ZT: Women’s soccer is now a global phenomenon - thanks to the US

Women's soccer is now a global phenomenon — thanks to the US team

 

By Gavin Newsham

July 7, 2019 | 7:45am

 

Today, the United States soccer team will take to the field at the Stade de Lyon in France to face the Netherlands in the final of the Women’s World Cup, defending the title they won four years ago in Canada. In fact, by the time you read this there’s every chance they may well be world champions again. They’re quite a team.

Megan Rapinoe and the US team have energized support for women's soccer in Europe, where the game has long been seen as a men's sport.

But while the United States women’s side has long been regarded as the very best team in the world — they’ve won three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals — their impact on the women’s game goes far beyond the medals and trophies amassed by the Stars and Stripes. Just look at the World Cup in France. If you’ve tuned in to any of the games, you’ll have seen packed houses across the tournament with terrific atmospheres and none of the unpleasantness or underlying menace you might expect to find at a men’s game. Even David Beckham’s been turning up with his kids to watch the action. He loves it.

It’s certainly found favor with TV viewers too. When the USA defeated England 2-1 in the semifinals on Tuesday night, for example, more than 11.7 million people watched it on television in the United Kingdom, making it the country’s most-viewed TV show of the year so far.

It’s ironic that it’s the US, and not the game’s inventor, England, that’s now leading the way in the world of women’s soccer, not least because of the historically difficult relationship America has had with the sport. While the men’s game has always been the most popular sport in virtually every other part of the planet, the USA has only really taken to it relatively recently.

It’s not for lack of trying. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, the original North American Soccer League imported some of the biggest names in the world game, including Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff, to kick-start the sport in the US, but it was like building a house and starting with the light fittings. By 1984 it had gone.

Today, of course, Major League Soccer continues to attract some of the best players from around the world, but the real growth is in the women’s game. Much of this newfound popularity can be attributed to the successes of the US women’s team and, in particular, that watershed moment in 1999 when the likes of Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and Michelle Akers won the World Cup for the United States on home soil.

That day, in front of 90,000 fans at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Stadium and over 40 million people watching across the country, women’s football changed forever when Chastain scored the winning penalty against the Chinese, famously twirling her shirt above her head in celebration.

Suddenly, women’s soccer was big news, and in the wake of their landmark victory, the “99ers” were invited to the White House to meet President Bill Clinton. “It’s going to have a bigger impact than people ever realize,” said Clinton, “and it will have a far-reaching impact not only in the United States but also in other countries.”

He was right. Twenty years on and the breakthrough made by the 99ers has not only seen the game grow domestically — the US National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) contributed more players to the Women’s World Cup than any other league in the world — but across the planet, too.

Today, there are an estimated 30 million women playing soccer worldwide — 4 million more than in 2006. In soccer’s heartland of Europe, the women’s game continues to make great strides. According to the European governing body of soccer, UEFA, there are nearly 1.3 million women registered to play soccer across the continent, with Germany leading the way with over 200,000 players, followed by the Netherlands (155,035), France (118,842) and Sweden (117,729). Crucially, it’s the younger players coming through the system where the numbers are really taking off, with the number of youth leagues (from under-6 to under-23) almost doubling in the last five years, a trend that has also seen the number of professional and semiprofessional female players more than double, too.

It’s not always been this way. In countries like Germany, France and England, women’s soccer was largely prohibited until the 1970s, and while some countries in the Middle East still deny women the opportunity to play, the fact that Iran and Saudi Arabia now allow female fans to attend soccer matches suggests some progress is being made. Not that you can expect any kind of parity with the men’s game, especially when it comes to pay. The world’s highest-paid male player, Barcelona and Argentina’s Lionel Messi, for instance, receives a reported annual income of $140 million, while the highest-paid female player, the Norwegian international Ada Hegerberg, gets around $430,000.

Money aside, the women’s game has never enjoyed a higher profile — proof that attitudes aren’t just changing, they’ve changed. Now, female analysts are just as likely to turn up and commentate on men’s soccer matches as they are at women’s games and female officials are now taking their place at some of the world’s top male leagues. More importantly, fans don’t say they’re watching “women’s soccer” any more. They’re just watching soccer.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

 

Gavin Newsham is a British sports writer and winner of the National Sporting Club Best New Writer award for his first book, “Letting the Big Dog Eat,” a biography of the golfer John Daly.