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A Game of Two Halves

April 28, 2024 by

[Slowly starting up my football writing practice. Sorry I sat on this a couple days, in general I’ll try to post within a day or two of games I watch.]

A part of me knew the game would end this way. Kansas is playing barn storming, take-no-prisoners attacking football. In their last three home games, they have scored a lot of goals (5, twice; 4 in a game against us). But their opponents are getting their cuts in (Portland, 4; us, 2; Bay, 2). Questions about their defense have been drowned out by goal differentials.

Nevertheless, we won the first half. Their attack was smothered by Jasmine Spencer, Megan Reid, and Sarah Gordon. Rocky Rodríguez and Madison Hammond played their opponents right out of their socks. Alyssa Thompson was phenomenal. There was so much give and go — Claire Emslie’s goal felt like the manifestation of the team’s collective will.  

We all knew, however, Kansas was going to come out of half time with a fire in the belly. And subs. One scary player after another stepped onto the field: to name just three: Lavogez, Debinha, Labonta. And sure enough, we were put on the backfoot. Our game became glitchy—the passing game was slowly unglued. We were defending, defending, defending. When the ball broke through, our attack looked sticky. For the most part, our defenders worked magic against very creative and unrelenting attack but Kansas is so good — you can’t give them the tiniest inch of possibility. Basically, they broke us down. So, we lost.

Still, this was one of those games were the football was so good you just couldn’t leave the stadium demoralized. That game offered lots of nasty fun. It made me miss playing.

For a few minutes, I stopped thinking about the Zionists in the ownership group.

By anti-Semitism here, Alexis Ohanian means the national movement on U.S. campuses demanding an end to the arming of Israel’s genocidal campaign to wipe Palestine—by which we mean Palestinians—off the map. Here he equates the call for Palestinian liberation (“from the river to the sea…”) with the chants shouted by the white supremacists at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. If he hears a genocidal call in “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” it is because he has allowed Zionists to naturalize the association of Jewish life with Palestinian death. I’m sickened by the idea that ACFC’s ownership puts their shoulder to the Zionist project.

But there I was, in my excellent seat at a stadium named after first one bank and then another, rooting for the players on the field (I love them!)—my spirits alternately crushed by the weight of this moment, and lifted by the Palestine flags waving in the middle of the supporters’ section.

Filed Under: ACFC, Football, soccer

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: , , , , , ,

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

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: ,

The Voices in Her Head

June 26, 2019 by

Screen Shot 2019-06-26 at 2.41.10 PM

[Revised*]

On March 15 of this year, FIFA approved the use of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) in the Women’s World Cup. This is, in general, a good thing. VAR was used in last year’s men’s tournament without too much trouble. But the implementation of VAR in the Women’s World Cup has not gone very well at all. Today, Pierluigi Collina, the chair of FIFA’s referee committee, hosted a press conference and reviewed this tournament’s refereeing statistics and fielded questions — if you are down for 90 minutes of VAR spin, you can watch it here. The questions (which start about an hour in) were pretty hard hitting and the panel dodged them – one gentleman, for example, asked why Asian, African and South American teams have seemed more vulnerable to VAR decisions than European teams. He was told to read the rulebook.

Like many people watching this tournament, I’ve been wondering why the VAR use has been so particularly awful. Luis Paez-Pumar, writing for Deadspin, provides an excellent overview of the misery caused by the combination of the last minute institution of new rules of the game, the amplified power of VARs, and FIFA’s general contempt for the women’s game. He writes:

FIFA listened (belatedly) to calls for VAR at the World Cup, and it gave its unprepared referees the unwanted responsibility of properly implementing new rules that were only made official six days before the first game of the tournament. These changes were made under the name of equality, but it’s hard to imagine FIFA implementing similarly dramatic changes so haphazardly coming into a men’s World Cup. FIFA set its referees up to fail at the Women’s World Cup, all in the name of technology no one fully understands and rules no one particularly likes

I have something to add to the running list of shitty FIFA things informing this situation. Every one of the 15 people initially listed as working this tournament as a Video Assistant Referee is a man and not one (as far as I can tell) has a history of working in women’s football.* (By the way, the latter may mean they don’t have much of a history of working with women, in general.)

