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Next for Spain: The Gauntlet of Complaint

August 28, 2023 by

[Revised after the news broke re RFEF demanding Rubiales’s resignation]

When the head of their sport’s federation harasses them, what can national team players do? This is the question hanging over the sports world right now, because it should not take winning the World Cup for players’ grievances to be heard.

Luis Rubiales’s behavior on the biggest stage in women’s football has made all too clear not only the everyday sexism that shapes interactions between men and women in the game: it has made clear the sense of impunity that characterizes leadership in the sport and the gothicism of the architecture which maintains the sport’s patriarchal structure. Consider this: The RFEF (Spain’s federation) is made up of 140 members. 120 of those members are elected (the rest are ex-officio). This body includes the presidents of Spain’s 19 regional federations, elected members from clubs, players, referees and coaches. Of its 140 members, only 6 are women.

Women have never not played football, but women’s access to the game has a long history of suppression. The Franco regime banned women from the sport in late 1930s. Like players in other countries living under these prohibitions (e.g. England, Brazil), women continued to play underground. In the 1970s, a Spanish team played international tournaments although not while wearing the federation badge (learn more about this generation here). The first officially recognized national team in Spain was formed in 1980. There is, in other words, a history of women’s football in Spain and a large community of former athletes whom one might reasonably expect to be represented in the federation’s governance body. If only 6 of the federation’s 140 members are women, it is because after lifting the ban against women playing the game, men have worked for over forty years to maintain exclusive ownership over it. That work is not easy. It is requires constant vigilance.

“Little” kisses like the one imposed on Hermoso are part of that system. We see this in Rubiales’s behavior around that kiss—from his locker room joke presenting an Ibiza trip as a celebration of his marriage with Hermoso, to his dismissal of his critics as idiots, to his attempt to coerce Hermoso into appearing on camera beside him while he downplayed the significants of his behavior, to the federation’s false statement about how she felt, to his attempt to intimidate her by threatening to sue her for defamation, to his attempt to blame her for the kiss because she lifted him off his feet (something he had done to several other players on the podium), to his mention of her missed penalty in his Friday statement, to the framing of the entire crisis as a form of social assassination engineered by false feminists (that phrase is a right-wing dog whistle), to the outrageous statement posted on RFEF’s website casting Hermoso as a liar—you get just a taste of what ordinary women in the sport face when they say, “I didn’t like that.”

The week before the final, Jenni Hermoso was on the cover of MARCA: almost none of the women with discrimination and sexual harassment complaints against their federation officials have this kind of visibility. Yves Jean-Bart was removed from his leadership position in Haiti’s federation after accusations of sexual abuse were made against him by players. (See Laurent Dubois’s July article on this.) Victims and advocates have been fighting to get the case heard in Haiti’s criminal court system while Jean-Bart has used the administrative processes unique to sports to de-legitimize the complaints made against him. FIFA had banned him from football for life: the Court of Arbitration in Sports overturned that ban, and, in June 2023, FIFA lost its appeal of that decision. Jean-Bart is accused of molesting adult and youth players at the national team training camp. He wants to return as the federation’s president: this is one of the most upsetting, most demoralizing situations in soccer—fans of the women’s game would be right to have some kind of feelings about the way this story has been lost in the shadows. Is Spain looking at some version of that story?

Coverage of the Spanish team’s struggle makes frequent mention of the players excluded from the selection. The whole history of that team is populated by stories of this kind of exile—sometimes chosen by the player, and sometimes enacted as a form of retribution. Other teams in the tournament this year also have this shadow bench, including one of the tournament favorites, Colombia. Yoreli Rincón, one of Colombia’s strongest and most experienced players, has not been called up for the national team since 2018. The 29-year old player has been banished for taking a leadership role in spotlighting the injustices that players in that country endure. In a June article for Global Sports Matters, Brenda Elsey wrote about the situation of women working within Colombia’s federation: her essay tracks the way the complaints against abusers disappear into a gauntlet of committees—this is an important read for people who are wondering about the shape of the next chapter in this story.

Soccer’s governance structure is intentionally confusing. The more labyrinthine it is, the easier for those in charge to shirk responsibility. Whenever there’s mention of corruption and sexism in soccer, most people immediately jump to FIFA. However, FIFA is, at its heart, an assembly of sovereign national federations. Those national federations, like the Colombian Football Federation, oversee all aspects of soccer, including amateur and youth divisions, professional leagues, and national teams. Federation leaders oversee ticket sales, development money, hiring, and policy. Men and women players, coaches, and staff operate within the same structure.

