The End of An Era for U.S. Women’s Soccer
2023-08-11 00:34:00
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From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
A few days ago, when the U.S. women's team was eliminated from the World Cup, it marked the end of a history-making run of victory. But according to my colleague, Rory Smith, it also marked the end of something even bigger, an entire era that redefined women's sports.
It's Friday, August 11th.
Rory, where are we exactly in the tournament right now?
This is really confusing for me. So it's Friday in Australia and New Zealand when they start, which I think is still Friday in the U.K., but might be Thursday in the U.S. And I can't do the three. I can't do the three jumps.
Yeah, two global time jumps is kind of all the brain can sustain. Well, as we're hinting at, you are in Australia, covering the waning days of the women's World Cup, and you are graciously tolerating this ungodly time difference of 14 hours from all of us here in New York. I want to ask you to go back a little bit in the tournament, hit rewind,
and reconstruct the final moments of this game that has already become sports legend.
The United States versus Sweden.
Countdown is underway.
Yeah, so it's a game in the round of 16, so the first knockout round of the World Cup. Three Sweden, number one USA. And, to be honest, it kind of played out as we thought. It was very tight. There wasn't a huge amount of action, which maybe, you know, fits certain stereotypes that certain people still have about soccer.
It was tense. Turns it back upfield. It's pushed. And you could feel the nervousness of the players and, to be honest, of the crowd, building as the clock ticked. Free kick U.S.
It's getting chippy.
And then, as these things tend to do when nobody scores. Ball played long. It goes to penalties. That's it. Penalty kicks are going to determine who will go on and who will go home in this incredible battle.
Right. And that's what I want to talk about.
So you start off with five kicks each, and the first two kicks of both teams are scored. And the U.S. scores its third. And Sweden misses.
Missed!
Which means that the U.S. have to score. Hit the ball in the goal twice. You are through to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. You know, you get to stay in the competition.
You're still in the tournament. You're still favorites. And up steps. Medin Rapinoe. Side relief on the U.S.
bench as Rapinoe steps up to take the next kick. Now, Medin Rapinoe, famously, doesn't miss penalties. You know, she's one of the most experienced players on this U.S. team. She's arguably still the brightest star in women's soccer.
Medin Rapinoe knows about pressure. And one of her specialties is taking penalties. She's a sure thing. And she steps up and she looks, as she always does, incredibly cool and collected.
And she misses. And she turns and walks back to her teammates, who are all kind of gathered on the halfway line. With this rueful smile on her face, as though she can't believe the absurdity of the situation. But it looks, fortunately for Rapinoe, like she might kind of get away with it. Because the Swedish player who follows her also misses.
Which means Sophia Smith can win it for the States. But she misses.
And you get to the situation where no one can really believe what's happening. Because you never see that many penalties missed in a row in a penalty shootout. But even that was kind of normal compared to what followed.
We come to the end of the shootout. The Swedes need to score one to go through.
And Alyssa Nair, the American goalkeeper, saves the shot. But instead of the ball spinning away from the goal, as it normally would, it spins quite slowly back towards the line. And Nair, because of her incredible reflexes, manages to save it again.
Nair walks out of the goal, shaking her head, pointing to the referee, saying, I've saved it, I've saved it. Hurting. the Swedish player is pleading with the referee that it crossed the line. Unfortunately, no one has to make their case. Because the referees wear a special watch, which is connected to goal line technology, which tells them if the ball has crossed the line.
And the whole world is kind of standing still here, waiting for the call.
Waiting for a watch to buzz. And eventually it does.
Wow. Sweden wins. And a second later, Hurtig is celebrating, the Swedish player. And Alyssa Nair has got kind of a thousand-yard stare. And Sweden are through in this impossible fashion.
And the United States are out.
Right. And at this point, viewers at home are absorbing the idea that the US has lost. And they have lost by literally a millimeter.
Well, the thing that struck me the day after it is that the US was knocked out by a unit of measurement the country does not recognize.
They were knocked out by 0.04 inches.
Thank you for the translation. So, Roy, once you pick your jaw up off the ground, after these excruciating mistakes by the US women's team and this loss, what are you thinking?
