's going to want to watch that when they can see it done better (even with less success).
Also, the success of the USWNT is due, in large part, to the fact that most of the world didn't take women's soccer seriously for a long time. But they're catching up now, borrowing from the men's game, and team USA is no longer a shoe-in for the end stages.
Where women's sports succeed, in the rare cases they do, it's because of characters and personalities create a compelling interest that go beyond the sport. The USWNT is too much a single entity, without those distinctive characters, to capture that kind of imagination. (Well, there's Hope Solo, but other than the "bad boy... er... girl" role, she isn't that compelling story.)
USA plays Sweden today....
Indeed. Twenty years ago we were light-years ahead of the rest of the world in the development of women's athletics. Now they have caught up.
Team sports are a different animal: the league is selling multiple simultaneous games (which dilutes viewership and is thus a negative for tv), with an emphasis on aggregate results over a long season. The superstar factor probably has a lot to do with why women's golf and tennis seem to do better than women's team sports, where the stars are spread over the league and only come to down intermittently.
With regard to team sports, in the U.S., we have the big three: football, basketball, and baseball. Hockey, for reasons I'll never understand, hangs in as a distant number four. Everybody else starves. But ... soccer, the number one sport globally, may be on the cusp of breaking through in the U.S. From one perspective, it is lost in the shadow of the big 3/4. From another perspective, keeping in mind the whole panoply of seriously contested international sports, there are the big four, and soccer is the best of the rest. Is the glass half empty or half full?
The men's soccer league has a decent television package and solid attendance. The women's professional league folded twice, partly due to feckless ownership, but the third version, which is active now, seems stable for the time being. There is no question that the star factor is important, and the national team players are well-distributed across the league.
(And attendance always seems to perk up when Portland comes to town because ... well, you know, it's a factor even though it's not what the league is trying to sell.)
Women's team sports, in terms of attendance and revenues, will always face an uphill battle against the men's game. The question for women's soccer is whether it can expand its base beyond the core of female youth soccer players, and older girls and women who played the sport in younger years. That is a growing market, but it's still a hard sell. The young women need to start dragging their boyfriends to games. I am reasonably sure that a 26 year old guy, whose 23 year old girlfriend used to play, will not object to taking in an occasional game. It's still a cheap ticket, and most guys would rather watch an athletic event than another date movie. So selling the league is largely up to the girls.
Why would anyone go to see women's soccer -- or minor league baseball, Division 2 college football, Division 3 basketball, or high school games after your own kids have graduated? For the best of reasons. It's fun to adopt a local team, and it's infinitely more fun to sit in the stands for a "minor" league game involving a hometown team than to sit on the couch to watch overpaid millionaires from teams in which you have no rooting interest. Plus, the minor league teams are usually a pretty cheap ticket, so you can take the kids without breaking the bank, and you don't have to fight crowds.
I was turned off by the NFL and NBA years ago. But I can drive about two miles and watch Division 3 Catholic U. play basketball for a $5 ticket for two games (men's and women's ... and a car full of kids will have more fun in that setting, sitting at courtside and running out to the hall for a hot dog when they get hungry -- than watching the tattooed thugs play above the rim downtown.
Meh, not sure this is the most convincing article about “sexism”.
At least they don’t wear those sickening tight-butt and low-cut spandex jobs to make their sexuality “shine through”. That sickens me in volleyball, e.g. Not to mention that damn “Survivor” show.
Meanwhile “men” wear saggy-baggy gigantic parachute “shorts” in half of these sports. Men sure are protective of THEIR sexuality! But damn it, women better wear revealing stuff just for our excitement!
OK, off the soapbox....ggrrrr.
Next they’ll say women’s beach volley ball is sexist.
It is. Plainly.
Everybody forgot that they were chicks
now THAT is SEXESS!!
The author also overlooked the self-evident fact that men play at a higher level than women. People enjoy watching the best quality of play because it is the most entertaining. Higher level of play will always attract more spectators, irrespective of gender.
The “girl power” nonsense with which we are inundated gets old quickly; do the same women that can’t compete with men in soccer admit they can’t compete as firemen or Army Rangers as well? (That is where the adversarial approach arises; I have sons, and will die ensuring they don’t buy into the goofy anti-male propaganda belching forth in every TV commercial and print advertisement). The propaganda of dopey guys and wise women in commercials has me rooting against the US women, instead supporting teams where the women don’t look like boys.
Watching the US women play in the World Cup is like watching an MLS game; too slow, and lacking the talent seen in men’s leagues in Europe. I’ve watched a couple of games, and the announcers admitted that Germany’s best female players played with boys when they were young. FWIW, the US men’s team isn’t a second-tier team; they practically qualify automatically in a group with such powerhouses as Haiti and Canada, and should be forced to qualify against South American teams to get to the World Cup (It would be easy to construct an “Americas” group that still has less countries than Africa, Europe, or Asia). Winning friendly matches stirs the hopes of fans that think it is “real” (the same ones telling me years ago that the FIFA ranked the US fifth in the world), and reality sets in when real second-tier teams dispatch them handily. My town had three starters on the US team in 1994 (when we hosted the World Cup), and they are waiting twenty years later for the boom in adult soccer they predicted at the time.
If I did cheer for US sprinters and such, you’d have a point - I’d cheer for the US women’s soccer team as well - but when any victory as hailed as a sign that they are somehow the physical equal of men, it is laughable.
As I pointed out in my post, male soccer players are paid poorly enough in this country; if the women had a product to sell, they’d be rich. Instead, two failed leagues later, they are in denial.
Nice pic; no butches.
Thanks again!
Not even. The top high school boys teams would run the WNBA's best off the court.
If they had least had an interesting style of play, people might watch. Women's tennis doesn't lack viewers, even though Serena Williams would have no chance against Roger Federer. But WNBA is a snoozefest, and women's soccer is, too.
With recent victories in friendlies over the Netherlands and Germany, it cannot be said that the MNT is mediocre, even if I remain sore at Klinsmann for his dismissal of Donovan.
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