Why Is Women's Soccer Still Struggling To Exist

[summer]

NY Times

With two minutes to go in stoppage time in the quarterfinal match of the Women’s World Cup 2011, Brazil was leading the United States 2-1. As the U.S. offense advanced for its last possible possession, the crowd in Dresden chanted “U-S-A!” But on ESPN, the announcer Ian Darke was already calling it. “It will go down as the U.S.A.’s worst performance ever in the Women’s World Cup,” he told his viewers: going home a top-eight loser in the quarters.



Then, in the final seconds, with Brazilian players feigning injury and the goalie taking her time with every touch, the midfielder Megan Rapinoe got the ball and sent it soaring: a perfect cross-field pass that landed square against the forehead of Abby Wambach, who nodded the ball just past the right goal post to tie the game. Wambach took her celebratory slide down the goal line. The Americans won in overtime. They went on to lose to Japan in the finals, but the match was watched by more people in the United States than the Kentucky Derby.



A men’s team coming off that kind of performance — and TV ratings — would arrive home to seven-figure European club contracts and endorsement deals. But the U.S. women returned to a professional league that was on its deathbed; Women’s Professional Soccer folded the following January. It was the second U.S. women’s soccer league to go bust since 1999.



On Saturday, the women’s team will once again head to the Women’s World Cup with bright prospects and an impressive audience; the team attracted five times as many fans to its sold-out exhibition games in 2015 as it did in 2011. “We have the potential to be the best league in the world,” Julie Foudy, an ESPN soccer analyst and former member of the women’s national team, told me. But what happens when the World Cup is over? The women’s professional league still pays as little as $6,000 per 20-week season, with a salary cap around $30,000, so little that the U.S., Canadian and Mexican federations have agreed to subsidize their countries’ players to play on their respective national teams.



Why is U.S. women’s soccer still fighting to exist? Part of the problem is FIFA. The sport’s embattled world authority and the national federations with a voting interest in the organization have refused to provide women with an equal playing field, quite literally: This year’s World Cup, in Canada, will be played on artificial turf. That decision prompted a group of female players — 84 players representing 13 countries — to sue FIFA for gender discrimination (though they withdrew the complaint earlier this year); no professional male player, after all, would be willing to play on artificial turf in any tournament, let alone in the World Cup. (Nor did any male soccer star step in to support or testify on behalf of the female athletes.)



Wambach says that Sepp Blatter — the FIFA president who resigned this week after the arrests of nine of the organization’s officials — had several opportunities to install grass fields at no cost and chose not to. The players even tried to compromise, submitting a proposal to play only the final rounds on grass, but FIFA refused to engage with them. In fact, its official response was “There’s no Plan B.” This was typical of Blatter, who called himself the “godfather of women’s soccer” on account of the sports’s relative rise during his 17-year tenure, but he is better remembered for announcing his strategy to improve women’s soccer with “tighter shorts.” And according to an internal survey from FIFA, only 23 percent of its 177 member associations have dedicated staff members for women’s soccer, and only 7 percent of coaches and 10 percent of referees globally are women. It’s especially disheartening when you consider that the tens of millions of dollars that FIFA officials are accused of siphoning off in bribery and graft could have supported a women’s professional league for years.




If women’s professional leagues in the United States have struggled in part because of FIFA’s gender problems, they haven’t been helped by their own, at times odd, leadership. Just before the Women’s World Cup in 2011, several Women’s Professional Soccer teams declared bankruptcy; by the league’s final season, one team had abandoned it entirely. The Florida-based magicJack franchise — previously the Washington Freedom, renamed by its co-owner, the tech entrepreneur Dan Borislow, after the USB phone-jack device on which Borislow made his fortune — had most of the stars of the national team (including Wambach, Rapinoe and Hope Solo) on his payroll. But other players filed a complaint with the players’ union alleging that they were subjected to unpredictable treatment and abuse. According to the complaint, Borislow insisted on being called “Daddy.” He was eventually banned by the team’s executive committee from attending magicJack games, and the five remaining owners voted to terminate the franchise. (The league folded several months later.) But Borislow kept his roster, the best players in women’s soccer, as an exhibition team. You couldn’t really blame his top-tier talent from exiting the professional league; Borislow, for all his faults, was the only team owner who actually treated athletes like stars, supplying them with real salaries and luxury condos.



