Growing Pains
As the NWSL becomes more popular, it finally faces a reckoning
Dear readers,
You may remember that last week we officially endorsed the Seattle Mariners as Southpaw’s official team for the MLB postseason—and we apologized in advance for cursing them. Well, dear readers, we made good on that curse, and the Mariners missed the playoffs altogether. With this experience in mind, we are now officially endorsing the Houston Astros, hoping that we can work our dark magic once again.
In last week’s potpourri, we also mentioned the abuse allegations that a handful of players in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) had made against their head coaches. That story has continued to evolve, so we’ve decided to make it the topic of this week’s newsletter and pull together a bit of a reading list to bring everyone up to speed on the latest development. Happy reading.
-Ian & Calder
Players in the NWSL are protecting themselves.
It’s a fairly common rhetorical trick of liberal sportswriters to hold up women’s professional sports leagues as bastions of righteousness amidst a world of more financially successful but more politically depraved men’s leagues.
To an extent, this argument is correct: the WNBA, for example, has been out in front of almost all the major racial justice protests since last summer, and it has had no problem vaccinating nearly all of its players, while the NBA has been bogged down by a vocal minority of objectors. The two of us have almost certainly made some version of this same argument in this very space.
The problem with this move is that it papers over the very real problems that continue to plague these leagues, as the recent scandals at the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) prove.
If you haven’t kept up with what’s been going on at the NWSL, here are the essentials. Since August, three head coaches—all men—have been fired from the 10-team league for misconduct: two for abuse (one sexual in nature) and one “for cause.” Last weekend, the NWSL’s commissioner Lisa Baird resigned, the league halted all of its matches, and multiple players gave candid interviews about the years of systemic abuse they suffered and the league’s abject failure to seriously investigate their allegations or take meaningful steps to protect players from predatory behavior. Since then, the NWSL Players’ Association has released a list of demands, including one that every owner, general manager, coach, and representative on the Board of Governors submit to an independent investigation into abusive conduct.
When the NWSL resumed play this week, players stopped at the six-minute mark and joined hands at midfield, a protest meant to represent the six years that it took for the NWSL to look into credible allegations of abuse.
A reasonable question that people have is, if some of these allegations happened six years ago, why are they being brought to light now? What changed? It’s easy to point to the #MeToo movement and a “larger national reckoning.” But that supposed paradigm shift is now four years old too. There’s something else at play. In 2020, while most other sports were seeing a sharp decline in viewership, the NWSL shattered viewership records by 300% after signing deals with CBS Sports and Twitch to broadcast their games more widely.
So this is partly a story about growing pains. As the NWSL turns into a league with more viewers and more influence, its bosses have been forced into something of a reckoning.
There are more systemic issues at play as well. The other problem with foregrounding female athletes’ leadership on issues of social and political justice without mentioning the abusive conditions that persist in their leagues is that you really can’t tell one of these stories without mentioning the other. It is not a coincidence that the athletes who are subject to the most exploitative working conditions in sports are most attuned to the injustices and cruelties that persist in American life more broadly. Female athletes do not have the luxury of treating sports as some mystical apolitical realm of life.
This makes their willingness to speak out all the more commendable, especially as the NWSL becomes more popular and the possibility of a real payday increases. Women’s soccer players have the least professional and economic security of any professional athlete in the U.S., and yet they are among the most willing to put that stability on the line to call out abuse and neglect among their bosses.
To add to our analysis, below is a brief reading list of pieces that explore some of these dynamics.
“How fear and the NWSL’s culture of silence perpetuated sexual abuse,” by Patrice Worthy in The Guardian (October 9, 2021).
The players are the NWSL’s biggest asset and find themselves in a culture that leaves them to feel disempowered. Levinsohn, who is also a sports psychologist, says women feel isolated in American soccer because there have already been two leagues that have failed. Players tend to internalize the message that they shouldn’t rock the boat or they will sink the NWSL.
“No one wants to be the one who ruins it all. There’s a team dynamic that happens that is very unique to women’s soccer because the psychological game is to make us think it’s fragile, when it’s not, but we all felt it,” Levinsohn says. “It’s a part of the Kool-Aid and for so long it’s been ‘I’ll take what I can get as long as I can keep playing.’’
“The NWSL is a symptom. U.S. Soccer is the problem,” by Kevin Blakistone in The Washington Post (October 9, 2021).
At the root of accusations of sexual harassment and sexual coercion and a raft of other inappropriate behaviors — which resulted in three managers fired since August, including Washington Spirit coach Richie Burke — is systemic sexism, unconscious or otherwise, in the national soccer federation. Until now, it was evident most notably in an equal pay dispute waged by the U.S. women’s national team, who claimed in court that they long were paid less than their male counterparts. A Court of Appeals last month rejected the women’s appeal and gave them until next week to respond.
But what revealed itself the past several weeks was an outgrowth of treatment as less-than. As McGill University professor Colleen Sheppard, who has studied and written extensively on gender equality in the workplace, proffered in one article: “If we [analyze] the particularities and systemic context of sexual harassment, it becomes apparent that most of the efforts to prevent sexual harassment [center] on changing the behavior of individual male employees or managers who transgress the line between appropriate social or workplace interaction and sexual harassment. What remains unquestioned by such an approach is the way in which the underlying organizational and structural status quo contributes to the pervasiveness of harassment.”
“Crisis in the National Women’s Soccer League: A Story of Predation and Power,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (October 8, 2021).
The protests, and the raucous support from the stands, were acts of catharsis after the most difficult week in the history of the league, a time when revelations about sexual harassment and coercion by one coach spawned a spate of resignations and the cancellation of a weekend slate of games. The protests were also a blaring signal to the powers that be that the players, even though they were back on the field, were keeping up their struggle against abuses that have been discussed behind closed doors with little to no resulting action.
“The NWSL Was Working As Intended,” by Claire Watkins in Defector (October 4, 2021).
If the facts seem damning, it’s because they are. Men with histories of abuse were allowed to continue to have jobs in the NWSL where they could harm more players. The much-lauded anti-harassment policy that unseated Lahue, Holly, and Burke was reported in The Athletic’s article to actually have been created this year at the behest of the players, and was not a proactive measure from the league. The NWSL has been exposed for operating at an intersection of ineptitude and malice that has left players stuck in between needing the league to survive, and needing everything holding it up to collapse.
This is without a doubt the largest push for accountability women’s soccer in America has had in its short history. That it has taken this long for players to finally start feeling safe to speak up for themselves has everything to do with the precarity that is enforced on professional women’s sports leagues. Prior to the NWSL’s era of relative stability, two different leagues tried and failed to create a foothold for the women’s game in the United States. The Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) and Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) played three seasons each, both buckling under public issues of costs and funding and more private concerns of mismanagement.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
. . . new revelations about former NBA players’ efforts to defraud the league? “18 Former N.B.A. Players Are Charged in $4 Million Insurance Fraud Scheme,” by Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich in The New York Times (October 7, 2021).
. . .what happens when oil money and soccer mix? “The Obscene Greed Behind the Saudi-backed Takeover of Newcastle United,” by Alex Shephard in The New Republic (October 8, 2021).
. . . the asymmetric nationalization of sports and politics? “The Team Heard Round the World,” by Jane Coaston in The New York Times (October 9, 2021).