World Cup retrospective
Football, football, football. All Day I Dream About Football. Well, or soccer if you are a brand-oriented thinker. Which isn’t true by the way, I mean, that isn’t what it means, but I’m sure that you don’t care. (Message me if you wanna know more). Anyway, its been a good summer. The FIFA world cup this summer (Women’s) was excellent, and I mean excellent. The football on offer was hard to beat, as well as the voices of stories that the average watcher of male-oriented footballing would have already grown jaded about. Thailand makes it into the world cup and scores a goal, Australia shocks the world by being really good because they care a lot and work harder than everyone else, Germany misses a penalty (wtf?), there iss surprisingly little `simulation’, the games are played with a sense of pride beyond personal ego, the quality is so high that all kinds of viewing records are made (for either the men’s or women’s team in the US), and a variety of other interesting points all made for excellent viewing. I was a pretty biased viewer, and enjoyed watching the team I support win. However, a couple of things should be remembered: the USWNT should be winning the world cup, the USWNT should in fact dominate the world cup, and the US women’s pro teams should do better.
Okay, so firstly, the women’s game in the united states is leaps and bounds above any other nation in the world, in terms of the number of childhood players, and the money spent on grassroots through international team players and facilities. No other country comes close. Places where the interest is very high, like Brazil, still suffer from having a lack of financial incentive for their players to devote themselves, or even to provide a large enough pool of players to compete. Recently, Brazil started a program to fund their national team players, but that isn’t much of a program. The social gender stigma associated with women’s football is massive, most obviously among the traditional hotbeds of the sport is in south america, where outside funding is required to attempt to start a women’s league in brazil or to fund the Ecuadorian team’s travel to Canada this summer. Player’s like Marta are often thought of as ‘Pele in skirts’, recognizing that she is in fact a maestro but still linking her success to another well-known but male figure. This is actually very sad, as anyone who has seen Marta play remembers her forever as the finest female footballer of all time, and across genders she must be considered in the top 5-10. Okay, Okay okay, so what is the point? Well, the US funds female athletics. It may not be egalitarian, not the same pay pay (obviously an issue), but particularly in the developmental stages, kids, all get to play. The number of young women’s teams and clubs through U-15 is on par with boy’s teams. Contrast this with another heavyweight of women’s football like Brazil, who have to get special legislation to pay for their INTERNATIONAL star’s wages, and you see the discrepancy. Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries also do a pretty decent job, with France, Germany, and Sweden representing the finest female professional leagues in the world, but in terms of raw numbers, none can compete with the developmental reservoir with the united states.
There is a rather beautiful contrast between the men’s and women’s national teams in the united states, proving that traditions, prejudices, and national consciousness drive success as much as talent pool and money. Its very interesting to see that in the United States our interest is focused upon success, thus you see the women’s team held up (rightly) as our finest role models. The US men’s team, who is highly professional and excellent overall, just lost recently in the CONCACAF semifinal to Jamaica, something that would NEVER happen to the USWNT. Because of the much wider world tradition of play in men’s football, the competition gap is much smaller for the same fractional investment at the ground level. Said another way: lets assume that USSF spends the same amount on every child of football, $X. In men’s football, this investment gets you to consistently be in the top 15 in the world. In women’s football, this investment gets you to be #1, indisputably for about 25 years. That is a rather interesting situation, and again it doesn’t mean that women’s football is worse, which is something that you heard all around up until 2015, its just that the depth and tradition of interest coupled with worldwide prejudice mean that we don’t have as wide a scope as we’d like.
We can be depressed about it, or optimistic, or some rational combo of the two. I’m gonna start with being honest, I loved watching the games this cup. As a spectacle, the world cup was a huge success, from the group stages to the final. On the international level, I’ll pick women’s soccer more often I think in the future than men’s, but on the club level I’ll be picking men’s games to view. The realities of this are economic and media driven too, but how do you fix that situation unless more people take part. The only solution for vetoing the prejudice, to change the financial situaiton for people who wish to be professionsals, is for the wider community to take part (going to games, watching games on tv). One of the few wedges that the masses have against prejudice is in fact capitalist economics, weirdly. If people sell out the games, then marketing will move in, and the wages will go up, and over time the prejudice will fade out of the public perspective, to hide within the dark recesses of a few troubled minds, to eventually die out when those few are too embarrassed to say anything. This is the simple way forward. Of course, FIFA could up the prize money too, but good luck with that, since it took a brave flight from a FIFA executive comittee member (and senior vice-president Issa Hayatou of CAF) to fly so close to an extraditing country to hand out the trophy.