'History in the making'

Women's soccer conquers the U.S.

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Posted: Sunday July 11, 1999 01:34 PM

Brandi Chastain and the U.S. team put on quite a display, but a professional women's league may still be a long shot. AP

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- Twenty determined young women conquered America's traditional antipathy towards soccer this summer.

As the United States celebrates not only winning the Women's World Cup for a second time, but also hosting the world's best-attended women's sporting event ever, the euphoria of the past three weeks is giving way to hopes and fears for the future.

"The future of football [soccer] is feminine," said Sepp Blatter, president of soccer's world governing body FIFA even before the staggering success of the 1999 World Cup.

"Even in this macho-minded sport, there is progress," Blatter added.

Ticket sales for the World Cup totaled 650,000 -- dwarfing the 112,000 sold for the last Cup in Sweden in 1995 and reflecting an enthusiasm for the world's most popular sport in a nation many people had regarded as a soccer desert. The global television audience for the 32 World Cup matches contested by 12 nations was an estimated one billion.

Poised and personable, the athletes of Team USA became media darlings after years of obscurity and were the new heroines of scores of teenage girls more accustomed to cheering cute ice skaters or gymnasts than grass-stained soccer players.

"This is history in the making. There are bigger things happening here than just us winning a game," said striker Mia Hamm.

The numbers alone appear to support the confidence of Hamm and the men in suits who run FIFA, which says that about 30 to 40 million women around the world play organized soccer, including 7.5 million in the United States.

But much depends on the ability of the women's game to continue to attract corporate sponsorship and to move onto the world professional stage.

There are currently no high-profile professional soccer leagues for women anywhere in the world, and in many of the bastions of male soccer prowess, the women's game is a very poor relation.

China, runners-up to the United States on Saturday after an impressive run in the World Cup, has a division-one women's soccer league and a high-level tournament. But only 10,000 women in a nation of 1.2 billion people play soccer.

"Most fathers cannot accept girls playing soccer. It's the culture. Girls are supposed to be shy and studious and not so active," said Chinese striker Sun Wen.

In Norway, a professional league is "many years back," said Karen Espelund, general secretary of the women's Norwegian Football Association, adding that Norway's success in reaching the semifinals in the United States should boost the women's game there.

The U.S. Soccer Federation is conducting a feasibility study for the formation of a professional women's league, with a possible launch date in 2001.

Alan Rothenberg, former president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, says a pro-league is not just an option.

"We have to have a women's professional league in this country if we're going to stay at the top of women's soccer," he said.

But corporate America seems ambivalent, and some industry experts feel that the finest hour of the women's game has already come and gone.

"It has been a wonderful event. Nobody's losing money on it," said Nova Lanktree of Sports Celebrity Network. "And a month from now it will be a nice memory, just like the Olympics in 1996."

Tommy Kain, soccer brand manager at Nike which was one of 11 corporate sponsors of the 1999 WWC, acknowledges that the sport is healthy as far as participation is concerned.

"But they still have a fight ahead of them regarding television ratings, corporate sponsorships, licensed sales, global respect and editorial space," he said.

Marla Messing, chief organizer of the 1999 Women's World Cup, has already witnessed a minor miracle over the past three weeks. Perhaps it's not too ambitious to hope for another.

"This is an evolutionary process and not a revolutionary process," she said.

"If you take a country like the U.K. or Brazil, one thing they love is to see great football, no matter who is playing. When they see that women can play great football, I believe they will come round."

 

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