Media coverage

[E10 Rifle]

As with Ray de Galles, the Cricket World Cup has nudged out WWC viewing time a little bit for me. It's the first time I can recall my two favourite sports both hosting World Cups at the same time, and I've been pretty pumped up for the CWC for a while, what with it being here and having some work responsibilities around it.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I haven't been able to watch very much of this tournament, because my Dad has monopolized the television, and my laptop can no longer handle streams. So I have had to follow it on the news programmes. But this jumped out at me.

The truth that nobody in the US wants to acknowledge is that the USWNT (and, I suppose, the Canadian WNT) has been much more successful than their male counterparts over the years largely because the level of competition is so much worse. Perhaps American women are just inherently better suited to soccer than American men and perhaps their coaches have been better than the men's, but I don't see much reason to believe that is the major difference, because the soccer system that produced the women's team and their coaches is pretty much the same one that produced the 1990 and 1994 US men's team.

There's another element to it. The list of countries that have been successful at women's football in the earliest stages of its development are pretty much a list of countries where it's a pretty good place to be a woman, compared to much of the rest of the world. Surely a huge part of the success of the USWNT is that relatively speaking a lot of money and effort has gone into women's football in America, particularly since that title er, ten? court case. And it didn't really matter whether or not if it was perfect, it was simply way ahead of everyone else at the time. And it has been a feature of life in America for a long time. I remember being struck by the way that Tony goes to see Meadow Play for her school in I think the second season of the sopranos, and that's 20 years ago. It was just treated as so normal a) for him to go to his daughter's sporting event and b) that it would be football.

I think you might be spot on about the US getting caught up because Women's sport in general is really taking off in a lot of places, though women's football in ireland is a bit of a disaster because the FAI are a fucking disgrace. Our footballers effectively went on strike, because they were having to swap tracksuits with underage teams in fucking motorway service station toilets, while John Delaney was getting a secret €400 k a year golden handcuffs on top of his €400k a year. On the other hand, the final of this tournament, is going to be going head to head with the Women's gaelic football final as the biggest attended female sporting event of the year in the world. So I think that amply demonstrates that an explosion in interest doesn't get you anywhere without proper organization and investment, and taking it seriously, and I think it's the last bit there where the US has had the edge.

Hope Solo was on as a pundit on RTE during the mens world cup and my god did she take it seriously. They also had Stefanie Roche, who is the most famous Irish womens footballer (coz she got nominated for a puskas award for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyiI2jZTnhU]This Goal. [/url] and she takes it very seriously as well. the few bits I've seen of RTE's coverage, they have her, and two other Irish internationals on, and my god do they take it seriously. There's nothing that is going to improve the standing of the game in this country like seeing the pundits taking it very seriously and talking about it like it matters, that's the thing that will cause the change. eight or nine year olds will be watching it and think that it is the way that it has always been. What actually happens on the pitch is a bit less important. I mean the First world cup I remember was Italia 90, and that had about less than two minutes of good football in the whole tournament and the overall standard was shockingly bad. But that's not the point when you are small.

[ursus arctos]

Title IX, not X

And the weird (from an international perspective) interplay between sport and higher education in this country is indeed the primary reason for the US' early dominance.

Football was a popular women's sport even before Title IX was interpreted to require "equity in athletics" between men's and women's programmes at institutions receiving federal funding (virtually all colleges and universities), largely because it was relatively inexpensive, required no additional facilities and was thought to be easy to coach (the vast majority of "soccer coaches" here in the 60s and 70s had never played the sport.

As sporting prowess has become increasingly more important as a road towards scholarships and/or preferential admissions treatment at major universities, more and more middle class* parents have been convinced that sport is the key to a lottery ticket that could save them a quarter of a million dollars in fees and/or get their kid into an Ivy equivalent that she would otherwise not qualify for.

That's also why the US team looks the way it does, rather than being more broadly representative of the country, or even of women who play football here.

* in both the US sense and the UK sense. I know several people who make millions of dollars a year and remain obsessed with their progeny's athletic development, to the point of spending USD 50K or more on it.

[Flynnie]

Rugby's a good sign of where the US could be heading. The US women won the first women's Rugby World Cup and made the next two finals after that, getting comprehensively beaten by England and New Zealand respectively. As the years have gone on, they've slipped farther away from the elite (England and New Zealand) to the point that beating either would be a major upset. It doesn't take long for a country where rugby is popular to overtake the US in women's rugby, despite our heritage.

It's hard to look at Germany or the Netherlands or France and see where the USA/Canada/Australia are going to get their results from in 2040, because those countries aren't going to be short of 1.75-1.8m women who can kick your arse but also play the ball out of the back with either foot. The saving grace for the Anglosphere countries might be the rising popularity of football in those countries in general, but as far as the US is concerned I'm a little worried that we'll stay agricultural for decades to come because there's just too many people who make money taking shortcuts to win. The USSF has never seemed particularly interested in fixing that.

