Soccerwomen

PREFACE

I didn’t think I could write this book.

Sure, it was my idea. It was the book I wanted to read, so it was certainly the book I wanted to write. But when faced with the prospect of actually writing it, my confidence faltered.

I thought about how when I started out as a sports writer, I didn’t want to write about women’s soccer at all. And although I’d been madly kicking a ball around in my backyard since I could walk, I didn’t want to play women’s soccer either. There was no setup for it in England, no professional league to aspire to join. I was the only girl out of hundreds of boys at the soccer schools I attended. So I grew up thinking there was nothing better than to be considered “one of the boys,” to be allowed into the realm of male culture and sports and, later, bestowed with the privilege of writing about the men’s professional game.

When the first newspaper I wrote for in England began sending me to report on women’s soccer—simply by virtue of being female—I was clueless and reluctant. It meant fewer column inches, less pay, less glory. The beauty of soccer has always been in its stories, those age-old rivalries and intriguing characters, and the narratives of women’s soccer were new to me. To make matters more complicated, I was entirely schooled in the automatic terminology of the men’s game. Was it okay to say things like “having a man sent off” or “keeping a man on the line”? During a phone interview, I once asked a player if the support of the home crowd would be like having a twelfth—long, uncomfortable pause—woman? Nothing quite rolled off the tongue the way the language of men’s sports did.

In the beginning, I made sure to compare female players to their male counterparts, as much for my own frame of reference as for the readers—who surely also needed a male lens through which to process things. I described Karen Carney as the female Wayne Rooney and Kelly Smith as the female David Beckham. It took time for me to understand the chauvinistic crap I was perpetuating as I came to love the women’s game, slowly and steadily, until I didn’t know how I’d lived without it.

Here’s another reason I wasn’t sure I could write this: I was scared because I had a shitty time as a woman reporting on men’s soccer. I know, right? Who’d have thought? Turns out the men who don’t like women’s sports don’t like women in men’s sports either. The obstacles came from outside in the form of e-mails from disgruntled male readers, and they came from within: my questions belittled in team press conferences, my knowledge questioned by other reporters, and those murky, icky incidents of sexual harassment carried out by club executives in quiet boardrooms and by pushy players in deserted hallways. Just the idea of writing about soccer again made me feel a little panicky, like boarding an airplane after a very turbulent flight.

And finally, I was pregnant. How could I possibly write a book through the fog of the final trimester and the delirium of childbirth and into the first sleep-deprived months of infant care? I thought I needed at least three nonpregnant, nonmothering years to do it, in which I would have lengthy coffee dates with each player and tweak each sentence into oblivion. But even having that debate with myself is a function of privilege, of doing a job that affords me some agency, when more than half of US mothers go straight back to work without any paid maternity leave.

Once I started writing, I quickly discovered that I wasn’t alone in questioning my capabilities or worthiness. When Sam Kerr, arguably the best forward in the world right now, walked onstage to accept the Young Australian of the Year Award in 2018, she grinned and said, “I’m pretty nervous. I guess the imposter thing is still . . . a thing.”

Becky Sauerbrunn talks openly about her struggle to feel confident, even though she’s the indefatigable captain of the USA, the world’s greatest women’s team. In the men’s game, confidence is seen as something that occasionally dips and wanes but can always be recovered. For female players, self-doubt is perpetual. And evidence bears it out. According to a 2009 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences, female world-class athletes have less confidence than their male counterparts and are more likely to feel anxiety and to rely on “external information in establishing performance expectations.”

Women are more harshly judged, and their achievements are belittled. Just look at the coverage of women’s sports: while 40 percent of all athletes are female, women’s sports receive just 2 to 4 percent of media coverage.

Next, let’s consider language. “Sports” seems like a big, inclusive term, but it only really means men’s sports. There is “soccer,” and then there is “women’s soccer.” The Major League and the National Women’s Soccer League. The World Cup and the Women’s World Cup. The addition of “women’s” makes it sound like a niche activity or a knitting circle. It’s no longer the main event but a sideshow, worthy of less coverage. It is, as Abby Wambach succinctly puts it, “bullshit.”

It’s one of the many reasons women are paid less than men. Yet American soccer is a perfect microcosm of the pay gap: here you have a women’s team who outperform the men, who are more popular and more famous, who attract more viewers, and who still don’t get paid as much. It’s not even as though they’re asking for more, just to be paid equally. This is how women’s soccer has become integral to the fight for gender equality.

But it goes further back than that. The origins of women’s soccer are steeped in the suffrage movement and in the fight to be allowed to exist in public spaces without stifling clothing, and to participate in activities outside the home. Women’s soccer transcends sport; from the beginning, it has been essential to the struggle for female selfhood.

Now, who says you can’t write a book while pregnant and/or mothering? Oh, that’s right—a hundred thousand articles and op-eds and advertisements, the messages women are bombarded with every day. You can’t be a mother and a writer, you can’t function with baby brain, you can’t work and be a mother, you can’t not work and be a mother, you can’t be gay and be a mother, and you can’t be female and not be a mother. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.

But then there’s Joy Fawcett, who nursed her babies in the locker room at halftime. And Emma Hayes, who suffered the loss of one the twins she was carrying in utero while coaching a game and somehow held it together for the remainder of her Chelsea team’s title-winning season. And many other players and coaches for whom motherhood wasn’t part of their journey but who also overcame overwhelming odds to do what they loved.

When the women in this book were told they couldn’t, they didn’t listen. When there was no path, no professional league, no World Cup, they forged ahead and made one. Behind every kick of the ball in women’s soccer is the power of all the women who made it possible.

I could have written about all of them, but I had to narrow it down. The selection process is mine, and there were some tough omissions. Even though the USA is number one and those teams of the 1990s made the global game what it is today, I tried to avoid bending too far to American exceptionalism. I wanted to paint a global picture, to share players’ stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been told. This, to me, was about all these players from around the world resting shoulder to shoulder in the same book, from Pahrump, Nevada, to Papua New Guinea.

Organizing it into a cohesive chronology was complicated. Plenty of players don’t fit into one decade. Kristine Lilly, for example, played in four. So I asked her which was her favorite era, and I placed her there. For others, I went with the moment they made their breakthrough or the game they considered their best.

I’ve also tried to be evenhanded in terms of position and include a cross section of goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, forwards, and coaches. Taken all together, they form a formidable squad.

It took some time to settle on a title. In publishing, ensuring that the word “girl” is in the title means you will likely sell more copies. But I couldn’t demean these players, these women, by calling them “girls” just to fit some patriarchal fantasy. Soccerwomen is an attempt to flip the script. This isn’t a niche sport, and these aren’t just women who play soccer; they are women who define soccer, who use the game as a force for social and political change, who lay their bodies and their lives on the line.

This book is a love letter to soccer in its purest form, played with passion, sometimes at great personal risk, and often without expectation or fanfare. It is a love letter to the players who constantly show us what is possible—if we work hard and show courage, determination, and tenacity.

Writing this book brought me more joy than I felt writing about men’s sports, and I hope that shows. It is imperfect, and it is all the better for that.

It is a testament to this:

If we question the narratives in which we’ve been indoctrinated, if we do what we love in spite of our fears, if we use our bodies the way we get the most from them, if we bring our best qualities to the things we do and the battles we fight, if we feel confident knowing we deserve our place in this world, we can help shape it for the better.