{"id":1157,"date":"2019-04-02T11:33:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T15:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2019-04-02T11:33:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T15:33:50","slug":"its-time-to-invest-in-womens-soccer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/2019\/04\/02\/its-time-to-invest-in-womens-soccer\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Invest in Women\u2019s Soccer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team celebrates victory in the 2015 FIFA World Cup (photo via US Soccer<\/a>).<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On March 8, the U.S. Women\u2019s National Soccer Team filed a lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming gender discrimination. This was only the most recent step in the team\u2019s two-year old fight for more equitable resources, a fight that has inspired<\/a> women athletes to push for change in other sports as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Reading the lawsuit, what struck me most was not evidence of disparate treatment of the women\u2019s team compared to the men\u2019s team, but the argument used to justify it. Specifically, U.S. Soccer argued that<\/a>, \u201cmarket realities are such that the women do not deserve to be paid equally to the men.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, this argument doesn\u2019t easily fit the data<\/a>. The women\u2019s team has performed far better in international competition than the men\u2019s team, which failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. In recent years the women\u2019s team has drawn sizeable crowds and generated substantial revenue for U.S. Soccer, with record television viewership numbers<\/a> for the 2015 Women\u2019s World Cup final. In other words, the market has valued and rewarded the women\u2019s team despite<\/em> their poorer training and travel conditions and lower compensation than the men\u2019s team.<\/p>\n

The persistence of appeals to the \u201cmarket\u201d despite the women\u2019s team\u2019s recent outperformance of the men\u2019s team suggests that the issue isn\u2019t really the market at all. It\u2019s about the way that women\u2019s sports are treated differently than men\u2019s sports, with greater hesitation to invest on the part of media and corporations and greater skepticism that reward will follow.<\/p>\n

What I identified as the \u201cideology of interest\u201d in Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women\u2019s Professional Soccer<\/em><\/a> is a one-sided logic that return drives investment but not the other way around. It is an idea we apply uniquely to women\u2019s sports, denying them resources by pointing to the size of their fan bases or corresponding revenue generation as if there were no way to improve these.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, this logic moves responsibility for unequal patterns of investment from decision-makers within sport, media, and corporate organizations onto sports fans. Inequality diffuses across the many thousands who could be paying customers but aren\u2019t, presumably because they just aren\u2019t interested in the product. Appeals to market forces not only fail to recognize the two-way street that is interest and investment, but they make inequality harder to see, and thus to challenge.<\/p>\n

Men\u2019s sports routinely receive media and corporate investment to boost their visibility and enhance interest. Consider Major League Soccer (MLS), which saw English language TV viewership increase between 2006-2014 while the league enjoyed a broadcast deal with ABC\/ESPN worth $8 million<\/a> annually. A decline in viewership from 2011 to 2013<\/a>, and a small decrease<\/a> in average game attendance between 2012 and 2013, did not present a \u201cmarket reality\u201d that prevented a new contract in 2014 with ESPN and Fox Sports worth $75 million<\/a> in rights fees.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the National Women\u2019s Soccer League, the regular home of many U.S. women\u2019s national team stars, currently has no national television exposure after the league recently parted ways with A&E. This is despite an increase from 4,271 to just over 6,000 fans<\/a> per game on average since 2013 and an average of 106,000 viewers<\/a> across 21 regular season games on Lifetime. This is a third<\/a> of the audience for MLS games on a less prominent network not known for sports coverage, and for a league that has been around less than a third as many years.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, audiences do not emerge from thin air. Yes, preferences exist and numbers matter, but investment plays a role in generating interest. We simply don\u2019t give women\u2019s sports the resources, exposure, or time to reach a sizeable audience\u2014a process that has taken decades for most men\u2019s professional sports leagues. And, as in the case of the women\u2019s national team, we often discount the audiences that do exist<\/a>, failing to reward them in the ways we do for men\u2019s sports audiences.<\/p>\n

Couching low investment in women athletes and the leagues they play for in terms of existing market returns contributes to perceptions that women\u2019s sports are inferior to men\u2019s. The expectation of little reward and hesitance to invest on this basis create the conditions in which this perception thrives. It\u2019s an unforgiving cycle for women\u2019s sports where low investment damages perception and hinders interest, which then makes future investments less likely.<\/p>\n

Recently, cracks have appeared in this cycle. Adidas announced<\/a> that it would compensate this year\u2019s Women\u2019s World Cup winners equally to their male counterparts. This is an important start. Giving women in sport equitable resources is not only the right thing to do, it\u2019s a smart business decision given that 84% of self-identified sports fans<\/a> report an interest in women\u2019s sports, including 51% of male fans. Soccer is the most popular sport among women under 30, with 59% reporting<\/a> that they \u201csometimes\u201d or \u201cregularly\u201d watch on TV.<\/p>\n

There is a market for women\u2019s sports. Historically, women\u2019s soccer has accessed it, but it has required a leap of faith. Upon moving 1999 Women\u2019s World Cup games into the largest possible U.S. stadiums, the theme of the tournament became a famous line from the movie Field of Dreams<\/em>: \u201cIf we build it they will come.\u201d<\/a> As midfielder Julie Foudy explained<\/a>, \u201cWomen\u2019s athletics needs to know it can put on a big event and be successful. The hardest part is they don\u2019t want to take the risk. We were fortunate enough that we had great backing to take the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

The over 90,000 fans<\/a> who watched the tournament final in the Rose Bowl that year remains the largest audience for a live women\u2019s sporting event in the U.S. to date. In that case, the risk paid off. Following that example, I\u2019ll revise the 1999 slogan for a new, 2019 Women\u2019s World Cup era: \u201cIf we build it, there\u2019s no guarantee they will come. But if we don\u2019t build it, they can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to break the cycle. It\u2019s time to invest in women\u2019s soccer.<\/p>\n

Rachel Allison<\/a> is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and author of Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women\u2019s Professional Soccer<\/em><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On March 8, the U.S. Women\u2019s National Soccer Team filed a lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, claiming gender discrimination. This was only the most recent step in the team\u2019s two-year old fight for more equitable resources, a fight that has inspired women athletes to push for change in other sports as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2075,"featured_media":1149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Following the U.S. Women\u2019s Soccer Team's recent lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, @rallis2 explains why it's time to invest in women's soccer.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[95533],"tags":[103854,2777,34978,103856,95665,1528,103852,103853,95615,4496],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football-american","tag-2019-world-cup","tag-gender-discrimination","tag-gender-equity","tag-major-league-soccer","tag-national-womens-soccer-league","tag-sexism","tag-u-s-womens-national-team","tag-united-states-soccer-federation","tag-womens-soccer","tag-world-cup"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/files\/2019\/04\/2015soccer.jpg?fit=1200%2C682&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8iFlL-iF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2075"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}