[image source: WBUR]

This morning, I watched the United States Women’s Soccer Team win their second World Cup in a row. If we’re being honest, they were barely challenged. The scorelines of some of the knockout games seemed close, but the games really weren’t. They breezed through the competition. There was not a single game I expected them to lose. I never doubted them.

As I’m writing this, the US Men’s National Team is gearing up to play Mexico in the final of the Gold Cup. That is a game I am fully expecting them to lose.

So that begs the question: what happened? Why is the women’s team so dominant in world soccer and the men’s team is, essentially, a laughingstock?

I have a couple of theories.

1. The competition is harder in Men’s soccer.

This might sound sexist, but it’s really not. Let’s just take a look at the World Cup. The first official Women’s World Cup happened in 1991. [source] Professional women’s teams didn’t really even get their start until the late 70’s and early 80’s.

But the Men’s World Cup has been played officially since 1930. Professional men’s soccer has been around MUCH longer than that. England was playing soccer in the 1800’s.

So, while the women’s game is still very much developing, the men’s game has over a century of history. The USWNT was able to launch with everyone else, the USMNT has been playing catch up.

2. There are more sports for men

There is a clear path to success for America’s most athletic male children. There are a variety of different avenues available to them. If you are insanely athletic, you can sort of take your pick (you have to be a genetic freak to be successful in the NBA, but the other sports are open to you). Very few kids would want to play soccer, a sport that doesn’t have a large market share in the U.S., if they could play in the NFL or in the MLB or any other sport that has dominated American attention.

Football, Basketball, and Baseball. That is what American sports stars play. They don’t play soccer. The majority of kids spend weekends watching college football and the NFL with their dads, they don’t early Saturday mornings watching the Premier League. They dream to be the starting QB, not scoring the winning goal in the World Cup.

So the “star-studded” sports are stealing our most athletic male kids. OBJ loved soccer and would have been a great soccer player, but the NFL and the promise of money and fame it brought stole his heart. So many of our star athletes would make great soccer players if they had trained for it nearly as hard as they trained for their respective sport. Most NFL running backs would have been phenomenal wingers. Any of the NBA players would’ve been fantastic goalies. Imagine the likes of Gronk or Travis Kelce as a center back.

Our most promising young athletes don’t want to play soccer, because the majority of our sports fans don’t care about soccer. If they are athletic enough, they can take their pick for any sport and soccer is not high on the list.

Now compare that to England or Spain or South America. For most of those countries, you either play soccer or you don’t play a professional sport. Sure, there’s rugby and cricket, but those do not have the same kind of passion that soccer has. If you are a sports fan over there, you are passionate about soccer. That’s just how it is. If you can be an athlete, you want to play soccer. The soccer players are the stars, they are the legends. That isn’t how it is in the U.S.

But it is for women. Think about it, what path to being a professional athlete exists for women? Sure, there’s the Olympics. Or the WNBA. But most of those require a certain body type and the Olympics isn’t exactly lucrative. If you are a young woman who is insanely athletic and wants to make a career as an athlete, soccer is the only choice. They don’t have the problem that the USMNT team has. The best athletes want to play soccer because that is just about their only option.

 

I don’t want this to seem like I’m diminishing the success of the USWNT in any way. Far from it. They have worked incredibly hard and I’m so thrilled for them. If anything, I wish the USMNT was anything like them. But I think there’s a noticeable disparity in the two team’s power-positioning.

There have been 8 Women’s World Cups. The U.S. has won 4 of them. There have been 21 Men’s World Cups. The U.S. finished 3rd in 1930 and hasn’t gotten close since. There’s a clear difference in the two programs. One is clearly outshining the other. Either of those reasons (or a combination of the both, most likely) could be why.