For fans who have spent the past three decades or so watching the U.S. national soccer team dominate the world stage, Sunday's loss in the round of 16 at the World Cup was a shocking, unfamiliar experience.
After struggling to score and looking strong all tournament, the USA women went scoreless against Sweden for 120 minutes before falling in penalties. The decisive ball from striker Lina Hurtig just crossed the goal line to give Sweden the win.
This may seem, in many ways, like an inopportune time for Team USA to fall short of expectations. For Americans, at least, economic and cultural equality with their male counterparts off the court has finally come into view in recent years. Thanks to settlement of 2022 with US Soccer, the women's team now has an equal pay rate with the men's national team for international friendlies and tournaments.
Members of Team USA—winner of four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals since 1991—still make far less money overall than comparable top-level male athletes in other US sports, but players like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan are world famous stars making millions every year in endorsement deals.
While close watchers of Team USA worried about its chances at this World Cup, the women were still the favorites with odds to win before the tournament, and conventional wisdom assumed they would play in late August. Their flame, for some, begs the question: After so many steps forward, has the women's game taken a giant step back?
Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, says no. Parity for the women's game around the world, he believes, is the next logical step towards real equality between male and female athletes – and it has been on full display this World Cup, more than any other before. The US was not the only traditional powerhouse to fall short at the 2023 tournament.
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“Colombia upset Germany”. points out. Germany had the second team in the world entering the tournament behind the USA and are two-time World Cup winners. “South Africa beat Italy. Jamaica knocked out Brazil. Morocco beat South Korea. Haiti, who have never had a team, played amazingly. I think what you're seeing is more and more investment in women's sport globally.”
Lebowitz and other experts point to Title IX, the 1972 law banning gender discrimination in education, as the seed for the US becoming a soccer superpower. Soccer is a relatively cheap sport to play, so as schools added women's sports programs to comply with the law, soccer programs multiplied at all levels across the country.
In 1974, fewer than 7,000 girls played high school soccer in the U.S., according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. By 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available, there were close to 400,000.
This early investment gave US women an early leg up, but other countries are closing the gap. In Europe, a thriving club soccer scene helps nurture players professionally. inspired in part by Team USA's long-standing equal pay law, international players, supported by organizations such as FIFPROthey have dared to demand better working conditions.
This World Cup is the first to guarantee players basic compensation for participation. Before the tournament, FIFA promised that each of the 736 players would receive at least $30,000—more if their teams advanced to the tournament. Since the Ballon d'Or, the top individual award in world soccer, began awarding a women's award in 2018, only one American, Rapinoe, has won.
“Right now, you can reasonably field a world-best lineup without a single USWNT player, possibly for the first time since the Women's World Cup was created in 1991. The Athletic wrote last week.
Lebowitz believes the platform that Team USA's success has given players can inspire others to advocate for social change. “When you think about the Olympics and the World Cups, there's a patriotic pride in that,” Lebowitz says. “Other nations want to get involved and get involved in it.”
However, there is a long way to go. Players in the 2023 World Cup will earn 25 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by players in the men's tournament (in 2019 it was just eight cents). “Social evolution takes a long time to germinate,” Lebowitz says. But once something like equal pay “becomes an issue that has grown on an international scale, you won't be able to put it back in a box.”
Schuyler Velasco is a writer for Northeastern Global News Magazine. Email her at s.velasco@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @Schuyler_V.