I suppose the first thought that you have is that it felt like the end of an era. The US has been the defining force in women's soccer, realistically for 30 years. But particularly over the last 10.. They've won the World Cup twice. They have been home to the biggest stars, the most famous players.
They have developed a profile that I think exceeds the bounds of athleticism and goes into advocacy and activism. They have always given the impression that this is kind of their tournament. But the idea that the US are the default winners, the champions in waiting, that is over, not just for this tournament, but for maybe every tournament from now on.
So what you're saying is that the era of inevitability is what's really over for women's soccer. This team is now fallible. They can now fail, and they have. And with that in mind, Roy, tell us the bigger story of how this women's team ever became so dominant, what the dominant era represented ultimately, and why it's now ending.
That's a big question. So I think for a long time, the US had a kind of systemic advantage in women's soccer. You know, bear in mind, this is a sport that was outlawed. as crazy as that seems to say, that it was banned completely in Britain at a kind of professional level until the 1970s.
It was banned for women.
Women were not allowed to play professional organized soccer in Britain until the early 1970s. In the US, Title IX, which was passed in the 1970s and made provision for the equal treatment of men's and women's sports, certainly at the college level, meant that there was an organized form of women's soccer being played. They were at colleges that had coaching staffs and training programs and played competitive games in competitive leagues. And that means you get a pipeline of talent. So when FIFA get round to organizing a World Cup for women, the first official one is in 1991, the US are kind of unmatched.
They are the standard bearers, the pioneers of women's soccer. But that's not the moment that makes this team, this program, so significant. That comes in 1999, when you have this starburst that gives not just US soccer, but kind of the American sports infirmament. Players like Mia Hamm, who for a long time was regarded as the finest women's player in history. Brandi Chastain, this team that become genuine stars.
And they become genuine stars because in 1999... The two very best teams in this World Cup going at it. The World Cup is held in the United States. This is the biggest game in the lives of these USA players. And you could say that for China too.
The Americans make the final. Referee has just looked at the watch.
That's it.
The winner of the 1999 Women's World Cup will be decided on penalty kicks. And Brandi Chastain...
Chastain will take it. ...hates the penalty kick that beats China.
Brandi Chastain does it. And the USA are world champions once again. And you get this iconic shot of Chastain in celebration, taking her jersey off to reveal her sports bra and kind of sinking onto the turf on her knees. And after a torrid two hours of football,
the USA win five forearm penalties.
This look of complete and utter overwhelming delight on her face. Jubilation on and off the field. That image goes across America. It goes around the world. Those sorts of iconic images have a power.
They resonate with people. And suddenly it feels as though women's soccer has arrived, certainly in the US. And to an extent, I think you can make the case everywhere. And I think that victory, not only determined that that generation of US women's players became certainly the first real superstars of women's soccer, but also it gave them a platform and a voice and a kind of broader significance that brought them into other areas that weren't necessarily just about what they did on the field.
Explain that.
They start talking about better conditions, about better pay, more equitable treatment. And the US national team kind of develops this activist edge to the extent that it becomes almost inseparable, really, from the US women's team. And the most obvious impact of that, I guess, is the establishment of the first professional women's soccer league in the States, then arguably kind of worldwide, which means that the players can devote themselves to soccer in a way that isn't really available to a lot of people in Europe and South America. And that creates this impression, really, that the US is this superpower that just can't be caught, that its dominance is going to be kind of almost eternal, or at least as close to eternal as sport can realistically manage.
So what you're describing is a very virtuous cycle where the dominance of the US women's team and the activism leads to things like a professional league, which cements the dominance and it strengthens the pipeline and begets even more dominance.
Yes. And all of that coalesces in the next truly great US team. It starts to beget genuine household names, players who are famous in sports and the culture as a whole. And that is people like Alex Morgan, the striker. And most of all, I suspect, it's Megan Rapinoe, who comes to be seen almost as the avatar of that generation.
And remind us what makes her such an avatar of the sport.
Well, first and foremost, it's how she plays. Into the area. Megan Rapinoe drives it.
