It’s been observed that the Brazilian women’s football team could use a little luck. They’ve been nearly to the top in some huge games, including the 2007 World Cup (in which they lost 2-0 to Germany) and 2004 Olympics (2-1 to the US in extra time).

But, alas, As Canarinhas find themselves in the group of death: Group B, which includes two-time World Cup champions Germany (their first opponent), very solid North Korea, and the talented Nigerian side – the latter is the best African women’s team, with a lot of desire and a lot of women playing in European leagues (this may be the group in which more players have experience playing with and against each other in their club sides).

The top two teams in each of the three groups advance, as well as the two best third place teams. In Group B that should be Brazil and Germany. If Brazil holds their own against Germany in the opener (August 6), they might take the whole thing – you can make your own luck if you have the confidence, and a good performance against Germany could shift Brazil’s sense of itself as the perennial underdogs.

For a good introduction to what’s at stake in that opening match, check out this video (from ole ole) of the award ceremony closing the World Cup: You’ll get a briefing on the best players of the two teams. You will also see the Brazilian women holding up a sign that says, in Portuguese, “We Need Support” (at about 12:20) as they file past FIFA officials and pose for the cameras.

In an October 2007 post New York Times blogger Jeff Klein describes a letter sent by the women to their national federation after the World Cup (you can see it here on O Globo’s site). It responds to their federation’s public statements of support for the team given their outstanding performance in the 2007 World Cup. The women point out that the federation made similar promises in 2004, when they nearly beat the US in the competition for the gold medal, and that they had still not been paid award money from their win in the Pan American games. They point out how little money they earn as a per diem, and the lack of staff support for the team. Like perhaps a majority of women involved in the game (especially outside the US), the players were quite cynical concerning official statements about the federation’s interest in their game – they’d heard it all before.

The story of their team is incredible, and it is the number one reason why every football fan regardless of gender should give the women’s game some of their time this summer. Imagine growing up in the country that loves football the most – where futebol shapes the texture of every aspect of one’s life. Where playing futebol offers one of the richest senses of pleasure and belonging available to you. Where the lore is about the child from the favelas who becomes a god rich as Croseus and known the world over by a single name. And, you are the best player anyone has ever seen.

But you are a girl! There’s no league system, and during your childhood there is not even national team. Growing up, you’ve been told that playing football will make you look like a man – it will make you ugly. You don’t know the name of a single woman player beyond the odd girls in your own neighborhood. Take being a black athlete in a racist culture and square that if you want to grasp how hard it is to develop your talent. You don’t even have segregated games to turn to. You are vulnerable to every violence prejudice has to offer. You don’t give a shit, because you are a genuine freak. It makes you tougher. You love the game so much, and play so well, people forget you are a girl. People play YOU. It’s a great feeling. You play with boys until local associations force your manager to take you off the roster – something the manager is loathe to do, because you are so much better than the rest. Which is, of course, why they noticed you were there in the first place.

The shitty thing for girl footballers the world over is that you can get away with playing on boys teams – as long as you don’t offer them any competition. The minute you do, they want you off the pitch. God forbid you should be the best player that local league has ever seen. I swear, having that kind of talent as a young woman footballer is like having a target around your neck. It’s a gift and a curse. But by some outrageous combination of good luck and blind determination, you end up playing in a different environment – like Sweden – where your talent is both accepted and nurtured, and where playing football as a woman doesn’t carry quite the stigma it does elsewhere – like in, say, England. But, now you play in the snow. A lot of the women in the Olympics have this kind of story – Marta‘s story being the most famous (for more, see Alex Bellos’s Observer profile).

Women’s football isn’t just not supported in many countries – it’s undermined by national federations for whom managing the game is more about keeping women in their place than it is about celebrating their football culture as it is embraced by both men and women.

On this point: at least the Brazilians are IN the Olympics. We can’t say the same for England – who had arguably the best game in the 2007 World Cup against the eventual German champions (0-0 draw in an early match). The top three European teams in the World Cup should have gained an automatic place in the Olympics, but the disorganization of the women’s game as it is managed by national associations led to England’s exclusion.

The FA associations associated with Great Britain (Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales) have been in dispute about forwarding a GB squad. The problem involves baroque conflicts between the FIFA and Olympics rules (see this BBC story), and issues relating largely to the men’s game.