To add to the confusion, the men who run different branches of football often hold positions in multiple governance bodies. For example, the president of the Colombian federation, Ramón Jesurún, simultaneously serves on the FIFA Executive Council and holds the position of Vice President and Chair of Finance for CONMEBOL (Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol), the regional governing body that lies between FIFA and South America’s national federations. When players have a complaint about their treatment by the Colombian federation, they could approach CONMEBOL or FIFA, but Jesurún wields influence in both those spaces. There isn’t a truly independent governance body to help players and staff when they have workplace complaints. (The Colombian Football Federation did not respond to requests for interviews regarding the allegations in this story.)

Officials like Jesurún further neutralize players’ complaints by portraying their relationship with athletes as personal rather than professional. When Jesurún says that he thinks of his national team players as his “daughters and others as my granddaughters,” he is portraying himself as a benevolent patriarch rather than a responsible public official.

Brenda Elsey, “Cafe con mala leche”

Elsey and I discuss this in a recent podcast. I also recommend reading Suzanne Wrack’s overview of one case against Colombia’s U17 coach, Didier Luna, which is part of the story Elsey covers. This is a case of quid-pro-quo harassment, in which a person demands sexual favors as a condition for their employment. According to the complainant in this case, he openly exploited her commitment to the national team in an attempt:

“I was sexually harassed by the manager as soon as I went into the job,” says Carolina Rozo, the former physiotherapist of Colombia Women Under‑17s. “It started with words. He would tell me I was very pretty and then he would try to take advantage of me when we were together at mealtimes and other places. Saying goodbye he would push himself against me very hard and whisper into my ear how much he liked me.

The tipping point for Rozo came in January 2018. “He came to the dining room where we were eating with a photograph of me,” she says. “He pointed at the photograph and said: ‘That’s the woman I want,’ and: ‘Be careful, because if you’re not careful I’ll kiss you.’ So I said to him: ‘Don’t you dare do that, we are just eating.’

That evening, when I was going to my bedroom, he was there, he met me on the way. He said he was being serious about wanting to have something with me, to be ‘his special friend’ and that he could bring me to great things in Colombian football. And then he pointed to the logo of the team on my chest and he said: ‘I want you to give me a piece of your heart.’

Suzanne Wrack, “Carolina Rozo: ‘It started with words. He would say I was very pretty.'”

So, so many people have stories like this. And those victims will tell you that this form of sexual extortion is a key feature in the sport’s toxic ecology.

Personally, I have been worried about where Spain’s story is headed. Today (Aug 28), the national prosecutor invited Hermoso to lodge a complaint against Rubiales. He has already received a number of complaints about the incident, but, according to El Pais, he is reluctant to move forward without her participation. If she files a complaint herself, however, what is it about? The kiss? Or everything Rubiales did afterwards?

How many of the RFEF 134 members who are not women are afraid that we might come for them?! How many of them see this as the kind of harassment for which you shouldn’t be fired? The fact that they have demanded his resignation feels like a miracle, as does the structural change they, after an emergency session, have promised.

It has been in Rubiales’s interest to turn this story into a question of consent. Every harassment victim, and especially women, enter into these scenes suffering from a credibility deficit. Within rape culture, the truth of an accusation will be turned into a mist. The common sense of rape culture is that the truth of sexual assault cannot be known, and/or that the man’s intentions were innocent. This is what Eve Sedgwick described as “the privilege of unknowing.”

The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape […] privilege at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education).

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

In general, criminal courts do not offer the kind of justice people are demanding when they declare “se acabó.” The criminal court system requires an isolated criminal event and a single perpetrator who can be punished. So much more is at stake with this struggle. Rubiales weaponized the federation against a player because she said she didn’t like the kiss gave her. That federation is not a machine: it is a large group of people. Even if the RFEF or EUFA or FIFA had excellent policy regarding accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination (and by all accounts, they don’t), that policy is only as good as the people who are charged with enforcing it. In a system that is this dominated by men and that is also this rife with corruption, you would have to be very naive to think that something like justice was right around the corner.

FIFA issued a 90-suspension against Rubiales, prohibiting him from working in football. They also issued a remarkable-for-them no contact order, prohibiting him from contacting Hermoso, her family, and her team. This is the first thing any organization around this fiasco has gotten right. When your institution gets wind of bullying, harassing behavior your first obligation is to do whatever you can to stop that bullying, abuse, and/or harassment. That they issued this no-contact order shows that they understand the problem is not about whether or not that kiss was consensual: they understand that Hermoso, her circle, and the whole team are being subjected to harassment. FIFA in issuing that no-contact order behaved as if his behavior was dangerous, and they were right to do so. Rubiales used his position to paint a target on Hermoso’s back. But how that order is enforced is a not obvious!

