A seven-a-side match featuring a collection of retired Wrexham pros and guests against a team of mostly retired US women’s players isn’t particularly newsworthy. But when the score wound up 12-0 in favor of the men, the knives were out.
Some outlets, notably Fox News, either ignorantly or deliberately misidentified the American players as “the US women’s team”. Some played up Heather O’Reilly’s playful callout of Wrexham’s celebrity owner Ryan Reynolds as a hysterical, delusional fit. From newsrooms to their parents’ basements, men rejoiced at the supposed humbling of women who dared to demand a place in the sports marketplace.
Why? Simple sexism surely explains some of it, but the mainstream and social media harrumphing also brings up an inconvenient truth – as we head into the World Cup, a lot of people in the United States are waiting for the women to fall flat on their faces, the result of years of political protests, questionable sportsmanship, and an “equal pay” war in which truth was the first casualty and money to develop the next generation of players was the last.
But despite that pushback among sections of America, USA women’s soccer players have never been this popular for this many years. The 1991 and 1999 Women’s World Cup champions could be outspoken as well, playing hardball in labor negotiations that paved the way for their successors to make a living in the sport. But women’s soccer struggled in the US after the WUSA, at the time America’s only women’s professional league in the sport, collapsed in 2003.
That 1999 team made ads like the classic “I will have two fillings,” a tribute to their team-first attitude. This time around, marketing has kicked off with an ad in which the US women sneer and scoff at the very idea of anyone dethroning the two-time defending champions. Why stick with that cold, hard braggadocio? Because it’s working. Mostly.
The National Women’s Soccer League, launched with a shoestring budget in 2013 as a third attempt at a professional competition in the US, now commands expansion fees reported to exceed $50m. Teenagers are passing up the security of college scholarships to turn professional, just in time to push their way into a national team pool that was creaking with age.
To an extent, the surge of interest is merely part of a larger wave of support for women’s sports, not just in the US but globally. Professional women’s soccer in Europe has soared in popularity since the last World Cup. In the US, this year’s women’s college basketball tournament obliterated records for TV viewership.
But women’s soccer players and agents have surely learned that it’s not too difficult to parlay infamy into fame. Embracing their own polarizing personae didn’t hurt Charles Barkley, Randy Moss or John McEnroe, so why would it hurt Megan Rapinoe or Alex Morgan?
And unlike Barkley, Moss or McEnroe, the USA women – whose World Cup roster was named on Wednesday – have no shortage of advocates who will back them no matter what. To highlight just a few examples:
Celebrating wildly upon scoring goals 11, 12 and 13 against an overmatched World Cup opponent? No problem.
Morgan pretending to sip tea after a goal against England? A meme-worthy moment, even though many couldn’t tell whether it was a dig at the team’s tea-crazed opponents, a homage to Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner’s Instagram account, or a shoutout to Kermit the Frog. (As it turns out, the correct answer was Turner.)
Rose Lavelle diving to get a call at the World Cup? Either we all missed the foul, or, hey, the men do it all the time. (Sadly, that’s not wrong.)
Underneath those viral moments, much of the antipathy – as it so often is in America – is political. First, Rapinoe followed Colin Kaepernick’s lead in kneeling for the national anthem in 2016. Before the 2019 World Cup she found herself pitted against the US president himself, Donald Trump. Kneeling became an issue again leading up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when the USWNT echoed other teams’ actions in kneeling before the game but not, despite erroneous reports to the contrary, during the anthem.
Second, the team’s quest for “equal pay” – with the blame aimed squarely at US Soccer though the problem lies mostly with Fifa, which is more difficult to sue in US courts – led to some murky economic and legal arguments, along with some unnecessary bashing of the US men’s team, many of whom supported their female counterparts.
US Soccer brought peace by settling with the women’s team, coming up with a unique revenue-sharing agreement between the federation and the men’s and women’s national teams, cleverly ensuring that each team would benefit from the success of the other where it apparently matters most – the wallet.
But these settlements added to the perception among US Soccer’s grassroots organizers that the federation only cared about the senior national teams. Voters nearly returned ousted president Carlos Cordeiro to office despite sponsor and player objections. Cindy Cone, herself a retired women’s player now in the Hall of Fame, retained the seat by a narrow margin.
Rapinoe is the personification of these disputes. To some, her protests are about satisfying her ego more than supporting any particular cause. To others, she is a powerful icon of gay pride and defiant activism.
When those opinions are weighed, the latter argument wins – Rapinoe’s off the field achievements are remarkable and she has helped change her sport and wider society. But Rapinoe’s cult of personality is so strong that she has claimed prizes for on-field play ahead of more deserving teammates such as Lavelle, Morgan, Crystal Dunn, Julie Ertz or Becky Sauerbrunn.
And so Rapinoe shows the influence of this team – and influence female athletes have been fighting for for years. Lightning rods draw lightning, and while that’s surely difficult at times, she and her teammates are sure to get attention and build an intimidating mystique as the World Cup approaches.
The US women’s team have made a few enemies, not just knuckle-dragging men on social media but also the rank and file of US Soccer. They’ve made many more fans. They’ve also made many more people interested in their fates.
And they know that, whether people are watching to see them succeed or fail, people will be watching.