A magnificent goal by Megan Rapinoe. She burst into kind of soccer's consciousness 2011, 2012..
Absolutely wonderful from Megan Rapinoe.
She's the sort of player that catches the eye. She's not necessarily the biggest or the quickest or the strongest, but she plays with a swagger, which I think a lot of people are drawn to.
I think there is an ineffable quality to stardom that you can't always really explain. Sometimes, you know, some people are LeBron or Michael Jordan. They're just like loads, better at the sport than anybody else. And so that they obviously become stars. But I think there are other players who tend to stand out because of something in their body language, something about the way they carry themselves.
You need to close down Megan Rapinoe because look at that ball. A sense that they might do something exciting.
We've all seen the YouTube of her playing the guitar.
Now we can listen to her sing as well.
And I think Rapinoe is in that category. She is the sort of player who you kind of have to keep an eye on, because you never quite know what she's going to do. That's Rapinoe on the field.
But increasingly, as her profile grows, she actually becomes as significant, really, for what she does off the field as what she does on it.
Like what?
Well, particularly initially, LGBT rights.
Why would I ever not come out? Why would I never not take this stand and say this is who I am? And I'm very proud of that.
She came out in 2012.. She's one of the first openly gay players, if not the first openly gay player, on the U.S. women's national team. And then, in 2016,, Several star soccer players on the U.S. women's national team have filed a lawsuit demanding equal pay.
Together with a few of her teammates, Rapinoe leads this legal battle against U.S. soccer, her employers, effectively, to try and achieve pay equity with the men's team. And it takes a long time. The legal kind of procedure is very complicated. But they do eventually force U.S.
soccer to change the way that players are compensated. Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem before her game last night with the Seattle Rain. And then later in 2016,, she becomes one of the first professional athletes outside of the NFL to kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial inequality. She told reporters, being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it. protect all of your liberties.
And you know, that's a risk, because if you look at what happened to Kaepernick, he was effectively forced to sacrifice his career to make his principles clear. And a lot of athletes have been told not to do it. Organizing bodies didn't want them to do it. And Rapinoe did it anyway. Well, two days before her women's national team takes on France in the quarterfinals of the Women's World Cup, co-captain Megan Rapinoe is in another match with President Trump.
And then, most notably, in 2019, around the time of the World Cup in France, she doesn't have any problem at all with standing up to the president of the United States. Traditionally, a winning team would be invited to the White House so that the president of the day can like bastion their reflected glory. And Rapinoe says-.
I'm not going to the fucking White House.
She will not go. To which Trump responds- Maybe Rapinoe should win first. You have to finish the job first. And that's what the Americans do. They get all the way to the final and against the Dutch in Lyon.
Rapinoe scores the decisive goal. that means the U.S. have retained the World Cup. And when they get back to the States-.
I stand by the comments that I made about not wanting to go to the White House, with the exception of the expletive. My mom will be very upset about that.
Rapinoe and the entire team don't go to the White House.
I would encourage my teammates to think hard about lending that platform or having that co-opted by an administration that doesn't feel the same way and doesn't fight for the same things that we fight for.
So- She makes it very clear that she does not approve of anything that Trump is doing and that she will not allow him to use her stardom to make himself look better.
And, of course, there's real risk here for Rapinoe and for the entire team in taking on someone like Donald Trump.
Yes, Rapinoe and the entire team, really, found themselves in a more central role in a kind of ongoing, broiling culture war than I think they probably anticipate or than many people would have said is ideal. That's never really been something that has concerned Megan Rapinoe, I think. That she is absolutely willing to stand up for what she believes in, regardless of who that might antagonize or alienate or upset. If there's a cause that she believes is worth fighting for or a cause that is close to her heart or something that she feels she should stand up for, she will stand up for and she will use the platform she's got. And Rapinoe was always very clear that all of that was contingent, because, while sport is a great way to distrust things that people might not want to distrust, to distrust things that they might want to avoid, it all depends on how successful you are.
If you are winning games, if you are winning trophies, if you are one of the best players in the world, if you are a world champion, then people kind of have to listen to you. They want to hear what you've got to say. Rapinoe has always said that, first and foremost, you have to win the stuff that people care about, and that is what gives you your platform.
