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Good post, but I think you overlooked an obvious item:

What makes women's soccer a lightening rod? I really don't think it's Megan Rapinoe and her in-your-face antics.

The obvious factor in making women's soccer "a lightning rod" is the $66M lawsuit filed by the players for the women's national team. This, coupled with the success of the women on the field in the World Cup last year, has provided an inordinate amount of media coverage of a story that would otherwise be largely ignored.

Tennis has faced a similar controversy in recent years, but it's been much easier to laugh off the "equality" arguments from the women in that sport. Even something as simple as the different rules for men and women in major tennis tournaments (men play best-of-five sets, women best-of-three) exposes the "equality" claims by female players as a farce.

I think the USWNT was a lightning rod long before the lawsuit. I haven't tracked the details very closely, but there is a lot of blood in the water, and there has been for years. The USWNT players contract expired sometime after the 2011/12 World Cup/Olympic cycle. For various reasons, the talks logjammed. If I recall correctly, the women played for three or four years, including the 2015 World Cup, without a contract. On a parallel track, the old women's league folded for financial reasons. The top level of women's soccer in the U.S. briefly went pro-am (the W league) while the current NWSL was organized. U.S. Soccer was a key player in making that happen. The USWNT player contract is thoroughly entangled with U.S. Soccer support for the NWSL, so it gets complicated really fast.

The USWNT is now U.S. Soccer's premier product domestically and is the top women's program internationally, while the men's team limps along as an also-ran in a much bigger and richer international pond. The leadership people also need to keep an eye on international developments. The European men's teams are starting to partner with their women's teams. There is so much money in European soccer that the big European teams could take over the women's game with chump change. In addition, Olympic Lyonnais, which has both a men's and women's team in Lyon, has just bought a majority stake in the Seattle Reign in the NWSL. One of the reasons for the success of the USWNT is that the U.S. has had the strongest women's domestic league in the world. The European men's clubs could change everyone's calculations in a hurry.