{"id":552,"date":"2017-04-13T08:45:46","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T12:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/?p=552"},"modified":"2017-04-13T14:23:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T18:23:58","slug":"success-at-last-the-national-womens-soccer-league-kicks-off-fifth-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/2017\/04\/13\/success-at-last-the-national-womens-soccer-league-kicks-off-fifth-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Success at Last? The National Women\u2019s Soccer League Kicks Off Fifth Season"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portland Thorns FC led the NWSL in attendance during the 2016 season with an average of 16,945 fans per match. (Photo by Ray Terril<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The National Women\u2019s Soccer League<\/a>\u00a0begins its fifth season this week with markers of success that eluded the two failed U.S. women\u2019s professional soccer leagues that predated it. Perhaps first and foremost is the league\u2019s longevity. Both the Women\u2019s United Soccer Association (2001-2003) and Women\u2019s Professional Soccer (2009-2012) folded after three seasons. With no sign of impending failure, the beginning of a fifth season for the NWSL bodes well for this league\u2019s ability to break into the national sporting imagination. Currently, when I ask the undergraduates I teach to name a women\u2019s pro sports league, they are only able to recall the Women\u2019s National Basketball Association (WNBA). This could change in the future, but only with a league that lasts long enough to build a national profile.<\/p>\n

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In fact, the NWSL has expanded since its 2013 kickoff, adding teams such as the Houston Dash and Orlando Pride, and will feature 10 teams during the 2017 season. Though uneven and still lower than WNBA and Major League Soccer (MLS) figures, average attendance has risen<\/a>. The Portland Thorns, perhaps the league\u2019s best-known team, routinely draw crowds into the tens of thousands and turned a profit<\/a> almost immediately upon joining the league.<\/p>\n

In February, the NWSL announced a three-year partnership with the television network Lifetime. As a new sponsor, Lifetime will air an NWSL game each weekend during the season. This partnership is an enormous boon for a league that, like women\u2019s sports more broadly, struggles to garner mainstream mass media attention<\/a> outside of major international tournaments. In addition, NWSL Media is a newly formed, joint creation of Lifetime and the NWSL. The first commercial advertisements produced by this partnership<\/a> are notable for their quality production values and focus on the athletic talent of the players.<\/p>\n

Beyond these commercial and corporate successes, the U.S. Women\u2019s National Team recently scored a goal for gender equity when it signed a new collective bargaining agreement<\/a> with U.S. Soccer. This five-year deal closes some (but not all) of the gap between men and women national team players in compensation and benefits. It also guarantees that U.S. Soccer will continue to provide financial support for the NWSL, further solidifying the status of this still-fledgling league. The NWSL recently announced<\/a> an increase of minimum NWSL salaries to $15,000, up from $7,200 in 2016.<\/p>\n

From the outside looking in, then, the NWSL looks to be on solid ground, both commercial and social victories characteristic of its first few seasons. Yet this \u201csuccess\u201d depends entirely on the league\u2019s increased mirroring of men\u2019s professional sports leagues in their practices, goals, and outcomes. Men and men\u2019s sports remain the benchmarks against which the league is inevitably compared. As much sociological research has shown, however, the values that organize men\u2019s professional sports, such as competitiveness, aggression, and rampant commercialization, have very real social and physical downsides. What does it mean for women\u2019s professional soccer to adopt these values as their primary understanding of success?<\/p>\n

For one, an all-consuming focus on competition and winning have increasingly permeated all levels of girls\u2019 and women\u2019s soccer down to the lowest levels of youth participation. As sociologist Rick Eckstein argues in his compelling new book<\/a> on girls sports, a \u201cwinning-at-all-costs\u201d mentality pressures girls to specialize early and totally, denying the benefits of sports participation to girls who prefer to play for fun or who want to pursue multiple sports. The development of a competitive, private pipeline in girls\u2019 soccer leading into the college game also funnels out those who cannot pay to stay in it, particularly girls of color and girls from poor or working class families. While the racial and ethnic diversity of women\u2019s soccer has improved in recent years<\/a>, greater diversity in the future will require attention to the accessibility of youth soccer. The prioritization of competitive play has also generated high and growing rates of injury. For example, one recent study<\/a> found that sports-playing girls were more likely to experience a concussion than boys, owing in large part to high rates of concussion in girls\u2019 soccer.<\/p>\n

In addition, unmitigated commercialization and corporatization drive a \u201cstar\u201d system that sees the rewards of \u201csuccess\u201d distributed unevenly. Only a few players on the Women\u2019s National Team have reaped the benefits of greater corporate investment, particularly after the team\u2019s win in the 2015 Women\u2019s World Cup. Their celebrity status, and the endorsements that accompany it, are not shared by rank-and-file NWSL players who often need to work second jobs<\/a> while in season. It is also not accidental that the players who have these opportunities are disproportionately white, heterosexual, and feminine, indicative of a long lingering homophobia in women\u2019s sport<\/a>. And when these best-known players in the country go abroad to play, as forwards Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn have done recently, these moves are feared to hurt attendance by depriving NWSL teams of the only players with widespread name recognition.<\/p>\n

Finally, as in women\u2019s college sports<\/a>, the NWSL is owned and operated almost entirely by men. Research has shown that as women\u2019s college sports gained in size, prestige, and resources post-Title IX, men increasingly wanted and obtained jobs in women\u2019s sports. Persistent beliefs in men\u2019s greater competence in sports than women contributed to shifting employment patterns. As a result, the percent of college women\u2019s teams coached by women has dropped from 90 to 40 percent since 1972<\/a>. Although it is too early to know definitively, similar dynamics may be operating in women\u2019s soccer; for 2017, only 1 of 10 head coaches<\/a> in the NWSL is a woman.<\/p>\n

The NWSL is one of the few fully professional women\u2019s team sports leagues in the United States. As such, it is a rare and important case study for understanding gender relations and gender (in)equality in elite sport. As the league gains visibility and accrues additional resources, it would do well to simultaneously ask itself what, exactly, success looks like, and what the consequences may be of reaching it.<\/p>\n

Rachel Allison<\/a> is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. Her research examines the gender, racial, and class politics of U.S. women\u2019s professional soccer. A book on women\u2019s soccer is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The National Women\u2019s Soccer League\u00a0begins its fifth season this week with markers of success that eluded the two failed U.S. women\u2019s professional soccer leagues that predated it. Perhaps first and foremost is the league\u2019s longevity. Both the Women\u2019s United Soccer Association (2001-2003) and Women\u2019s Professional Soccer (2009-2012) folded after three seasons. With no sign of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2075,"featured_media":553,"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":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Success at Last? The National Women\u2019s Soccer League Kicks Off Fifth Season","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":[95612],"tags":[3849,95665,95662,95664,947,95615,21932],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football-soccer","tag-gender-equality","tag-national-womens-soccer-league","tag-nwsl","tag-professional-sport","tag-soccer","tag-womens-soccer","tag-womens-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/files\/2017\/04\/NWSL.jpg?fit=2048%2C1365&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8iFlL-8U","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","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=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/engagingsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}