Sponsors and advertisers, too, have failed to show up in numbers anywhere close to men’s soccer. More than 400 million people worldwide saw at least part of the women’s 2011 Cup. These figures lag behind the men’s cup, the most widely watched sporting event in the world — nearly a billion people tuned into the final alone in 2010 — but the ad revenues lag much further behind: The 2011 Cup brought in just $5.8 million, while the men’s cup in 2014 netted $1.4 billion. Fox Sports, which is carrying this year’s World Cup, says it has already tripled 2011’s revenues, but the numbers are still far apart. This imbalance trickles down to the prize money as well. The Brazilian team that won the men’s tournament in 2012 took home $32 million more than the Japanese women’s team that won in 2011.



If there’s an analogue for the plight, and potential, of women’s soccer today, it’s women’s tennis in the 1970s. At the time, women had no professional circuit to speak of. When women were allowed to play in tournaments, the pioneering champion Billie Jean King recalled in a recent interview, they were paid an eighth of the prize money that men were.




King spent three years building what ultimately became the Women’s Tennis Association, with no support from professional male players and at times little support even from some of her female colleagues. She organized a league with infrastructure, pay scale, tournaments and player protection that worked a lot like a union. “We realized this could have been the end of our tennis careers, but we had the courage to draw the line in the sand, not just for us but for the future,” King told me. “We needed to convince players to belong to something.”




In its first season in 1973, the W.T.A. united all of women’s professional tennis on a single tour, and for the first time, the U.S. Open offered equal prize money for men and women. By the mid-’70s, women’s tennis secured a TV deal with CBS and found a prominent national sponsor in Colgate. By the end of the decade, prize money for a tournament had gone to six figures from $15,000, and only a few years after that, Martina Navratilova became the first female tennis player to earn a million dollars in one year. Now women’s tennis players compete for $129 million in prize money per year; after winning the 2014 U.S. Open, Serena Williams had the largest payday in the sport’s history (men’s or women’s), taking home $4 million.




The W.T.A. is an outlier among women’s professional leagues; the organization for almost every other sport is either supported by a male counterpart or minimized to the point of nonexistence. It owes its success to the foundation that King built early on. “Don’t only shoot for half the marketplace,” King told me. “It’s not just about what you need for women. It’s what you do for the sport.”



It’s possible that the new National Women’s Soccer League, established in 2013, has learned from the past and is starting small, in targeted markets with modest expectations and support from federal organizations. But whether that strategy will lead to success and longevity is still unproved. In the meantime, the United States is losing out on building not just a sport but also a business. And the door is closing. The U.S. leagues enjoyed a near-monopoly on women’s soccer as recently as 15 years ago. But today, the English Premiere League teams have female counterparts, and teams in France, like Lyon and PSG, are paying very well for elite female players.



There is some hope that this year’s World Cup could change things for the better in the United States. Members of the U.S. women’s national team are making appearances on “American Idol” and striking poses on building-size ads off Times Square. Last week, EA Sports and FIFA announced that “FIFA 16,” the latest version of their popular video game, which receives part of the credit for the recent boom in men’s World Cup viewership in the United States, will feature 12 women’s teams. The trailer for the game is a bracing montage of slides, steals, headers, high fives and turf, presumably the real kind, flying through the air. It’s the kind of celebration of athletic prowess, ambition and ego that we’re accustomed to seeing lavished on male athletes, not female ones. It’s a little sad when virtual reality is aspirational, but it feels like the beginning of something for which we’ve been waiting for far too long.

[elleblue]

This is so infuriating to me. And the whole astro turf thing is a complete outrage. Have you seen what happens to a player's legs when they play on astro turf? 

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[lilibet]

I feel like it's hard to be a fan of any women's sport because it's impossible to find it on tv to watch, and since there are no teams anywhere need me I can't go to a game - so tv is my only option. I know they won't put it on tv with more fanfare until there is more interest - but you'll never get the interest if no one can find it.

I have a couple cousins who have been into soccer, one is a college coach now and her team does well but gets little attention.

And omg, that looks painful elle.

[secretlyevil]

Yikes! That looks awful and really painful. How is that acceptable?

[erbear]

The fact that they are playing on turf when they would never ask a men's team to play if turf infuriates me.

I fucking love the women's World Cup, perhaps more than the men's. I'll be watching.

[Velar Fricative]

This is so frustrating. The artificial turf pisses me off so much.

The tournament started today and I'm excited!

[secretlyevil]

I'll be tuning in to the world cup, can't wait. I still can't wrap my mind around the AstroTurf thing.

[sushi]

Their shorts aren't short enough. Duh