Women’s football always on the verge

Women’s football has been around a long time, and it’s been very popular. The English Football Association (FA), for example, did not ban women’s football in 1921 because people weren’t watching; they banned it because people were watching and because more and more women wanted to play. I begin with this simple fact because, repeatedly, there are some who express surprise at the popularity, quality, and success of women’s football. Some of those unable to grasp this popularity are the men in charge of football at both the international and national level. Unable to ignore it or claim the growth and scale of the women’s game as their achievement, the men in charge can only patronize players and fans alike and try to contain it.

Women’s football has been central to my life since I first kicked a ball on a playground in Atlanta in the 1970s. When I joined a pick-up game at recess in elementary school, I immediately fell in love with the sport. I eagerly joined a team coached by two teenage girls. In high school, I was one of two girls who played on the boys’ B-team before a girls’ team was created. I was recruited by Anson Dorrance to play at UNC but decided to go to UVA instead. My playing career ended in 2001 when I had to have surgery on a cervical disk in my neck that was compressing my spinal cord.

I am also a longtime fan and armchair analyst of the women’s game. I attended the first-ever and sold-out women’s soccer gold-medal game at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, witnessing the U.S. beat China 2-1 in a scintillating and evenly matched game. I was aghast to learn the next day that, rather than show the dramatic final live on television, NBC covered a practice session of the U.S. men’s basketball “dream” team. I watched the final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, which was a rematch of the Olympics final, in a packed and rowdy bar in Atlanta. I attended the first-ever home game of the Atlanta Beat, one of the teams in the Women’s United Soccer Association that began in 2001. Two of the international players on the Beat roster were the great Chinese striker Sun Wen, who had scored in the Olympics final in 1996, and the soon-to-be legendary Japanese midfielder Homare Sawa. Japan became my favorite women’s team and, in 2011, I cheered on as Sawa led Japan over the U.S. to win the World Cup in Germany in what was, in my opinion, the greatest match in Women’s World Cup history. Sawa would score from a corner kick with a flick from an improbable angle in the 117 minute to tie the game and send it to penalty kicks. As a sign of the continued lack of investment in covering women’s football, there were limited replays of the goal in the U.S. coverage and commentators and viewers were unsure whether Sawa had used her head or foot to score.

Fast forward to 2023. By all accounts, the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand was a roaring success. Almost two million fans attended the tournament, smashing the previous record by 600,000. Australia’s semi-final loss to England was the most-watched TV event in Australian history. Fears that by expanding the tournament to 32 teams, the quality of the football, at least in the group stage, would be diluted, did not pan out. Many of the supposedly “lesser” teams played well against the perennial powers in women’s football and shock early exits by the US, Germany, and Norway meant that at the quarterfinal stage only one previous winner of the tournament (Japan) was still in the running. 

In the end, a final between England and Spain was not a surprise to folks like me who follow the women’s game closely. Spain was the better team on the day and their 1-0 victory was a glorious achievement for a talented team that has historically underperformed in senior tournaments, in no small part thanks to a structural lack of support for the women’s team from the Spanish Federation (RFEF) and a long and sordid history of domineering, patronizing, and ineffective coaching. The immediate and ongoing (as I write) aftermath of Spain’s historic win has shocked the world, but for many of us who have followed the Spanish women’s team’s travails over the years, though shocking, it has hardly been surprising. 

To try to recap in a short blog piece all the twists and turns of this story is an impossible task. Suffice it to say, the Spanish Federation’s (RFEF) has showed the world the sexism and gaslighting the Spanish women players have been dealing with, and trying to change, for decades. After the final whistle blew, the RFEF president Luis Rubiales was filmed grabbing his crotch in a crude celebration, as the Spanish queen and her 16-year-old daughter stood nearby. In a filmed “apology,” Rubiales seems to me to be pleased with himself in a boys-will-be-boys way as he describes the gesture as “unfortunate” and “unedifying” and says, “I have to apologize to the royal family.” And, revealingly, he admits the gesture was a tribute to the Spanish team’s controversial manager Jorge Vilda.

For me, this is a classic example of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified as “male homosocial desire.” As I tweeted at the time:

““Rubiales’s crotch grab to Vilda shows how women (footballers) exist simply as a conduit between men and for a performance of hegemonic masculinity.””

On the podium for the medal ceremony, Rubiales grasped Jenni Hermoso’s head in both his hands and kissed her on the lips. Millions watched this incident live, and clips of the kiss then circulated widely on social media. Hermoso said not long after on Instagram Live that she “didn’t like it.” Later, the RFEF released a statement supposedly from Hermoso indicating she consented to the kiss, a statement she would later categorically deny having made. The RFEF held an emergency meeting where Rubiales gave a rambling speech in which he insisted he was the victim of “false feminism” and intoned three times: “I will not resign.” This was applauded by the men in attendance, including Vilda. The entire World Cup-winning team (and other Spanish women players) signed a letter in support of Hermoso, condemning “behaviors that have violated the dignity of women” and asserting they would not play another game until Rubiales resigned. On social media, the hashtag #SeAcabó (which translates as “it’s over” or “time’s up” and “enough is enough”) appeared. FIFA (another bastion of male homosocial desire) suspended Rubiales for 90 days and told him not to contact Hermoso or anyone connected to her. As I write, the latest developments sound like the plot of a bad soap opera: Rubiales’s mother is apparently hunger striking in a church and his brother and cousin have appeared live on Spanish TV to accuse Hermoso of lying.

Jenni Hermoso is kissed by president of the RFEF, Luis Rubiales, after the Women’s World Cup Finals. Photo credits by Noe Llamas/SPP/Shutterstock

I had initially planned to write a piece about how women’s football is always on the verge, not because it isn’t popular, but because retrograde institutions (FIFA, the RFEF, media corporations) undermine and contain its potentiality. I was going to talk about how irritating it is, that every four years many male journalists and commentators treat women’s football as if it’s only just been discovered, despite the long history of its popularity and slowly increasing structural support. One particularly egregious example came after the U.S. was eliminated by Sweden in the round of 16. The Swedish goalkeeper Zećira Mušović was instrumental in her team’s win and chosen as player of the match. In an interview after, a reporter asked her if she knows Zlatan Ibrahimović and mentioned that Mušović and Ibrahimović are both of Bosnian heritage. Mušović and others were irritated by the question, which of course had nothing to do with her outstanding performance, but also revealed how patronizing some coverage of the women’s game still is. I also noticed how the groundswell of support for the tournament in Australia, especially as the Matildas made it to the semifinals, was compared by U.S. announcers to what happened in the U.S. in 1999. You could only make a statement like this if you were not paying attention to the growth of the women’s game elsewhere. Indeed, the U.S. is now falling behind, in terms of both talent and tactics, to other nations. Yet all of this is now overshadowed by the spectacle of the Spanish Federation forced through its own hubris and arrogance to display to the world its crass, abusive, and endemic misogyny. Led by the Spanish women’s team—the 2023 World Cup champions, perhaps we are ready to say in a unified voice: #SeAcabó.