Even with reassurance from FIFA that the formation of a Great Britain squad would not jeopardize the status of, for example, Scottish internationals, the FAs refused to cooperate. Because of this, the women playing in the United Kingdom can’t participate in the Olympics (for more on this, go here). The impact of this is much, much bigger on the women’s game of course. An Olympic team benefits from lottery money (see this Telegraph story). Had these FA associations supported the team’s bid, these women might have actually been able to play football for a living. British Sports Minister Richard Caborn railed against the injustice of this: “That these nearly all-male organisations can deny their women footballers the chance to play in the Olympics is beyond belief.” Glad he said it, so I don’t have to.

What does this have to do with the Olympics? English women play in a very competitive league and, like Brazilian women, live in a culture that lives, breathes, and, well, shits football. A large portion of the English national team plays for the same club (Arsenal) and know the world’s top players because half of them play in Europe. They had a much better shot at medaling than most of the teams in Beijing. It shows how the limited commitment from national organizations is a giant drag on the development of the game.

Returning to the teams that will be there: I am rooting for Brazil because they are willing to do something like carry a sign displaying how angry they were when they walked across the awards podium. That wasn’t just for them – that was for all the women in their country who have talent and want to use it. And they might as well have been speaking for the Lionesses as well, who made similar complaints to the FA about the shameful support they got on their own World Cup bid.

As Canarinhas didn’t hide their disappointment at losing to Germany with fake smiles. They don’t feel grateful just for the privilege of being there. They feel entitled to the big trophy. Call me crazy, but I think that attitude is a good one. I like seeing women go crazy when they win, and look visibly pissed off when they lose.

Nobody just gives you what you want and need: you have to know how to ask for it, work for it, and sometimes you just have to take it because no matter what you do, people don’t think you should have it. They are bad ass footballers, through and through. It’s high time they took a champion’s medal home. Or back to Sweden.

Jennifer Doyle writes at From A Left Wing. This article was first published on 23 July 2008 on her blog here.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

I watched the Women’s World Cup final with my aunt in her living room. I watched the semifinal match between Brazil & USA in a sports bar in France (pictured, Christiane fighting off Natasha Kai). I caught the televised second half of the 1999 final in Pasadena, but I don’t know where I was, or how I happened to catch it. I do remember that I kept switching channels, because the tension was too much – scoreless, the game famously went to penalty kicks, and the tension of watching that was excruciating!

Watching the 2007 games was qualitatively different — because in between 1999 & 2007 I started playing.

The experience of watching soccer on television is much more intense now that I play. When I watch now, I have very mixed feelings — I get caught up in the drama of the match, of course, but I also wish deeply that I could play like the people on the screen. And I want to be playing at that moment.

That desire can be so intense that my limbs begin to very nearly act like they’re playing — I’m like a sleeping dog dreaming about chasing rabbits. My feet are restless, my legs want to run – the most powerful sensation of watching football is this feeling of being physically hailed by the game. This is even worse at a live match — if I’m sitting near the pitch, it’s all I can do to restrain myself from jumping onto it.

This experience is new to me. I suppose this is how lots of people who play must feel about watching — enthralled, caught up in it, there, but hyper aware too that they are not there. The embodied memory of playing is a complicated gift: It gives you both the ability to feel what it feels like to play (and thereby get even more involve with the action), and an awareness of the real difference between you and the those on the pitch.

I am ashamed to admit that I really thought that watching sports was a relatively passive thing — but watching a soccer game is a lot like watching a really good suspense film, or reading an engrossing novel. Time seems to stand still and race by, you forget you are where you are, you are instead projected outwards with your interest — you are in the stands, on your couch, but somehow not. Somehow, you are there. Your heart races, palms sweat — watching a great game is almost unbearably exciting. But behind all of that excitement is a bittersweet sadness about that gap between us and them.

Sitting on the bench must be just awful (right: goalie Hope Solo, famously benched for the 2006 WC semi-final match mentioned above). I don’t have a lot of experience with this, as most of my league experience has been in games with unlimited “rolling substitution”, so you come off to catch your breath, and go back on when someone else begins to tire. (Using rolling substitutions well is itself a fine art.)

But sitting on the bench as a highly skilled player who lives and breathes the game must be a real test of character. How not to sour? How not to get bitter and resentful? How to stay loose, and positive? Because the darker your mood, the more likely you are to stay on the sideline. Your bitterness would make you more and more static, and make you more and more leaden. You would become a stone.