Under Rubiales, the Spanish federation asked UEFA to ban it—UEFA and FIFA both have rules that punish federations where they are manipulated by their national governments. This is a very hollow set of regulations unevenly applied, but that is a story for another day. In this case, RFEF tried to position the various investigations and explorations of disciplinary action mobilized this week as governmental interference. This is widely accepted as a last-ditch effort on the part of the federation to save Rubiales. Thankfully UEFA said no.

FIFA, UEFA, and the Spanish criminal court system will not set things right. That work falls squarely on the shoulders of players and their union, FUTPRO. In a statement made today, the union president Amanda Gutiérrez was explicit: “Measures must be taken so that we can improve the working conditions for our soccer players so that they are not subject to discrimination and we can put an end to the problems that we have been having for so many years.” This will require “structural change.” The union positions what happened to Hermoso in perspective—complaints filed against the manager of Alhama, a club in Spain’s top league, led to an investigation which found that 68% of the club had experienced harassment and yet “the club has done absolutely nothing.” (For more, read this.)

With the federation’s call for Rubiales’s resignation, they show that they are, for the moment, following the players’ lead. Too much is on the line: Spain has been aiming to host the men’s World Cup in 2030, and to do that, now, thanks to the women who play in Spain, the federation will have to clean house.

Meanwhile, Rubiales’s mother has retreated into a church where she is threatening a hunger strike. A bizarre reminder if ever we needed one that women also buy into the patriarchy’s empty promises, and this rarely serves them well.

Filed Under: 2023 Women's World Cup, Football, Politics, Sex Politics, Sexism, soccer Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Furias Rojas (Updated)

August 23, 2023 by

I published an op-ed with the LA Times about the Luis Rubiales fiasco. Here, some of the things that I couldn’t cram into 700 words.

Editors gave my piece the headline “Rubiales Must Resign.” Were I writing headlines, I might opt for “Rubiales must go,” or, “Fire Rubiales.”

Last week, surprising reports by Spanish sports outlets gave us almost a whole day of thinking he might step down from his position as the president of the RFEF, Spain’s federation. This was, we thought, the reason for the federation’s August 25 emergency session. Bullies like him do not resign, however. A man like him responds to criticism with howls of injury. He scans interactions for signs of betrayal. His world is one of friends and enemies, with the former always on the edge of becoming the latter.

From the moment the team won, his behavior has been awful. His first instinct, at the referee whistle announcing the team’s historic victory, was to wave his balls at his critics. This is not offensive because he was standing next to members of Spain’s royal family. This is offensive because it shows the world the posture he has taken toward the people in the game who have been demanding that the federation do better. It shows a profound disrespect for the accomplishments of the women on the field, and the women off of it. And it shows how little he cares about the team’s fans.

In the hours after the win, he tried to make this team’s victory his. On the award platform, he asserted a special relationship to players—physically laying claim to them in his body language. He didn’t just hug them, he nuzzled their necks and kissed them. He lifted a number of players off their feet—that is a particularly loaded piece of bodily interaction. More on that in a second. He acted like he and the players were all old friends, or like a drunk uncle at a family picnic. His behavior towards Hermoso felt extra weird: for me, it was the way he grabbed her head. Soon we saw locker room video of her expressing disgust at the kiss, and another video of him promising the team a free trip to Ibiza, to celebrate his impending marriage to Hermoso.

Pressured into recording a video apology, he tried to coerce Hermoso and the team’s captain into being his alibis. When that didn’t work, the federation issued a statement that put his words in Hermoso’s mouth — this amplifies the violation of the way he kissed her. She told people to talk to her union, and eventually had to come out and say how all this felt for her. It made her feel vulnerable, and it made her into a victim. For this alone, we all have a right to be furious.

On Friday, Rubiales gathered as many members of the federation and coaching staff as could be found. Only a handful of the members of the Spanish federation are women, so they had to work to find women to populate this this spectacle. Jorge Vilda’s coaching staff were in the room, and the women who work under him were made to sit in the front row.

Rubiales’s discourse has been disturbing. In his empty apology he suggested one could “both sides” the incident (“there was no bad faith from either side”). His behavior was “natural,” “normal.” He claimed that he and Hermoso had a special relationship. His speech on Friday was a naked display of toxic and wounded narcissism. Here I get to the reason I am writing today.