[Patrick Thistle]

People behind me discussing the WWC on the train just now.

Including an irritating Scottish chap dismissing Japan as not a footballing nation compared to Netherlands...

[Nesta]

Haven't lost as many world cup finals, it's true

[Kevin S]

Point of order - given the stadium's capacity, the world cup final won't even have the highest attendance for a women's football match this year. 60,739 saw Barcelona v Atletico in March.

Roadside attendance of La Course will probably be in six figures, but it's not ticketed.

[Hot Pepsi]

Rugby's a good sign of where the US could be heading. The US women won the first women's Rugby World Cup and made the next two finals after that, getting comprehensively beaten by England and New Zealand respectively. As the years have gone on, they've slipped farther away from the elite (England and New Zealand) to the point that beating either would be a major upset. It doesn't take long for a country where rugby is popular to overtake the US in women's rugby, despite our heritage.

It's hard to look at Germany or the Netherlands or France and see where the USA/Canada/Australia are going to get their results from in 2040, because those countries aren't going to be short of 1.75-1.8m women who can kick your arse but also play the ball out of the back with either foot. The saving grace for the Anglosphere countries might be the rising popularity of football in those countries in general, but as far as the US is concerned I'm a little worried that we'll stay agricultural for decades to come because there's just too many people who make money taking shortcuts to win. The USSF has never seemed particularly interested in fixing that.

I don’t know if it will be quite like that. Because soccer is much more popular and played by a lot more girls than rugby in the US. In fact, it might be the most popular sport for girls in the US. (I’d have to check)

Pretty much every small town, high school, college, and university has a varsity girls or women’s soccer team now. (That wasn’t true even when the US started winning world cups.) And pro women’s soccer does have significant fan support (even if it may not be enough) and the USSF has sponsors investing in women’s soccer. The USWNT is a very marketable brand.

So, despite the problems in the development system, I think the US will have such an enormous player pool and enough money that they will stay in the top 8 or 10 and have a chance in most games.

Rugby isn’t near that level of support or interest yet, on the men’s or women’s side. It may get there, but it’s still fairly niche. The pro men’s league is just getting started and has very little public visibility. There are a lot of college teams, but most of them are not well-funded. There are a growing number of high school teams - both men and women - but it’s still a small number and mostly at wealthy schools (with some notable exceptions). Only a few have professional coaches. There’s not really any youth rugby to speak of. It’s rarely on TV. There are no famous rugby players here.

Contrast that to New Zealand, especially, where kids start building skills as soon as they can walk. RU is not as dominant in England or Australia, but there are more clubs around (per capita) and it’s much higher profile on TV etc than it is in the US. I‘m sure it’s a lot easier for clubs there to recruit girls to play, find qualified coaches, and appropriate competition within a days travel.

[Flynnie]

The US women’s rugby player pool is more than twice as large as any other country’s in the world (England is 2nd) and 15 times the size of New Zealand’s. Less than a thousand adult women in New Zealand play rugby and they have the best team in the world.

Size of player pool doesn’t matter if you just teach hoof ball because that’s what gets NCAA player scholarships while the Dutch are teaching technique and 4-3-3. If it did then the US men wouldn’t be so shit, because there’s probably more American men playing soccer than there are men in the whole of the Netherlands.

There’s always a chance it carries on, the US gets religion in terms of football popularity and training methods, and/or the advantage the US has in taking women’s sport seriously continues to be substantial versus everyone else.

But if there’s thinkpieces in 2040 on how the last 16 is actually a successful World Cup for the USWNT, I think my theory is how it will have come about.

[Hot Pepsi]

The player pool is big, but most of those players didn’t touch a rugby ball until 16 at the earliest. I knew a woman who played for the US in the World Cup in ... whichever one was in Edmonton. She had never *seen* rugby until college and our college team was/is pretty crap.

Giris soccer starts at around age 3 here just like it does in Europe and the coaching in US soccer isn’t quite that bad. At least it’s mostly professional. And it’s not like the NCAA coaches - at least the good ones - aren’t aware of all this. They want to develop national team players and want the national team to succeed. Teams that produce World Cup winners have an edge in recruiting

Or maybe it is that bad and what you’re suggesting will come to pass.

The US might be able to eventually progress faster in women’s rugby because it seems like the whole system is geared toward developing the national teams. That isn’t really true in women’s soccer where there are a lot of competing agendas.

[Satchmo Distel]

The format has been a problem in both the current cricket and football WCs but I think cricket has the advantage of having Pakistan and SL beating England, the equivalent of which does not seem to be currently possible in the women's game.

For me personally the men's cricket WC is huge due to its continuity since I was 12 in 1979, whereas this is only my 3rd women's WC. There are just longer narrative threads in the former, such as Pakistan 1992 v 2019.