Screen Shot 2019-06-26 at 2.48.16 PM

Before I dive in, let me be clear: I do not think that having women leading the VAR Room will necessarily fix things. What I do think is this: the fact that the VAR list did not include women or people with experience refereeing women’s matches is symptomatic of the sexist rot which plagues FIFA’s involvement in the women’s game. [Women are working in the VAR room as Assistant Video Assistant Referees: one woman per match team.]

There is a reason why those fifteen VARs are men and why they do not have experience officiating at the highest levels of the women’s game. This is the outcome of FIFA’s practice of maintaining separate referee lists for men’s and women’s football. It was not always this way. In a 2002 post on FIFA’s website, Sonia Denoncourt (the former head of referee development) explains:

In 1994, FIFA took the unprecedented step of appointing the first four female assistant referees in the world. These women were included in the universal (read: male) list. In 1995, FIFA followed this up with significant changes for women referees and assistant referees, by introducing FIFA’s first ever list of women referees just in time for the Women’s World Cup in Sweden.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for the conversations in which FIFA administrators debated the benefits of a universal (meaning all-gender) referee list! Denoncourt’s brief article suggests that the misogyny of national federations was so intense that it was hard to imagine working in any of its contexts and getting an education in much beyond one’s capacity to endure harassment. More than implied in this article was the necessity of this separation in order to create a space in which women might have a chance to gain experience and to do so in a minimally sexist environment. (The article also expresses some really quite regressive views about the differences between men and women athletes; it’s worth reading as a document of what I imagine was one of the more forward thinking perspectives on the sport within FIFA structures.)

There are manifold problems, however, with the total segregation of referee pools.

There is a tendency, in sports, to treat girls and women’s sports as a training ground for inexperienced referees. (In the United States, Civil Rights law actually makes it illegal to do that in most contexts.) This expresses a broad devaluation, in sports and in the world, of women’s capacity to lead and govern men.

Furthermore, women’s sports are held at a sub-professional level by governing institutions run by men whose misogyny is often worse than that one finds amongst the general population. So, if you only allow women to referee women, and those women work in countries with an amateur-level game at home, those women will hit a glass ceiling hard and early. Women’s leagues, furthermore, currently do not use VAR. The only referees with experience working with VAR are those working in the men’s game and in those leagues using it, VAR is still new.

Women refereeing this World Cup work in men’s leagues, however, and a few work as referees in leagues using VAR. To name just two — Bibiana Steinhaus (Bundesligue), Stéphanie Frappert (Ligue 1). Just a few months ago, in fact, the FFF assigned Frappert as the center referee to a Ligue 1 match. The federation explained that they did so in response to a request from FIFA to support her exposure to top-flight matches in advance of the World Cup. Frappert, one learns with just a little more googling, has experience working for Ligue 1 as a Video Assistant Referee. She worked 8 matches this past season. I point this out to emphasize the fact that it is not the case that there are no women with VAR experience. There have not been, until this World Cup, women with experience working in the VAR room at a World Cup — which is the result of FIFA’s unwillingness to use the men’s game to support the development of women referees.

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FIFA’s request of the FFF strikes me as interesting — it’s a sign that the people governing refereeing know that they have a pipeline problem, as is the language of its press release describing an all-male VAR team (“VAR will be part of a remarkable project as it will unite women and men referees in what we are certain will be a successful tournament.”) It’s also a sign that FIFA treats the Women’s World Cup as an afterthought. There should have been no question about whether VAR would be used in the Women’s World Cup, and women should have gone to Russia specifically to train with it last year. There is no reason why the men’s game can’t be a platform for the development of the women’s game.

Referee development is a big part of FIFA’s discourse about the World Cup’s function as an instrument for lifting the level of the game globally. From what I can see from my admittedly limited research on this issue, it looks as if in the 1990s and 2000s, FIFA punted the project of developing women referees because FIFA executives were not interested in taking on the misogyny of its national federations. The gender segregated list was one way of addressing that as it forced national federations to start working with women at least in women’s games; but it also tied the project of the development of women referees to the same federations that inhibit the development of the women’s game.