And now, after all those years and years of winning, the U.S. women's soccer team has now lost.
Yeah, for the first time in more than a decade, it has lost a World Cup game. It looks like the end of an era and it looks also like the rest of the world has kind of caught up.
We'll be right back.
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So, Roy, how does the rest of the world manage to catch up to U.S. women's soccer?
I think the first step was unbanning the sport. That was quite helpful. And then what you really see probably starts 10 to 15 years ago, where the major club teams of Europe start to take an interest in women's soccer. And you see the major teams of the Premier League and of, you know, the top divisions in Italy and Spain and Germany belatedly. And it's really important we don't cast anyone here as the good guys, because this was in the 21st century.
This is the sort of thing I should really be describing from, like the Victorian period, but it's not, this is the 21st century. But these clubs know exactly how to produce footballers. They are extremely good at it. They're also extremely good at finding footballers. And they have the brilliant light bulb moment of, if we can do this for men, it'll probably work for women too.
What you see is within the clubs themselves, you see all of these facilities suddenly populated not just by boys, but by girls, that you get players who are recruited to youth academies at the age of 10, 11, sometimes earlier. This seems slightly uneasy, saying it, but if there's a talented kid playing soccer somewhere in like an organized setting in Europe, the local professional team will know by the time they're six. Wow. Like we're all finished after six. If you've not been spotted by the time, you're six, you are done.
But it is a machine. It is a talent spotting and a talent creation machine. And you see this rapid growth in women's soccer that the European teams get better, and they get better really fast.
Right. And the U.S. of course, does not have a comparable system.
No, the U.S. is a complete outlier in global soccer. And in women's soccer, there is a real issue with pay-to-play. that women's soccer in the U.S. has always been kind of a middle-class pursuit.
And because of that, it's obviously a little bit exclusive and that has this effect of limiting the number of players who can have access to it. And at the same time, the place that leads isn't to professional teams. It leads to colleges and the colleges provide good quality coaching. It's a professionalized environment, even if it's not fully professional. But that's at, what, 18, 19??
You're competing with European and South American and to an extent even African kids now who have been trained professionally at professional elite teams since they were 10 or 11.. That's an awful lot of catching up to do for someone who's 18 or 19 and going into college. There is a natural disadvantage to that U.S. system when it's exposed to global competition.
So, once Europe decides to really invest in this pipeline for women's soccer, whatever advantages the U.S. had with systems like Title IX, they basically evaporate.
Yeah, and it evaporates really fast because the European clubs can move so quickly and with so much money. So you start to see, really, since the 2019 World Cup in France, which is obviously one that the Americans won, it starts to feel, even there, like the gap is closing. The aura that they had, the sense of fear that they inspired in European teams, the idea that that was the final boss in a video game, that you had to beat the American national team, that starts to dissipate. And I think, coming into this World Cup, there was a real sense among the European teams and for the sake of being able to walk around safely, I should say Australia,
that the U.S. team was kind of there to be taken down, that they weren't what they used to be and that there was nothing to be afraid of anymore.
And so what does this year's World Cup look like when that U.S. aura begins to dissipate?
Well, they kind of arrived here knowing that for quite a few of the players, this would be their last hurrah, or what they hoped would be their last hurrah. You know, Madeleine Rapinoe is retiring. She has already announced that. Several of the members of the team are in their mid to late 30s and, without wanting to be ageist, that tends to mean that you are in the autumn of your professional athletic career. They probably won't come back either.
And, to be honest, they've kind of looked like a team that's at the end of a road. You know, they played four games. They beat Vietnam. They drew with the Dutch and with Portugal.
And P.S., when you say drew, two stupid Americans tie.
Yeah, they tie, sorry. But they never really looked particularly exciting or imaginative, or inventive. They didn't feel like they were the defining story, the must-watch draw of this tournament. They felt like a faded force. They looked a shadow of what the world expects from the United States women's team and what the U.S.
women's team expects from itself.