Rubiales argued that the kiss was consensual. He anchored that argument in the fact that when Hermoso stopped in front of him, as was expected of her, she did something unusual. She lifted him off his feet. Rubiales had done this to three or four people before his interaction with Hermoso—with players who are shorter than him. On Friday, he argued that this made the kiss consensual. The federation then went (as one fan put it) “full Zapruder film” and posted screenshots which somehow make this argument.

Clearly, all this demonstrates is that Hermoso made him feel small, and so he needed to do something about it. So, in the press conference, he reminds everyone that in the final Hermoso’s penalty kick was saved by Mary Earps. He claims that he told her she could forget about it—but forgetting about it is clearly not what he wants us to do. He wants us to think about her as a weak player, and the team’s victory as having been achieved in spite of her. He then said he asked for a little kiss and claims she said yes.

Even if everything he said about this interaction is true (and we have ever so many reasons to characterize his narrative as gaslighting) it is the very definition of a coercive scenario. Players in that situation can’t just push him away from them. If they refuse to shake his hand, or dodge the hug, it’s a massive scandal and all along even the players on the front line of the struggle have done everything they could to keep everyone’s eyes on the game.

He demonstrated that he understands the coerciveness of the public spectacle in the way he used cameras to manipulate women on Vilda’s coaching staff into appearing to support him. You can see a couple women move their hands almost as if they were clapping during the event, while either appearing demoralized or as if they might explode in anger. Those women resigned shortly afterwards and published a statement giving the full breakdown of his dishonest and manipulative behavior.

I have so much more to say and will keep writing here.

Filed Under: 2023 Women's World Cup, FIFA, Sex Politics, Sexism Tagged With: , , ,

Policing Women’s Sports Does Not Protect Women’s Sports

March 23, 2023 by

The World Athletics Council just barred trans women from competition if they transitioned after puberty — mind you, in much of the country, it isn’t as if transitioning as a teen is an option! They’ve also declared that all athletes with “a difference in sex development [will] be barred from competing internationally in all events unless they reduced their testosterone to 2.5 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a minimum of six months.” This feels quite specifically aimed at Caster Semenya, who, under the previous regulations was barred from running her preferred events (e.g. 800m). She had been allowed to compete in the 5000m. No more, however.

I’m reposting, reframing some paragraphs from a 2016 article I shared here—even then I was exhausted by the fascist obsession with women athletes who are “not really women” but are, it seems, always black. The men running this sport (track & field) just cannot let the idea of Caster Semenya go—Semenya, by the way, as great as an athlete as she is, is not the super dominant Godzilla storming through women’s sports with some freakish advantage that leads to the total destruction of all world records in her events. She’s just one of the best athletes out there.

Let me make it clear, for those of you who have been sleeping on this for the past 15 years.

Trans women are women and have competed in women’s sports for DECADES. And it’s been fine!

Some women have above average testosterone levels. This doesn’t make them not women. This is not an unnatural advantage. It is literally their bodies. Even if it gave people an advantage, and much research refutes that claim, that should be OK. The best athletes have advantages! And it’s never reducible to a single feature of their physiognomy. That is just not how it works and frankly anyone with even basic awareness of sports gets this.

These rules impact all athletes who can, through these regulations, be subject to truly invasive gender policing—e.g. medical examination, by which I mean pelvic exams. This can be forced on an athlete by sporting officials, shitty parents, abusive and homophobic coaches. Anyone with short hair, delayed puberty, facial hair (not uncommon for girls and women), broad shoulders, flat chests or just plan swagger can cause gender panic. Lots of people decide NOT to play sports because they consider this kind of social ecology murderous. They are not wrong.

This end-of-women’s-sports fantasy imposes on women’s sports a surprising fragility given that almost every women’s sport we can think of has survived being actively suppressed by men with arbitrary regulations and outright bans (limiting, for example, women’s tennis matches to three sets instead of five; barring women from marathons, virtually outlawing women’s soccer).

Women’s sports will not disappear because women with different hormones and gender presentation are allowed to compete against each other. PERIOD. Pun intended. If I weren’t menopausal I would write this in my own menstrual blood.

Women’s sports is not a “protected category.” It is, instead, the category that takes the most beatings.

Athletes compete as women by virtue of the alignment of their identity (as they perceive it, as others perceive it) with this already-existing category of gender. That alignment is not stable; it is a site of constant negotiation. And it is compulsory. We do not have women’s sports because women need to be protected from men. We have women sports because the world has women athletes. We also have women’s sports because gender difference is such a powerful, defining aspect of our experience of being in a body that we enjoy – as athletes and as spectators — the spectacle of gendered subjects in competition with each other as gendered subjects.

That enjoyment is NOT biological. It’s political.