Basically, with that gender segregated list, FIFA extends the women’s game a hand while keeping its boot on her neck.

If FIFA is actually committed to supporting the development of women referees, it should have a universal referee list and work towards gender parity at every level of the sport. The minute FIFA started working with VAR, it should have included women referees in that process.

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In the press conference today, officials could not deny that governance of the match has been more aggressive that it was in 2018. Statistically, however, it is not out of line with the recent U20 tournament, a fact that raises more questions than it answers. In this tournament, if feels like VARs have micromanaged the referee, interfered with the match’s pacing and turned the game in a direction that seems unfair.

Perhaps this is just a sign of the times — so much of what passes as technical advancement makes the quality of our lives so very worse. VAR has made it harder to trust the technical apparatus — it amplifies the lack of trust we have in FIFA itself.

Returning to gender: in the imbalanced optics of this situation we have a great expression of one of the very biggest contradictions shaping FIFA’s governance of the women’s game.

About fifteen years ago, in rejecting a woman player’s request to transfer to a second-tier men’s club in Mexico, FIFA explained that “there must be a clear separation of between men’s and women’s football.” They’ve stuck to that line ever since.

But the truth is that the separation of women’s football from men’s football is not at all clear. If that were true, women would have total executive authority over the game. They would determine its funding levels, they would make decisions regarding player salaries and support, they would negotiate endorsements. They would govern the game’s rules — they would make the decisions about things like hijab, for example and set guidelines regarding who is eligible to play on a women’s team. If we take the players themselves as the center of the women’s game, we needn’t step very far at all from that center to find the game being run by men.

That situation is visualized in this tournament by images of (mostly) men sitting in what looks like a war room as they supervise a game played and refereed by women.

The contradictions in FIFA’s logic regarding the necessity for absolute clarity in the difference between the men’s and women’s game is made manifest in the fact the men in that VAR room do not work in women’s football. If the differences are so clear, so important to the sport’s integrity then how are those men actually qualified to do this supervisory work? And if they can do that work, then why couldn’t women work as VARs in Russia? Or at the U20 men’s tournament in Poland?

I wonder what the men working as Video Assistant Referees for the Women’s World Cup are thinking about women footballers and referees. I wonder what they are thinking about the difference that gender makes. How might race and gender be impacting the way that the VARs are reading the screens? Who does a freeze frame help, or hurt? We do not see the game through a race and gender neutral lens unless we’ve made a commitment to unlearning how racism and sexism pattern how we see what we see. I find it hard to believe that the decisions made by a group of men charged with reviewing the decisions of a team of women are not shaped by their attitudes about the women and the women’s game.

This, hopefully, will be the first and last world cup to give us this optic of a battery of men with no history in the women’s game supervising women referees. Maybe this situation will force FIFA to give up its antiquated policy of segregated referee lists. Maybe we are inching towards a more gender dynamic environment in the sport.

As it happens, during his press conference Collina reviewed a VAR call from (I think) last night’s match. When he showed a short clip of the VAR team at work, I spied a pony tail, two seats from the left: is that a woman referee in training? My bet is that it is Sian Massey-Ellis, getting herself ready not just for the next World Cup, but for next season’s Premiership. Oh, check that. It’s Scotland’s Kylie Cockburn! Screen Shot 2019-06-26 at 8.01.54 PM.png

 

*I first drafted this working off of FIFA’s own press releases re VAR. I’ve been watching matches in person, in bars and missed that there are women working in the VAR room as Assistant Video Assistant Referees — eg Oleksandra Ardasheva, who worked the France-Brazil match. My first draft didn’t reflect this fact; I’ve gone through the post and edited to finesse my main points, which still work. Thank you Twitter for sorting me out!

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: 2019 World Cup, Sexism, soccer Tagged With: , , , , ,

Outer Limit: More Notes on Losers

June 24, 2019 by

Cameroon’s performances in the group matches hinted at the possibility that they might explore the outer limits of the possible. Every game they’ve played in this tournament has been characterized by the sense that anything might happen. They played the edge until it wasn’t playable.

