{"id":3773,"date":"2015-06-11T06:33:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T06:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3773"},"modified":"2016-08-13T07:38:53","modified_gmt":"2016-08-13T07:38:53","slug":"will-womens-soccer-ever-have-a-mass-following-beyond-the-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/will-womens-soccer-ever-have-a-mass-following-beyond-the-world-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"Will women’s soccer ever have a mass following beyond the World Cup?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrei S Markovits<\/a>, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The recent FIFA scandals may have exposed soccer\u2019s sordid side, but two other major events have refocused the world\u2019s attention on the playing field.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, millions witnessed FC Barcelona\u2019s win over Juventus at the UEFA Champions League final in Berlin; and across the Atlantic, in Canada, the seventh FIFA Women\u2019s World Cup kicked off.<\/p>\n

While global soccer fans were more likely to tune into the Champions League final, one cannot discount the social and cultural significance of the Women\u2019s World Cup: in fewer than 25 years, it has emerged from obscurity to become a major international sporting event. And while questions remain about the sport\u2019s broad appeal beyond tournaments like the World Cup, the popularity of female club teams seems to be on the rise.<\/p>\n

A modest start<\/h2>\n

When the United States triumphed in the first Women\u2019s World Cup in China in 1991, few in the global soccer community beyond the US noticed. Most people probably didn\u2019t even realize the tournament had taken place.<\/p>\n

Held almost stealthily in late November during the middle of most men\u2019s soccer seasons, the muted (almost embarrassed) nature of this event was further marginalized by FIFA\u2019s reluctance to bestow its official \u201cWorld Cup\u201d brand on the tournament. Instead, FIFA called it the \u201cFirst FIFA World Championship for Women\u2019s Football for the M&M Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only 12 teams, divided into three groups of four, participated. Some organizers even proposed that women should play 80-minute games, as opposed to the standard 90-minute men\u2019s games, and use a smaller ball. (Both ideas were quashed.) For the first time, FIFA did use female referees; however, with the exception of the third-place consolation game, they all served in the role of assistant referee.<\/p>\n

A nascent sport blossoms<\/h2>\n

Still, the tournament was deemed successful enough to incorporate women\u2019s soccer into the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympic Games. Nearly 77,000 spectators watched the US defeat China for the gold medal in Athens, Georgia, making it \u2013 at least for the time being \u2013 the most-watched women\u2019s sports event in history.<\/p>\n

Three years later, this record was shattered when 90,185 people watched these two teams square off in the World Cup final in the Rose Bowl, with the US prevailing yet again. This official attendance figure remains the largest crowd in history ever to watch a women\u2019s sporting event.<\/p>\n

\"\"
In 1999, the women\u2019s US national team defeated China before a record crowd.<\/span>
\nReuters<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The collection of essays Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation: Kicking Off a New Era<\/a> highlights the unprecedented ascension of women\u2019s soccer between 1990 and 2003. Each of the chapters features a different country, but the story of women\u2019s soccer in these nations is virtually identical: at first, men derided and ridiculed women who attempted to play the game \u2013 in some cases, even banning them from participating. But in the 1980s, there was a shift in public attitudes, and female athletes were accorded more rights and more opportunities to play the game.<\/p>\n

As Steven L Hellerman and I argued in our contribution:<\/p>\n

Change has already arrived and will increase with the passage of time. Whether women\u2019s soccer will emerge victorious at the end of this transformative process nobody can tell with certainty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what\u2019s happened in the decade since we wrote those words?<\/p>\n

The best marker for a sport\u2019s maturation is the increased competitiveness and leveling of the quality of play among the contestants. Whereas the first few World Cups witnessed the domination of the United States, Norway, Sweden, Germany and China \u2013 with a clear dropoff in play by most other contestants \u2013 this year\u2019s tournament includes superb teams representing Australia, Canada, Brazil, France, Japan and the Netherlands. Many have even surpassed China, which has experienced a marked decline over the last few years.<\/p>\n

The current tournament has been expanded to include 24 teams; the venues in Canada \u2013- just like in Germany, four years ago \u2013 will be filled. All games will be televised internationally. Viewership is expected to be in the millions. Media reporting will be detailed, prompt and ubiquitous. And there will be large crowds gathering in public places to watch the games.<\/p>\n

What does the future hold?<\/h2>\n

By many metrics, soccer has become an immensely popular sport in the US. From youth levels to adult leagues, slightly more than 19 million Americans played the sport in some capacity. And ten years ago, soccer surpassed all team sports<\/a>, with the exception of basketball, in participation.<\/p>\n

But playing a sport has only a tangential relationship to watching it. Millions of people run, hike, bowl; yet very few follow these sports on a regular basis beyond tuning in to the Olympics every four years.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s quite likely that the majority of Americans who will be cheering for their team in Canada will do so because the players represent the US. In other words, most folks will be cheering for what Jerry Seinfeld so aptly called \u201claundry.\u201d Very few really know these players’ past performances for their clubs, their statistics or even their names.<\/p>\n

Rooting for laundry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Will the enthusiasm that this tournament will surely garner \u2013- especially among the fans of the tournament\u2019s best teams \u2013 carry over beyond the tournament\u2019s conclusion, and become a daily preoccupation, as it\u2019s become for many fans of men\u2019s clubs?<\/p>\n

The key to this lies not in women\u2019s soccer at the national level, but at the club level. It\u2019s the latter that plays regularly, sometimes even twice a week. National teams generate huge \u2013 but fleeting \u2013 attention, whereas club teams have a prolonged, sustained presence.<\/p>\n

For this reason, what delighted me much more than the crowds from the World Cup\u2019s first games were the 17,147 fans who attended the UEFA Champions League Final<\/a> between FFC Frankfurt and Paris Saint-Germain in Berlin\u2019s Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn Sportpark on May 13.<\/p>\n

To be sure, this was not Berlin\u2019s famed Olympic Stadium, where the men\u2019s final between Barcelona and Juventus drew nearly 75,000 spectators. But the trend of rising spectatorship for each of the 13 Champions League finals in women\u2019s soccer has been unmistakable, even if the average attendance rates<\/a> for weekly matches in Germany\u2019s top league barely exceeded 2,000 during this past year\u2019s campaign. (In many cases, attendance hovered in the three-digit range.)<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, with social media giving women\u2019s soccer an outlet that can circumvent the mainstream media\u2019s minimal coverage (now largely confined to the World Cup), the potential for the sport is very real.<\/p>\n

And with the sport making huge leaps in a mere span of 25 years, fans should be optimistic about the sport\u2019s continued growth over the ensuing two decades.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Andrei S Markovits<\/a> is Professor of Political Science and German Studies at University of Michigan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrei S Markovits, University of Michigan The recent FIFA scandals may have exposed soccer\u2019s sordid side, but two other major events have refocused the world\u2019s attention on the playing field. Over the weekend, millions witnessed FC Barcelona\u2019s win over Juventus at the UEFA Champions League final in Berlin; and across the Atlantic, in Canada, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":5897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3773"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5898,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3773\/revisions\/5898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}