Quite a few of us, furthermore, also enjoy direct physical competition across gender and know to our bones that women must be allowed to lose to men in order to win against them. And so when it comes to mixed-gender competition, there are a lot of us out here who say: bring it on.

IAAF regulations police gender in more way than via “sex hormones” (which, by the way, is not a biological category). IAAF stigmatizes the speed of women racing against men by moving marathon records set by women into a special category when those records are set in races in which women have run alongside men. The fastest marathon run by a woman is the fastest marathon run by a woman whether or not she is running alongside men. People run faster when they run with faster people. And to create the weird sense that women, as a category, are slower than men as a category, we have to minimize our awareness of the fact that, in fact, girls and women excel in a wide range of context when allowed to go toe to toe with male wrestlers, runners, soccer players, basketball players. Protecting women from direct physical competition against men holds women back. (Lindsey Vonn, the downhill skier, has bumped up against even more intense rules whose explicit aim is to slow women down. Men’s and women’s courses are mapped out differently, women’s courses are designed to be slower. When Vonn petitioned to race against men, she was petitioning to be allowed to race the same course as men — in order to achieve faster times. That petition was denied.) The practice of making women ski a slower course, or run only alongside other women do nothing other than slow women down — these other rules attempt to root out from women all traces of their own masculinity in order to shore up a sense of absolute gender difference.

Women’s sports is not a defensive structure from which men are excluded so that women might flourish. It is, in fact, the opposite of this: it is, potentially, a radically inclusive space which has the capacity to destroy the public’s ideas about gender and gender difference precisely because gender is always in play in women’s sports in ways that it is not in men’s sports (with a few exceptions — e.g. figure skating). Because men have been so committed to the “end of women’s sports” for so long, women’s sports thrives in the zone of destruction. It has its own character thanks to the gender trouble at its origin. If women’s sports has one job that really is different from men’s sports, it is the destruction of sex/gender difference. Men’s sports (again with a few exceptions which prove the rule) reinforce ideologies of gender difference. Women’s sports destroy them. Magic happens when the difference between men’s and women’s sports crumbles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Grant Wahl’s Utopianism

December 11, 2022 by

In 2011, Grant Wahl announced his intention to run for President of FIFA. His platform included the introduction of term-limits for FIFA officials, hiring the best referees for the World Cup and requiring them to explain controversial calls, ending the use of yellow cards for stupid things like removing shirts in goal celebrations, and the dismantling of the system which effectively excluded women from FIFA leadership. It’s worth reading Grant’s take on his “half-serious, half-satire” campaign and watching his campaign ad: “There’s a cure for FIFA’s Blatter infection!“

The prescience of this interventionist project is hard to appreciate. He promised to appoint a woman as FIFA’s General Secretary, its most powerful position. The role is now served by Fatma Samoura, appointed in 2016. He advocated for the introduction of goal-line technology and instant replay. We now have a new sports writing sub-genre: complaints about VAR. He promised a “wikileaks”-level release of FIFA’s records which would allow the organization to being to reckon with the rot within its structure and culture. Football leaks, a massive data dump exposing the scale of corruption in the sport, launched in 2015. In recent years, FIFA has been the subject of sustained forms of scrutiny and global reflection on the question of what accountability and change might be for an organization this incestuous, this rotten.

At the time, however, for a candidate to advance to the election, FIFA required the official endorsement of just one of its 208 football association: not one would take the risk of alienating themselves from the affections of the men who run the organization. The action of soliciting a nomination from the 150 FAs that Grant selected as the “least corrupt” in FIFA’s system made visible the shamefulness of FIFA’s so-called democratic process. Without a nomination, his candidacy was stopped before anyone had a chance to vote for him. Sepp Blatter ran unopposed.

Today FIFA requires the endorsement of five FAs, a change attributed to Wahl’s action and one designed to make interventions like his less feasible. But in the wake of his candidacy, Grant wrote, “ordinary fans in countries around the world talked a little bit more about the absurdities of Fifa’s electoral process.”

This is a good moment to reflect on what FIFA might have been under Grant’s leadership, and on the importance of journalism to the project of wrestling this sport away from the hyper-exploitative systems we’ve been tricked into thinking of as inevitable and insurmountable.

