The other day, as he sat on a tour bus here surrounded by visitors from England, Joe Machnik – a former assistant coach on the US men’s soccer team and currently an analyst on Fox Sports – asked his fellow travellers a question he presumed obvious:
“Are you here for the World Cup?”
The tourists from the UK scoffed.
“They pooh-poohed it – they said: ‘No, it’s women’s soccer.’”
That is when he realised just how differently women’s football is perceived in the United States than almost anywhere else. The country that has come late to the world’s game does not discriminate with its soccer passions. The US might be decades behind the rest of the world when it comes to the history of the men’s game, but it has been a regular power in the women’s football. Domination does not know gender. Without a soccer legacy, any championships will do in the US regardless of who is winning the title.
As June has rolled into July, the US has become captivated by their team marching through Canada to Sunday’s Women’s World Cup final. Television ratings have soared. Fox reports the six US women’s matches so far in this World Cup have averaged 5.3m viewers, a rise of 121% over the 2011 Women’s World Cup. At one point 12m people watched Tuesday’s semi-final win over Germany. For a sport that has not been seen as American enough, the ratings are enormous.
“I think it’s fair to say they have exceeded our highest hopes,” said Michael Mulvihill, a vice-president for Fox Sports which is broadcasting the World Cup in the US.
Fans are surging over the border to attend matches. Nearly every hotel in the Vancouver area is sold out this weekend. The few that have rooms are charging more than $500 a night. Crowds heavy with US fans have caused sell-outs at matches here and in Montreal.
Part of this is proximity, with so many games within an hour’s drive of the border. Part is due to the growth of the sport in the US, but Machnik thinks there is something more, something bigger, that makes the US different to other countries when it comes to soccer: the women’s game in the US is almost as important as the men’s.
For 39 years he has run a series of youth soccer camps in cities across the nation. In the beginning his camps were attended almost entirely by boys. But when the US women’s team won the 1999 World Cup, which was held in the US, something changed. The number of girls wanting to come to the camp boomed. Now enrolment at his camps is more than 50% female.
The reason is Title IX, a law passed in 1972 to provide educational equality to females. One of the law’s biggest impacts is in college sports, where universities had to stop handing the vast majority of their sports scholarships to males. Soccer was a cheap beneficiary – an easy sport to operate. And as more colleges offered soccer scholarships to women, more and more girls began to play.
“We hadn’t had that cultural bias of having a great men’s program in our country,” said Julie Foudy, a star on the US team that won the 1999 Women’s World Cup. “It takes a while to change a cultural mindset. We benefit here in the United States to have a history that wasn’t gender-biased.”
Foudy, now a commentator for ESPN, remembers the first time she met her English in-laws. They were stunned to hear she played football. “They looked at me like I had two heads,” she said. It was not until she started travelling the world that she realised that the game was viewed differently outside the US. “When you look at the number of girls who play in our country, we have two million girls who play soccer,” she said. “When you go to France they are excited to have 90,000 girls who are playing. Our numbers are huge in terms of girls who are playing soccer.”
Nearly lost in the flood of data that has poured into the Fox executives’ inboxes, is a statistic about this year’s cup that seems to say volumes about women’s soccer in the US. Of the 25- to 54-year-olds watching the Women’s World Cup, 30% are watching with a child or teenager, a far bigger number than Fox sees for its most popular primetime shows or even the NFL – traditionally the highest-rated sports programming on any US network.
Families rarely watch TV together anymore. The days of everyone huddling around the television set on a weekday night are distant memories. That the Women’s World Cup has brought people back together was a surprise to Fox. “When you have something you watch with your kids you’ve something special,” Mulvihill said.
Yet Machnik told his bosses as much in planning meetings before the World Cup. His role on the telecasts is to discuss rules and he finds the women’s game a pure, sporting version of the game. Look how the women help fallen opponents get to their feet, see how few red cards have been handed out (just three the whole tournament), notice how none of the women’s players flop in an attempt to draw a foul call – a men’s tactic that is heavily mocked by casual sports fans in the US.
On Sunday, the USA will play for its third Women’s World Cup title since 1991. A country will watch and hold its breath. Someday the rest of the world might understand. “When you have daughters playing and nieces playing, it won’t seem like such an anomaly,” Foudy said.
Then the rest of the football world will catch up to the US.
