Love is a Battlefield…and a Football Pitch

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved two things with my whole heart - France and US women’s soccer. In 2019, on a scholarship from UNC, I spent a joyous month traveling between Paris, Montpellier and Nice reporting on the US Women’s National Team’s road to its ultimate glorious victory over the Netherlands. Watching them claim their third star was heaven, tinged a bit around the edges by the team’s concurrent quest for equal pay.

It’s been a long time since then and a lot has changed, for the team and for me. For them, a new coach, new players, and equal pay. For me, graduation from UNC and a new life in Paris on a path seemingly different from my planned journalistic career. But despite all the changes, when the team announced that the world champions, USA, would take on the European champions, England, at Wembley Stadium, I queued online for five hours. Twenty-four hours after the tickets had been released and all 90,000 were sold - and I was lucky enough to hold four tickets to the match and a ticket to London from Paris via the Eurostar. 

In London, I met up with one of my friends from my time studying abroad and two of her new friends and together we formed a small entourage of Carolina alumni. We grabbed a pint before joining the steady stream of football fans squeezed into the tube heading to Wembley. We pushed our way through the crowds, gazing up at the giant posters of Lucy Bronze, Alessia Russo, and Lotte Wubben-Moy - all fellow former Tar Heels (not to mention their coach Sarina Wiegman and those on the American roster: Crystal Dunn and Emily Fox). With three of us splitting citizenship between the US and the UK, we debated whether we could get away with just cheering for Carolina.

It was an incredible moment in women’s soccer - a sold out match at Wembley. But as I listened to the roaring cheers that preceded the kick-off, the creeping internal conflict of loving the game while hating the US Soccer Federation nudged. The US Soccer Federation is abusive. It exploits its players, from the drawn out battle for equal pay to the latest development: an independent investigation revealing rampant abuse throughout the ranks of the NWSL, the women’s professional league in the US. The full ramifications of the report are still ongoing, but they were apparent even at that game. The players on both teams wore teal armbands to stand in solidarity with the sexual violence survivors.

As I explained this situation to my friends, one of the girls seated in the row in front of us turned around to join our discussion. She explained that she is an American who had chosen to support the English that night because she was so disgusted by the behavior of the NWSL and the complicity of the USSF. It was only later, as England scored the opening goal and her companions booed while she cheered, that I learned we were in fact sitting behind a group of Olympians who had skied (and even medaled) for the United States.

Even as the game started, I wrestled with the question of whether the USSF deserved to lose, or if its players deserved to win. But for better or for worse, soccer doesn’t care about who deserves what. As I watched my beloved USWNT (although missing quite a few of my favorites - don’t get me started on the starting lineup @Vlatko) battle against not only the opposing team but also a rowdy stadium of English fans, I decided I simply couldn’t turn my back on the team I so deeply love.

That love quickly turned to panic as I saw a team more disorganized and dysfunctional than I had ever watched before, except perhaps in the last Olympics. Sure, the English side looked good - they didn’t win the Euros for nothing. They cut through our defense seamlessly and it was pretty remarkable (and frustrating) to watch Lucy Bronze making plays up and down the sideline. There are some arguments to be made in the USWNT’s defense: the first being that there’s no chance in hell that Trinity Rodman’s goal was offsides. Maybe Vlatko is testing new players before the World Cup, though I’d argue that fielding an entirely new team doesn’t test the chemistry between the players he’ll ACTUALLY put on the roster come summer 2023. Or, if this is really the team we’re fielding, we have MAJOR issues! Injuries aside, I have to wonder where Abby Dahlkemper, Julie Ertz, Tobin Heath, Catarina Macario, Jessica McDonald, Sam Mewis, Alex Morgan, Kelley O’Hara, Mallory Pugh, and Lynn Williams factor in. We can count our three lucky stars that Sophie Smith is a magician at pulling goals out of thin air and that Hailie Mace didn’t earn a red card for her kick to Bronze’s face. But in the end, I can’t even argue that the English didn’t run the game - they had twice as many shots on goal, nearly three times as many passes and held 69% of the possession. It takes a lot for me to admit it, but they earned that win fair and square. Compound this with the evisceration of the US by Spain’s B team (with their A team missing due to a dispute within Spain’s federation regarding their coach), and I’m left feeling more than a bit uneasy about the Americans chances in the upcoming 2023 World Cup.

It’s easy to get lost in the game once the whistle blows, whether it’s losing your head screaming about a bad call or gazing in awe at a seamless string of passes that leave you wondering if the players can read each other's minds. I’m all in with my team - Bronze is no longer one of the most versatile players in the world, she DEFINITELY fouled our forward. Russo didn’t score one of the best blind goals the world has ever seen, she was DEFINITELY offsides. Ironically, when I saw that same mindset exhibited by English fans when they booed Rapinoe off the field, I seethed! Put some respect on her name! Hey, I never claimed to be unbiased. My emotions are never stronger than when I’m watching a football match - I’ve cried out of anger, sadness and joy, even all during one match. Once, I briefly stopped speaking to my dad after he argued that the ref was correct to take away a US goal (and I plead the fifth on whether he was, objectively, correct).

I idolize the USWNT players for their domination on the field and for their resilience off of it. But they are bearing burdens that they should not have to carry. And these problems extend beyond the US women’s team (again, check out what’s going on in Spain). For years, female athletes have suffered at the hands of those who control the sport, both the men who are inflicting the abuse and the women who are complicit. This is both horrifying and unacceptable. Even beyond the women’s game, the upcoming 2022 Men’s World Cup to be held in Qatar is rife with corruption; well, all of FIFA is really (I’ve been obsessed with the new podcast World Corrupt which digs deeper into the extent of the corruption).

But even knowing all of this, I waited five hours for those tickets and made an international trip for that game. And I’ll be there in New Zealand and Australia to watch my team win the 2023 World Cup (assuming Vlatko takes my advice)! So, I guess it all comes down to this question: how can we, ethically and morally, love something that is so flawed, so deeply?

The NWSL, the US Soccer Federation and FIFA must change and we must work to make it change. I’m not sure how to do that and for now, I only know that love is complicated - life in Paris should’ve taught me that.

xoxo,

Mat

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Summer in Europe