They lost to the Netherlands (3-1) in a match that had the audience riveted. The pace and intensity of that game was glorious. I saw players race around the pitch with a tornado like intensity. They were really good at loosening the ball from their opponent’s intention and exploiting the chaotic episodes of a match. Canada shut them out (3-0), but Cameroon fought from start to finish. They made Canada work. They beat New Zealand (2-1) in a barn-burner, scoring on literally the last touch of the match. One of their players was stretchered off the field at the end of the match: she had collapsed from exhaustion.

At the group stage, they played by tearing the game open — they can appear very emotional but that emotion doesn’t necessarily mean they are out of control. I think they like discombobulating their opponents —  some teams work like that. They’ll push — literally — and how you perform against them has a lot to do with how you respond to the provocation. I don’t think any of their opponents (even the ones that beat them) really played “their” game. It felt like Cameroon was authoring these matches, even from the losing side.

England’s first goal was the direct result of Cameroon’s mistake: Ejangue, in a scramble in front of the goal, kicked the ball into the keeper’s hands — a miserable mistake — Houghton converted the indirect free-kick. Cameroon seemed to feel the call against them was somehow not fair — I would say it was more humiliating than unjust and that the refusal to acknowledge this mistake was a very bad sign.

England scored again just as VAR-enhanced extra-time wound down: the goal was initially waved off as off-side but then awarded after VAR review corrected an indisputably bad call. Cameroon nearly stopped playing; for a good bit, they refused to kick-off.

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Apparently, after all that, at half time, Cameroon’s coach, Alain Djeumfa, told players that the referee wanted England to win.

THEN, at the start of the second half, the truly incredible Nchout Ajara scored — only to have VAR take that goal back because a sliver of her heel (her back was to the goal) had crossed the line. The validity of that call is debatable.

The misery that ensued made me think of the following: When you get a red card, you have to leave the field — not just the field of play. You have to remove yourself from the game entirely. This happens because there is a real risk of fighting if that player doesn’t go to the locker room. It is a very, very bad idea to let a struggling team that feels like they’ve been cheated stand on the field contemplating the injustice of a bad decision while referees commune with the VAR apparatus. A better team, a more grounded team, a team with a stable situation, a team that trusted the refereeing might use that time to center themselves. But this team was convinced the fix was in.*

Cameroon’s coach was dropped into this position in January, after the team’s head coach and goalkeeping coach were unceremoniously fired. Why? Federation politics? Is it related to the political situation in Cameroon (Anglophone regions are threatening to secede)? Is is corruption? Were they cleaning house or the opposite? I would love to know the answer to that.

In any case, Cameroon’s players were not concerned by the question as to why none of them were given red cards — an elbow to the face, a cynical tackle which might have broken an ankle, the shove of the referee’s back, spitting on an opponent, refusing to get off the pitch at half time — the players had been tempting that fate from the start of the game and they were all spared.

And for all but the opening minutes of the second half, England did not let themselves get sucked in by the game’s drama. They very nearly paid for the few minutes they lost that focus.

People who haven’t spend much time with women athletes may find that Cameroon’s combination of attitude, playing style and tactic challenges their ideas about the women’s game. People who only watch the most intensely regulated and produced versions of the sport might have been shocked by what they saw on television. But people who watch a lot of the sport and who have played it will know that things like this can happen — in a way, the game is actually always threatening to fall apart and it takes a lot of effort on the part of match officials, event producers, coaches, support staff and players to give viewers a good game.

When a team starts to feel that the game is fixed, and that all is hopeless, they have to actively fight off the desire to stop playing. So very many national teams in the women’s game must struggle with this.

We might judge the Cameroonian side harshly, but we can do that with compassion—and perhaps use this moment to appreciate the losers who have lost well — to send some good wishes to teams like Nigeria, Thailand and especially to Brazil, who lost their match against France last night. An incredible constellation of stars are rotating out of the sky.

 

 

*a side note: in a very, very corrupt sport we should pause and reflect before dismissing players for feeling this way.

