In some ways Portland… is uniquely set up to support a women’s soccer team.
The 2015 Women’s World Cup is over, with the champion U.S. Women’s National Team is being feted from coast to coast (and deservedly so). With parades in Los Angeles and New York and a White House visit in the offing, women’s soccer is experiencing a long-overdue renaissance in this country. In the rest of the world, though, women’s soccer is rapidly receding back into the anonymity and obscurity of poor funding, substandard facilities, and sexism. In many places, the attitude towards female soccer players is “They’re just going to get married and have babies, so why should a national federation spend money on a development program? Why should a women’s national team receive the same level of support as a men’s team?”
Why? How about because it’s an issue of feminism? How about because it’s about equality of opportunity? I hear the “But women don’t draw the crowds or advertising that the men do” argument, and it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women don’t get support because they (and the men who believe in them) don’t demand it. Little effort is made to create an environment that could generate the excitement and financial opportunities men’s teams take for granted. The opportunity exists to create an atmosphere in which the women’s game could prosper, but no real effort has been made to capitalize on that opportunity. Given that women comprise roughly half the world’s poipulation, claiming they don’t attract attention and support is to effectively deny it to them. Women’s soccer could absolutely thrive and prosper- if the men who run national federations would lose the Neanderthal mindset that allows them to discount the value and contributions of female players.
The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is the third attempt in the past decade at making women’s soccer viable and sustainable at the professional level. I’ve not been favorably impressed with the business model, the salary structure, or the level of commitment to finding sponsors…but it’s what we have at the moment. Portland Thorns FC, who won the inaugural NWSL championship, has been a bright spot in an otherwise rather drab and uninviting league. (Full disclosure: Erin and I have Thorns season tickets.) PTFC averages 14,000 fans per game in a league where most franchises are fortunate to play in front of 3-4,000 fans. Portland is the exception to the rule…but there’s no reason what’s happening here in the Rose City couldn’t be duplicated elsewhere.
The USWNT’s World Cup championship will hopefully provide a bump to the NWSL and to women’s professional soccer’s prospects in the U.S.- though it shouldn’t take a world championship to convince America and/or the world that the distaff version of the game is entertaining. It’s not the high-flying physical game that the men play…but then women generally don’t collapse at the slightest contact, writhing on the ground as if they’d been shot by a sniper hiding in the cheap seats. Women’s soccer suffers only if one determines it appropriate to use the men’s game as a standard. Truth is, the women’s game holds up quite well on its own. The NWSL, as in leagues around the world and the World Cup, features a high skill level, tough players, and every bit as much excitement as one might find in the men’s game. There’s no reason it can’t be successful on its own merits. All one need do is to look at the families attending Thorns’ matches with their daughters in tow to understand the power and the potential of the women’s game.
On the international level, as long as FIFA remains the governing body, the women’s game will continue to be treated as second class. The suits who run FIFA see little reason to support the women’s game- they’re just going to get married and have babies, remember? Short of the soccer equivalent of a revolution, women’s soccer will continue to be treated as second-class and subordinate to the men’s game.
Players like Alex Morgan, Marta, Nadine Angerer, and so many others deserve to be recognized as they fabulously talented athletes they are. Hopefully, we’ll soon see a world in which talented female players won’t feel forced to retire because they can’t support themselves playing professional soccer. In the meantime, go to an NWSL game. Support women’s soccer. Girls can grow up to play the game and play it well; they just can’t (except for a very few) make much of a living. Yet.
That can and should change, and it will- if women demand it and do the work needed to make accomplish and sustain it.