Truth tellers with utopian impulses are to be cherished. We saw a little of this side of Grant in the photo he shared of himself in a rainbow shirt when he was stopped from entering the stadium near the start of the tournament. He was eventually allowed to proceed to his seat in the press zone; reporting of his death often includes a photo of Grant in that shirt sitting at a desk, writing. He of course knew he was likely to be stopped, and I am sure he understood the action as pure symbol. But in a week marked by a mass shooting at yet another LGBTQ bar, in a season shadowed by the violent repression of young revolutionaries in soccer-mad Iran and the question of how one honors them at the tournament when the team is used ruthlessly by the country’s dictatorship as if their wins could wash away its sins, at a time when anti-trans hate has been perfectly fused into fascism’s psychosis, Grant’s gesture of solidarity from inside the machine mattered. It was a signal for those of us watching the game and feeling driven to the edge of madness by the gaslight—it was a way of letting us know that there are allies in the press who are also struggling with the structure and with the moment.

I don’t know how he managed to balance his love for the sport with his awareness of the awfulness of the organizations which manage it—I’m in constant awe of the people who write about this day-in, day-out. He clearly understood the importance and the value of that work himself: he was a constant ally and champion of feminist, queer, and anti-racist sports writing. He often let us know when, in our own work, we hit the nail on the head, and via his social media platform he amplified our voices. He read our work.

Great sports writers make you feel the passions invoked by the subject, and, often in equal measure, the frustration and outrage we feel when our love is exploited and betrayed. This has been especially true of Grant’s writing about this World Cup, the enjoyment of which is shadowed and corrupted not only by the ruthlessness of Qatar’s development practice but by the resonance of that practice with those of FIFA itself. Those of us struggling to manage our relationship to this tournament are responding not only to the present, but to decades of the abuse of our love for the sport and for the people who play it. We have really and truly had enough and want a different FIFA, maybe even something that isn’t FIFA at all.

The very deep grief so many of us feel at the news of Grant’s death is tied to the forms of grievance that Grant helped us to name, even as he wrote the story of our love for this game.

Note. There are many sharing their affection and respect for Grant. Although I’m using his name like he was a personal friend, I only met him IRL a few times. There are so many people out there who collaborated with him, worked alongside him, and really knew him and who are writing their grief and sharing stories. Richard Deitsch included a beautiful list on The Athletic as an addendum to the moving sketch of his own sense of loss. If you are feeling sad, I encourage leaning into this community of people who are sitting down at their desks and honoring his memory by giving our love and our grief a shape we can share.

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Attendance Record for Women’s Football! [whispers] was set in 1971

May 30, 2022 by

On March 30, in a new take on El Clasico, Barcelona’s women’s team beat Real Madrid. These two teams had played each other before, but never in Camp Nou. Women’s games are normally scheduled in stadiums used as training facilities for the men. Even big games, like Champions League matches, have been scheduled in smaller stadiums tucked out of the view of all but the most ardent fans. Fans, encouraged by a good promotional effort from the club, packed Camp Nou to watch their team clean Real Madrid’s clock. And when the game was over, fans stayed and sang to the team. That’s when I cried.

The club celebrated the win and quickly posted on Twitter that its crowd of 91,553 was the largest ever gathered for a women’s soccer match. I went from tears of joy to eye-roll, and then side-eye and then furrowed brows. Barcelona drew an even larger crowd for its next Champions League match; this story of record setting attendance figures at Camp Nou gained steam. It is now treated as a given, as fact. But it’s actually not true.

As numbers of news articles and television programs have detailed in recent years, Mexico hosted an international tournament in 1971. Tens of thousands of people turned up for those games: you can see the figures for those matches here, on a website maintained by sports statisticians. Two early matches featuring the home team drew 90,000; another, 80,000; the final was attended by 110,000.

In 2018, the BBC posted this lovely article about the history of that tournament. In 2019, the Guardian cited this tournament’s final as one of the most important moments in women’s football. There are quite well-research stories about this tournament out there.

Why, then, is this not mentioned in reporting on the fantastic turn-out for the women’s game this year? There is a really shitty answer for that. Those 1971 matches were not organized by FIFA. The tournament is thus regularly framed as an “unofficial” World Cup, as if the fact that it was not organized by FIFA means that it was not an actual, real, authentic football tournament. FIFA and UEFA enable this, along with news media which defers to the posture adopted by these governing bodies when they are confronted with the history of the women’s game. The history of women’s football does not belong to these organizations. In the early 1970s, FIFA and its partner organizations weren’t just uninterested in the women’s game—they actively worked to hobble it. How much that is true is not focus of this post, but let me just point out that FIFA hosted its first convention for the women’s game in 2019. (When they returned from that 1971 tournament, English players were punished by the FA with a ban; the manager who brought them was banned from the game, for life.)

We have over twenty years of World Cup and Olympic tournaments documenting the scale of interest in the women’s game: these attendance and audience statistics indicate that when the game is accessible, people show up. When it is not, people don’t. We have a hundred years of women’s football history manifesting that truth for us in so many different ways.

