ABSTRACT
For the first time in its history, the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup (WWC) included 24 teams in the final round, expanded by 6 teams from previous tournaments. Seven of the teams had qualified for every tournament since the WWC began in 1991, including perennial favorites and former champions Germany, Norway, Japan, and the eventual winner the United States of America. The popularity of women’s football in the United States exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, as youth clubs began producing an increasing number of women’s players in order to keep up with the massive post-Title IX growth of women’s college soccer during the same period (Williams 2007: 62).2 As Markovits and Hellerman (2003: 14) argue, successful US Women’s National Team (USWNT) players such as Mia Hamm, Brandy Chastain, Julie Foudy, Alex Morgan, and Abby Wambach are as widely known publically as their equivalent stars on the men’s team. As they suggest, “Nowhere else is women’s soccer the cultural equivalent of – or even superior to – the men’s game, as it is in the United States.” The World Cup final versus Japan, for example, set the record as the most watched soccer match (men’s or women’s) in American history. One week after the match, tens of thousands of fans lined the streets of Manhattan for the first ticker tape parade held in honor of a women’s sports team in American history. Sports Illustrated issued 23 different commemorative covers of its magazine featuring all the members of the team holding the World Cup trophy in individual poses. While the 2015 Women’s World Cup reaffirmed the US as a dominant force in women’s soccer, the event proved a fairly dismal failure for the teams from the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Apart from Canada and the USA, no other team from the region advanced to the final eight of the tournament. Additionally, Brazil and Colombia were the only teams from Latin America or the Caribbean to make it out of the group stage, culminating in losses for both teams to Australia and the United States respectively. The teams from Costa Rica, Mexico, and Ecuador all failed to record
a single victory in the tournament, with the Ecuadorian team suffering the ignominy of exiting the tournament with a goal difference of one goal scored against 17 goals conceded. In a part of the world where women’s soccer suffers from a lack of funding and woeful support from their own soccer federations, the failure of the Latin American teams was predictable – but there is more to the story than first meets the eye. Though there continues to be some growth in the women’s game across northern and western Europe, Canada, East Asia, and Australia, the relative stagnation and underfunding of the women’s game throughout the rest of the Americas means the United States has very few regional rivals to challenge their hemispheric hegemony. The embarrassing performances by the teams of CONMEBOL (the South American Football Confederation) and CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football) at the 2015 World Cup illustrated just how far many of these programs have to go to even become competitive at international events. This chapter examines this clear discrepancy in the growth and quality of women’s soccer across the Western Hemisphere, examining the role the United States plays in engendering the growth of the women’s game within the region.3 Women’s soccer has a long history in Latin America, well predating the passage of Title IX in the United States. Nonetheless, it remains massively underdeveloped and underfunded in comparison to the men’s game, with much of the blame resting with national and local federations, which have historically viewed the women’s game with a mixture of indifference, sexism, and contempt (Nadal 2014). As such, aspiring women footballers from the Americas have left their home countries in large numbers to hone their craft at a higher level abroad – and many of them end up playing collegiately or professionally in the United States. The idea of leveraging the success of the women’s game in the US to grow women’s soccer across the region is a major talking point for FIFA Administrators and general advocates of the women’s game in the US. In a purely sporting sense, it would certainly be in the best interest of US women’s soccer to have strong competition regionally. From a purely nationalist sporting perspective, a stronger region would actually benefit US women’s soccer in the long run. Their games against stronger regional rivals would theoretically produce more seasoned and confident US women’s teams, placing them at an even stronger position during World Cup and Olympic events. Additionally, US collegiate and professional teams could benefit from an additional pool of stronger international players, some of whom would most likely come from soccer-crazed Latin American countries with large minority populations in the United States. This has not happened, however, and this chapter asks why. Or, more specifically, why has the explosive and unparalleled growth of the women’s game in the US failed to ignite a similar dynamic movement for the vast majority their regional neighbors?