Filed Under: 2019 World Cup, FIFA, Football, soccer Tagged With: , ,

Their Loss, Our Loss

June 12, 2019 by

As the USWNT moved from dominating Thailand to obliterating them, people watching the game wondered, “is this OK?” Shouldn’t there be a mercy rule? As players and supporters celebrated the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th goals, people wondered — are those goal celebrations…necessary?

There are many ways to answer that question. The importance of goal differentials to establishing one’s path out of a group is the easiest. Other teams playing Thailand in the group will likely score a lot. Any attempt on the part of teams in the group to collaborate in capping scoring against Thailand would also challenge the rules governing the game — while this is certainly the decent thing to do in amateur league play, it’s not the kind of community-oriented practice supported within a World Cup tournament.

There are, however, other angles into this match’s scenario.

Some of us have played in games like this. There are the games in which one’s team scarcely touches the ball. Games where, for example, a team might pass the ball amongst themselves while limiting each player to two touches. In which they might, oh, count off each pass they complete—turning your game into their drill. Last night’s situation may be unheard of at the highest levels but it isn’t terribly unusual for an amateur league.

When your opponent is at a level you would normally never get close to, it’s possible to play, lose big, and to take a lot from that experience. But you won’t get that kind of experience from a team that withholds its game from you.

For the USWNT team to stop scoring in that game, they would have needed to abandon any pretense towards attacking. They would have needed to turn a World Cup match into a drill. That is actually, in my view, not respectful to opposing players.

It is also makes for terrible television. That sort of thing is, for the spectator, even worse than the one-sided win.

Last night, the USWNT played as they play. Thus the Thai-American player Miranda Nild described it as “amazing” and “as a really cool experience.”

Pushing back against those who chastise US players for scoring too much, and – horrors — for enjoying scoring lots of goals — numbers of people have been pointing to similar kinds of results in the men’s game. Generally, men are not criticized for the lopsidedness of their wins, nor is their affect and composure monitored in the same way. But their losses are also very different. When Brazil collapsed in their 2014 World Cup semifinal, giving up five goals in the first half, we experienced that collapse quite differently than we experienced Thailand’s loss. Brazil’s loss manifested as an existential crisis. It was a spectacular melt-down; a shame spiral of epic proportion. We conjured a thousand reasons for that collapse, none of those explanations, however, centered on the team’s ability. The mess of that game, in fact, was all the more spectacular because we know those players, we know what they can do.

Last night’s match was a different experience entirely; we glimpsed the systematic debilitation of the women’s game. There is a lot of nobility to Thailand’s performance. Being up for a game like that takes a ridiculous amount of fortitude. But there is nothing noble about the state of the women’s game globally — even the world’s most privileged players are fighting for equal treatment within their federations. Let us remember that last year’s golden boot winner hasn’t played for her national team in two years because she expects her national team program (Norway) to be as professional as her club team (Lyon). USWNT players are suing their federation; Thailand and Jamaica’s teams are supported by private benefactors who are compensating for the lack of support the programs get from their federations; Afghanistan’s players were subjected to horrifying abuse; women’s teams are less likely get the money they earn in competition (and the money they earn is insanely less than that earned by men); federation official will give coaching positions to friends of friends who use the team to feed their egos while the federation turns away from the program’s losing record. You will find struggles against material forms of inequity at every level of the women’s game. (See Shireen Ahmed’s blistering statement on this fact.)

There are a lot of reasons to feel angry about that game. The way the USWNT played is not one of them. We should not feel shame for the losers, or for the winners. That shame, in my view, belongs entirely to FIFA and to mainstream sports media — which honestly, even now, when it is doing so much more than it used to, still does so very little serious reporting regarding the corruption, incompetence and abuse that hinders the development of the women’s game.

I can imagine a situation in which teams might collaborate in refusing to produce a lopsided result. This action would not be staged in order to spare Thai players a humiliating loss. It would be a protest, a labor action — the athlete’s version of a work-slowdown. In such a game, women might pass the ball to each other. They might refuse to defend but also refuse to score. Thai players might abandon the pretense of defending, and lose even bigger. These actions, however, only make sense for teams committed to destroying the World Cup as we know it!

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Filed Under: 2019 World Cup, Football, soccer Tagged With: ,