FIFA wants you to think that until they got involved with the game, there was nothing. That’s just a lie and its shameful to see a club participate in this gaslighting.

The history of people showing up for women’s sports is not one of slow development from primordial nothing! The people who went that 1971 match are real, actual football fans who showed up for a football match. That match was broadcast on television, covered by newspapers and was part of a series of international tournaments. Fans actually showed for — gasp — quarterfinals! Semis! Group matches! These matches are remembered, discussed, and cherished by the people who witnessed them. That tournament is a real, authentic, true part of the history of the game in Mexico, and one nice context for understanding impressive attendance figures for the still-young Liga MX Feminil (founded in 2017). If we weave 1971’s figures into list of records for attendance at women’s football matches we get something like this (WoSo stat nerds: I am very happy to correct):

  • 1971 110,000 Final Campeonato Mundial de Fútbol Femenil, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, MX | Mexico – Denmark
  • 2022 91,648 UEFA Champions League semifinal at Camp Nou in Barcelona, SP | Barcelona – Wolfsburg
  • 2022 91,553 UEFA Champions League quarterfinal at Camp Nou, Barcelona, Spain | Barcelona – Real Madrid
  • 1999 90,185 World Cup Final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA | USA – China
  • 1971 90,000 Group A Final Campeonato Mundial de Fútbol Femenil, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, MX | Mexico – Argentina
  • 1971 90,000 Group A Final Campeonato Mundial de Fútbol Femenil, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, MX | Mexico – England
  • 2012 80,203 Olympics Final at Wembley in London, UK | USA – Japan
  • 1971 80,000 Semifinal Campeonato Mundial de Fútbol Femenil, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, MX | Mexico – Italy
  • 2019 77,768 International Friendly at Wembley, London, UK | England – Germany
  • 1996 76,481 Olympics final, Sanford Stadium, Athens, Georgia | USA – China
  • 2016 70,454 Olympics semifinal, Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, BR | Brazil – Sweden
  • 1996 64,196 Olympics semifinal, Sanford Stadium, Athens, Georgia | Norway – USA
  • 2019 60,739 Copa de la Reina Semifinal, Wanda Metropolitano, Madrid, SP | Atlético Madrid – Barcelona

Anyone following the women’s game knows that very large numbers are possible for every world cup final, if women’s world cup finals are scheduled into the largest stadiums and properly marketed. Stade de France holds 20,000 more people than Groupama, which hosted the 2019 final. The 2011 final was held in Frankfurt; that stadium was at capacity at 48,817. There are nine stadiums in Germany with larger capacities. FIFA has a terrible history of treating the women’s game as an obligation, of neglecting the women’s game in its thinking, and undervaluing the World Cup tournament itself.

There are a lot of reasons to keep our own records and insist on the integrity of our own history. One might argue that FIFA’s interest in the women’s game is motivated primarily by the desire to ward off the emergence of alternative governing structures that grow around the spaces it neglects—organizations like that which staged the tournament in Mexico in 1971. Michele Krech makes this suggestion in a terrific essay on the contradictions between Fifa’s stated intentions and its material practice:

Given FIFA’s only very recent (and tentative) embrace of women’s football, we are early in the process of witnessing the extent to which a new phase of football, under the auspices of FIFA, “offers women discursive tools to oppose oppressive power relations” or rather “enmeshes them in normalizing discourses that limit their vision of who and what they can be.” We must therefore pay close attention to how this tension plays out in the implementation of FIFA’s Women’s Football Strategy and other initiatives purported to advance gender equality. Using girls and women to grow the game will be anti-feminist if it simply brings more of them into a sport premised on masculine (and other intersecting forms of) superiority and dominance. While women’s participation challenges this premise, overturning it will require active cooperation from those who have long dominated FIFA football.

Michele Krech, “Fifa for women or women for Fifa?: The inherent tensions in Fifa’s women’s football strategy”

What we are seeing now is what happens when you give the women’s game just a piece of what the men’s game gets in terms of stadiums, and media attention. It is important to understand that in the actualization of that potential we experience a version of the game that challenges what FIFA and its structures continue to think about not just the women’s game, but the sport.

FIFA wants you to think that the history of the women’s game begins in 1971, with a match played between France and the Netherlands, attended by 1,500 people. UEFA, FAs, clubs want you to think there was nothing until they got involved. They want you to forget the history of the women’s game because the culture of their organizations is threatened by a history which suggests that other organizations and networks are capable of putting on successful tournaments and stewarding the game.

