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Not a strong women’s team, I wonder what the outcome would be for Canada or U.S. women’s teams? I would guess much closer than 7-1 for that age group. Would probably need to use 18 to 21 year old teams to achieve that level of disparity for the stronger women’s teams.

I’ve actually played a soccer game with a top-level woman player participating, it was basically a beer league sort of setting and the woman player was at roughly an equal level to the rest of the people on the field. It was in the U.S.A. (in 1980) and the woman was on the roster of the then-current top collegiate soccer team. Now these beer league teams (the result of the game was 1-0) would both have been hard pressed to hold any sort of professional soccer team to a 10-0 outcome so I am guessing the women’s collegiate team would have been in the same ball park given that their squad member seemed to be at our level.

I think the main problem for parity of men’s and women’s soccer is average size of the players, although soccer is not necessarily dominated by large physical specimens like other sports. Men tackle a bit rougher on average too. These two factors mean that a male team keeps or obtains possession more frequently. If that were not the case, the actual skill levels with ball on ground are about the same. It’s the way in which the teams control possession that leads to the disparity. And it’s not really a knock on women’s sport, just a fact of biology (which trans athletes can perhaps erode to some extent but you have to wonder what level of male athleticism a trans athlete is bringing into women’s sport, it wouldn’t be like Team Uruguay declaring they were now women).

I also played in a game (this time in Canada) in which a ranked national team player was participating. He was a goalkeeper who thought he should grace us with his outfield play until we lobbed a 35-yard shot into his empty net. He probably didn’t do that on the national team he played with in Europe. That was the only goal we got in on him though.