Right, and that extends quite clearly to the final game that you described at the beginning of our conversation against Sweden, when Rapinoe misses her penalty kick and Sweden's last penalty shot goes in by that painful millimeter.
Yeah, and there was a temptation in the immediate aftermath to see it as being a really close-run thing, that the World Cup had been ended by a millimeter. But that's not really true, because that millimeter was just a culmination of all of the rest of the tournament, which in turn was the culmination of all of the last four years. And that in turn probably linked to the growth of women's soccer around the world, to the inevitable march of time for some of the most important players on the U.S. team. So it wasn't unforeseeable that the U.S.
should not win the World Cup. It wasn't really an injustice that they went out to Sweden. The only thing that struck me as being particularly cruel was the fact that Rapinoe, with her last ever kick at a World Cup, should miss a penalty. That felt like it wasn't really the coda that her World Cup career deserved, given all that she's achieved for the sport as a whole and in terms of the causes that matter to her. And she expressed all that after the game.
I mean, this is like a sick joke. For me personally, I'm just like, this is a dark comedy, I missed a penalty.
She called it a sick joke that that would be her final contribution to a World Cup.
I think this team has always fought for so much more, and, you know, to know that we've used our really special talent to do something, you know, that's really like changed the world forever. I think that means the most to me, and, you know, the players that we've played with in this locker room here.
And she talked about how she's tried to use the platform that the U.S. national team provides.
That's the best part. We're going to miss you. Thank you, Megan, for everything. Thank you.
And she has always said that without the winning, you don't get the microphones, you don't get to say whatever you want all of the time, because people, in Rapinoe's telling, listen to winners. They want to hear what winners have to say. And in her view, if you don't win, then that might go away.
Right. She seemed to recognize that this platform is now in jeopardy. I wonder, Rory, to the degree that the era that we've been talking about truly is over and, based on the pipeline and Europe's success in building it that we've been talking about, it might be over for some time. The U.S. might not be able to catch up to Europe's catching up to the U.S.
for years. Maybe it will be impossible to catch up. We're not going to know that for a while. But I'm curious, what do you think that this era of extraordinary dominance and success and activism will have meant with U.S. women's soccer?
Well, first of all, I think that maybe the U.S. will just have to get used to being one of several nations that can win major tournaments. And there's no great shame in that. I don't think the U.S. is going to be bypassed as a soccer force.
They will be back. They might win the next World Cup. But I think the era of them being default champions is probably over for good. There will always be other countries that can challenge them now and challenge them in a convincing, consistent way. What I don't think will change is the kind of spiritual, philosophical legacy of this team that women's soccer all over the world has an activist edge.
And I think in no small part, that's because most of these women have had to fight for something, the right to play, the right to be paid as much as they deserve, the right to have access to the same facilities as the men, the right to have their sports projected in the way that it ought to be. So women's soccer is always accompanied by a degree of advocacy.
But to me, Rapinoe and this generation of the U.S. national team, I think they were the embodiment of that. And I suspect that they inspired quite a lot of people within women's soccer to stand up on the issues that they believed in. I mean, it's been really interesting here in the last week or so to see how defensive, really, players from other countries have been about the U.S. national team.
I don't want to kind of cause any offense when I say that the rest of the world generally quite likes seeing Americans lose at things. But that's not the case. in women's soccer. There is an abiding respect and admiration for this team. They feel quite protective of the U.S., I think, in a way that's quite rare.
And that, I think, speaks to two things. One is what this generation of the U.S. national team has meant in a sporting sense.
Athletes admire winners, and this U.S. team have been relentless winners. But also, I think there's an element in there of what they've represented as people, the admiration for what they've achieved, both on and off the field, will continue long after we've forgotten, kind of, how they got knocked out of this World Cup.
Wolverine, thank you very much. We appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
We'll be right back.
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Today's episode was produced by Claire Tannisgetter, Sydney Harper, and Olivia Natt, with help from Carlos Prieto. It was edited by MJ Davis-Linn, with help from Paige Cowan. Contains, original music by Mary Lozano, Diane Wong, Alishaba Itup, Ro Nymisto, and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.
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