Returning to Barcelona: I cried when when fans sang to their team not because I never thought it was possible to have a full Camp Nou for a women’s match, I cried because I’ve known for so long that it was. It is really, really hard, I think, to communicate that feeling to people who haven’t shared it.

In sum: it’s important to remember that 110,000 audience record, set by fans in Mexico City in 1971, as the actual standing record for the largest-ever audience. When we forget them, we contribute to the erasure of generations of fans who have been here for this game all along and we let the gentlemen of FIFA, UEFA, and our FAs off the hook for what they did and do to the women’s game when they think no one is watching.

Filed Under: Football, History, Sexism, soccer

Jaime Lauriano: morte súbita (2014)

October 20, 2021 by

morte súbita from Jaime Lauriano on Vimeo.

from the artist’s vimeo page:

direção (director) jaime lauriano
direção de fotografia e câmera (cinematography) cassio luiz rothschild
edição e finalização (film editing) onze corujas

The Brazilian team which won the 1970 World Cup is considered by many to be the greatest of all time. In a spectacle transmitted, live, for the first time for the Brazilian people through television, this achievement was transformed into a heroic feat. With strong media coverage then, the Brazilian team’s victory in 1970 was used as a propaganda tool for the Brazilian military regime.

“Morte Subita (Death Sudden)” consists of a projection with people covering their faces with shirts of the Brazilian Soccer Team. In the background, listen to an audio that mixes sounds of football stadiums (shouts, clapping, fireworks) with sounds of protests and street demonstrations (bombs, shots, shouts, etc); as the camera tracks these people, we hear a sports announcer recite the names of dead and disappeared politicians in the year 1970, the hardest year of the Brazilian military dictatorship.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Sexism, Corruption, Sports (a brief note)

September 30, 2021 by

If you have yet to read Meg Linehan’s story about NWSL coach Paul Riley, you should read it now. And if you aren’t following the story about sexual abuse within Haiti’s national women’s team program, you should catch up. Not a women’s sports fan and think sexual abuse is just a women’s issue? You will want to read this, or this, or this, or this.

Struggling to understand why sexual abuse is such a strong feature of organized sports?

Patriarchy is a specific form of corruption: men only dominate by virtue of theft and betrayal. They only occupy positions of power and authority by working hard to undermine and destroy people whose competency and talent challenge their sense of entitlement. In patriarchal structures, sex operates as a vector for the accumulation of power, and wealth. One feels entitled to the bodies of one’s subordinates. And a whole sexual culture — white, heterosexist, patriarchal, homophobic, cis, binary — normalizes this association of power with sexual access.

Women, gay men, trans men and women, non-binary and genderqueer people in these systems become targets because they, in essence, are sex. Territory to be colonized. Sexualized forms of hazing and sexual abuse of men and boys within patriarchal, straight homosocial spaces operate as a means for expressing and consolidating power—you become implicated in a set of “crimes”—if you speak of it, you exit the scene.

In systems like this, that sexualized performance of abusive authority is treated as a form of competency—even professional achievement.

A few years back, I remember sitting in a meeting with men in charge at my campus. We were talking about some issues related to sexual harassment charges. In some of the cases we were talking about, women had been bad actors—enablers, mainly. Ironic, isn’t it, someone said. No, I replied. In these corrupt systems, the only women allowed close to that form of power are those who collaborate with it. Either by operating as an abuser’s enabler, or as an alibi — “I haven’t had any problems, so my example demonstrates that there is no problem.” Usually, those women end up under the bus.

As Brenda Elsey and I have argued, this shit sits on a continuum with the profound corruption that rots this sport from the inside out. Professional sports does not have to be like this—it really and truly doesn’t. The people running the game will have you thinking that the “ironies” of the system are key to its pleasures and its profits. This is flat out bullshit. OK. I am going to go punch something.

Filed Under: Sexism, soccer, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Carolee Schneemann, Kitch (figure skater)

May 26, 2021 by

Artist’s postcard (photo from auction). See also Ice Skating Naked.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Khaled Jarrar: Concrete

May 23, 2021 by
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Marcin Dudek: The Lure of the Arena

April 27, 2021 by

The Lure of the Arena, 2019 — a bit of football art, to recall the thing I know many of us can’t wait to get back to. Sitting in the stands together. Art historian and fantastic thinker of sports-art Przemyslaw Strozek wrote to me about Marcin Dudek a few years ago. Dudek tends to work with the situation of the fan/spectator, and has done some really provocative work exploring the relationship between sports, art and violence. Click on that first link for a slide show & text about Lure. I love this artist’s work, and find myself turning to it on a day when I’m planning to see some of the guys I used to play with.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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