But if I were 12 now, I'd be watching the free to air sport. My dad would not pay 10 quid a month for cricket so I would never get interested. The playground would not be buzzing about games in the way we replayed Joel Garner's yorkers.

1976 could not happen now, even if the grounds still had the atmosphere of that summer, because Viv and Andy would be seen by fewer than a million TV viewers. Nobody would know who David Steele was, or Dickie Bird for that matter. Richards and Greenidge would be playing T20, not honing their skills with Somerset and Hants.

[Hot Pepsi]

That's really sad.

But it might be the same even if ICC hadn't made the dumb move of taking the money with Sky. Because kids today don't watch TV like we did. They are all watching one of 100,000 different YouTube feeds or anything they want to from the catalog of almost every movie and TV show ever produced via Amazon or Netflix or Hulu or whatever.

When I was growing up, every kid around here followed college and pro football (gridiron) even if they didn't really like football because their dad or brother (and maybe mom and sisters too) was watching it on the weekends on the one and only TV (and a lot of those adults were watching it just to be part of the social gathering). If we went outside instead, we'd find that most of the other kids were playing touch football because the only sports we'd really ever heard of were football and baseball, and it was football season so we did that. The options were limited. We either played touch football with the other kids or went to go stare into a well. (See below).

Now if dad is watching football on TV, the kid can just pull out the laptop and play Minecraft. Or if dad drags them to a baseball game, the moment they aren't completely entertained, they pull out their fucking phone.* Etc. Nobody goes outside to play pick-up games any more because kids have been indoctrinated into the idea that no sport is worth playing if there isn't a coach, a ref, uniforms, and pressure to perform.


*I have witnessed both behaviors first hand recently. The first one doesn't bother me at all - that kid is sensible to not like football (he's 10 and he already knows a lot about CTE) and he's really really really good at Minecraft, apparently and it's teaching him all kinds of stuff about coding and cooperative work. The second one does bother me a lot. Not because kids should be compelled to like baseball, but we're screwed as a species if this phone addiction thing continues (me included). But I don't really know the dad of the kids involved, so I didn't comment.

[treibeis]

How expensive is Sky?

Here, if you've got a boozer, you're looking at 800 euros a month. That's why boozers here binned it.

[Nefertiti2]

Incredible ESPN piece about Megan Rapinoe’s brother Brian

[Hot Pepsi]

Here, if you've got a boozer, you're looking at 800 euros a month. That's why boozers here binned it.

That doesn’t seem like a good business model for Sky.

[tee rex]

In New Zealand there's a highlights programme at 5 pm each day on a free channel. Half an hour, better than nothing.

I say "each day". Well, this has been true for the group games and R16. And 3 of the 4 QFs are scheduled. But England's triumph was not shown, for reasons unexplained. It was replaced by a very old episode of Everybody Loves Raymond.

On an unrelated note, NZ has a sizeable Scottish population.

[Satchmo Distel]

The scheduling is diabolical.

That FIFA chose to have the Women's World Cup contested at the same time as the Copa America, CAN and Gold Cup (yes, I know, but it is a thing here) is nuts.

And that's before one gets to the Cricket.

Switching it to the year before the men's WC seems to be the way to avoid this in future.

The cricket is a once in a generation thing because it won't be in June when held anywhere else, and the TV conflict is mainly only in the UK anyway until cricket becomes more popular outside the Commonwealth.

[Janik]

Oooh, a spygate row. Unbranded clobber and everything. Proper stuff.

[ursus arctos]

The hotel in question has 75 rooms. Surely there must be some that aren't being occupied by England players and coaching staff?

[Janik]

So why was it the US personnel asked to see the ones which England were using? Eh?? Eh?!?

[Stop being reasonable. There is no place for that here.]

[ursus arctos]

It's clearly a plot hatched by the Auld Alliance of Scotland and France to undermine England's progress. The US administrators are useful idiots.

[Patrick Thistle]

A spygate drama. Again this is turning into a proper world cup.

[Janik]

The NWSL has both a minimum and maximum. I looked them up when posting about Sam Kerr's mooted move to Chelsea. From memory the floor is $~14,000 and the max $~42,000 or thereabouts. With an overall team cap of $~420,000.

I just saw part of one of ESPN's Nine for IX documentary strand, which had a stat flashed up that the average NWSL salary was $25,000. And quickly followed that with the average Senior Stadium Janitor salary in the US (or some such similar phrase for what us Brits would probably call the Stadium Manager) of $43,000.

[ursus arctos]

The salary cap is USD 420,000, so I guess that is possible.

If they used the word janitor, they are referring to people who clean the ground, not those who manage it. The latter will be well into six figures for major facilities.

[Sporting]

Janitor would be British English "caretaker" and there at least the job implies rather more tham just cleaning.