In 2024, ladies’s soccer has change into a worldwide phenomenon. Curiosity within the sport grows year-on-year each within the UK and on a worldwide foundation. The final FIFA Girls’s World Cup in 2023 was essentially the most attended in historical past, with a prize pool of $110million.
Girls’s soccer in brief is now large enterprise. The game has come an unbelievable means from being a primarily newbie pursuit on the flip of the millennium. But it surely hasn’t been plain crusing.
With that in thoughts, mirror upon a few of the largest controversies thus far in ladies’s soccer. Now we have as an alternative singled out three incidents that spotlight the challenges ladies’s soccer has confronted, each previous and current.
It could be remiss to not point out a choice that set the ladies’s sport again a long time.
Within the late 1910s, ladies’s soccer was booming. With males preventing away within the First World Conflict, ladies have been referred to as upon to do manufacturing facility jobs. Official office sports activities have been inspired to enhance well being and productiveness.
Quick ahead to Boxing Day 1920 and a exceptional crowd of 53,000 at Everton’s Goodison Park floor watch Dick Kerr Women play St Helen’s Women, with the recognition of the sport persevering with to strengthen after the battle.
So how did the FA capitalise on this curiosity within the sport? By subsequently successfully banning the game, in fact.
On 5 December 1921, the Soccer Affiliation banned ladies from taking part in on FA-affiliated pitches. With no official place to play, the sport successfully went into exile. The governing physique on the time stated “the sport of soccer is sort of unsuitable for females and ought to not be inspired.”
Partially motivated by inaccurate theories which contended taking part in the game threatened ladies’s well being and morality, gamers have been unable to construct on their early progress.
It wasn’t till 1971 that the ban was lastly lifted by the FA after the formation of the Girls’s Soccer Affiliation just a few years earlier than, a bunch shaped after additional curiosity following the 1966 males’s World Cup. However for 50 years the sport in England – the birthplace of affiliation soccer – was placed on maintain.
Whereas the boys’s sport had half a century {of professional} growth, ladies weren’t formally in a position to play. It is a determination that appears extra scandalous with every passing yr. An apology from the FA would belatedly comply with in 2008, with the ladies’s sport nonetheless making up the misplaced floor to at the present time.
The USA nationwide workforce equal pay declare
Whereas so many international locations – together with England – ignored or actively restricted ladies taking part in soccer, America led the best way. The US have been the primary nation to have a totally skilled league, initially launched in 2001, and had a nationwide workforce the envy of the world.
Their profitable internet hosting of the 1999 FIFA Girls’s World Cup (which they received in dramatic trend) is seen by many as a ‘yr zero’ for contemporary ladies’s soccer. Primarily, the USA’s strategy to the sport has paved the best way for different international locations, providing a blueprint on how ladies’s soccer ought to look.
Within the 2010s their domination was on one other stage. The USA reached three World Cup finals – profitable two. After profitable in France in 2019 questions have been raised over whether or not the ladies’s nationwide workforce ought to be paid a minimum of the identical as their (far much less profitable) male counterparts.
A bid for equal pay from the USWNT adopted, with 28 participant submitting towards the US Soccer Federation (USSF) and in search of $66m (£52.8m) in damages beneath the Equal Pay Act.
The controversy went on with the Federation providing the boys’s and girls’s sides equivalent contracts, initially rejected by the USWNT. Nevertheless, in June 2022 an settlement between the 2 sides was lastly reached.
The deal signifies that USA feminine gamers will obtain $24m (£17.7m) and US Soccer has pledged equal pay for the boys’s and girls’s groups throughout all competitions, together with the World Cup. Though ultimately resolved, the episode successfully highlighted how – even in nations which are supposedly ‘doing ladies’s soccer proper’ – the perfect gamers can nonetheless be massively undervalued.
The equal pay decision additionally got here at a time when many within the American sport have been solely simply studying about plenty of sexual harassment circumstances within the nation’s home league, the NWSL. One other reminder that though the ladies’s sport has moved at tempo on the opposite facet of the Atlantic, there’s nonetheless a lot work to do.
The Luis Rubiales case
This story of this infamous incident has been properly scrutinised and even over a yr after it first passed off, it nonetheless feels surreal.
Spain had simply overwhelmed the Lionesses 1-0 to change into World Champions for the primary time ever. They have been worthy winners, not simply within the remaining however the entire match. That ought to have been all the story.
As a substitute, it was overshadowed by the actions of Luis Rubiales. The President of the Royal Spanish Soccer Federation kissing Jenni Hermoso in the course of the medal ceremony, and because the world watched on witnessing his totally inappropriate behaviour.
Slightly than settle for his wrongdoing and resign instantly, within the following days Rubiales made a weird speech doubling down on his behaviour on the remaining – which additionally included a not so refined crotch seize within the authorities’ field.
The one optimistic to take from the episode was the widespread condemnation of Rubiales behaviour from all corners of the globe.
The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez referred to as Rubiales’ behaviour unacceptable and stated there “was nonetheless a great distance for equality.” 81 Spanish gamers signed a press release saying they wouldn’t play for the nationwide workforce till their was change in management, whereas 21 groups from throughout the nation referred to as for Rubiales to resign.
Rubiales lastly fell on his sword on September 10, giving a wierd interview to Piers Morgan (who else) wherein he confirmed his resignation not solely as president, but in addition from his function at UEFA.
FIFA later introduced Rubiales was banned from football-related actions for 3 years, whereas he later had his home raided as a part of a corruption investigation.