Fred Poulet and Vikash Dhorasoo (pictured right, fighting off the hardest working man in show business, Franck Ribéry) explore this awful dynamic in their collaborative film Substitute about Dhorasoo’s time on the bench during the 2006 World Cup (film still below right).

It’s an incredible document — started with no idea that Dhorasoo (who played in all of the qualifying matches leading up to the world cup) would serve the team as a sub who never takes the field, or that France would advance all the way to the final match which would then become famous for Zidane’s startling “coup de boule“.

We experience that amazing summer isolated from everything that made it amazing — security is very tight, Dhorasoo can’t film training, etc. — so he keeps a personal diary of sorts, measuring his increasing depression and resentment, as well as a heroic effort to keep those feelings in check.

I don’t know if I could have understood that film until I’d begun playing myself: Because until I’d taken the field myself, I wouldn’t have understood the difference between a film made from the perspective of a fan, and a film made from the perspective of a player — and in case of the latter, there is no substitute for actually being in the game.

And with that, below is a rather melancholy YouTube homage to M. Dhorasoo – set to Velvet Underground. I think this footage is from a 2006 classic match between Paris St. Germain & Olympique Marseille – Dhorasoo’s was the winning goal, and it was delivered on a Sunday.

Jennifer Doyle writes on From A Left Wing.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Those of you who have never played organized coed soccer (mixed football) will be surprised to learn that in some coed leagues (e.g. UC San Diego’s intramural leagues) your team wins 2 points when women score. First time I heard that (while playing one weekend in a coed 5 aside league in Santa Monica, CA) I was shocked and offended – until I took the field and saw that there was always at least one woman playing forward.

My admittedly casual research suggests that this rule is largely confined to “weekend warrior” leagues with a fair amount of inexperienced players (all coed leagues have rules about the ratio of men to women on the field, and ban or severely restrict slide tackles). Generally, when men and women are left to organize themselves, women end up in the goal and playing back. Put twenty two men and women on the field for a kickabout, and nearly every woman on a team will volunteer to play goalie before even half the men will have done the same. Regardless of experience, women will step into the box before men: This of course goes against all that people tend to think about femininity — the mentally and physically toughest position has got to be goalie, requiring a willingness to take ultimate responsibility, to confront attacks, to throw your body in the path of that attack. (An aside: Most people who used the uneven goal keeping at the World Cup to argue that ‘the women’s game will never be as entertaining as the men’s’ didn’t watch the final, and have never actually seen what women can do with just a fraction of the support and training available to their male counterparts. This was the subject of a great blog entry by David James. If you want to see a fierce woman goalie, check out the aptly named German keeper Nadine Angerer – best in the world – pictured above left successfully blocking a penalty from Marta in the last World Cup. ARGH.)

Anyway, among us amateur coed players, the division of labor that assigns women to the back four happens only because we all often place defense in the same category as washing dishes, and making the boys in the office a pot of coffee. Many men drift up, many women drift back in spite of themselves.

Personally, I started off playing defense and am still most comfortable with it — not because that’s where my limited skills lie, but because it’s the easiest role for me to play on a team. I like feeling helpful, supportive — I find it hard to put myself forward with the confidence of a goal scorer. I also like taking the ball away from people, I like the challenge, and I like the collaborative aspect of defense (you have to communicate with everyone else holding the line). I am a big Michelle Akers fan (pictured left, check out her autobiography) – there’s nothing like the level-headed, single-minded focus of a great defender to inspire a whole team. But if I don’t play up, I don’t learn if I can play up.

Anyway, leave it to social habit, and you’ll have co-ed games with men up front, and women on the back four: A bad idea with broken bones. Defense is really physical — especially when you have a lot of inexperienced players on the field, in an un-refereed game. You can take real beating — on average, guys are bigger, heavier, and have physics on their side. And, when you really get into the game, everyone forgets this — it’s hard to remember, “shit, if I really tackle him, I’m going to break my ankle”, or, “if I kick the ball as hard as I can at her, I might break her arm”. Fact is, in a good, hard game men and women play each other as people — we forget ourselves, and our differences – and unless everyone has a good skill level, there’s a lot of ugly tackling and dangerous play.

Furthermore, if you don’t have an outside mechanism pushing against habit, teams don’t play the ball to their own women players. People (men and women) on coed teams tend not to “see” women players — even when they are calling for the ball. This habit is harder to break than one might think.

THIS is why many lower-level coed leagues give women 2 points — not because it’s harder for women to score, but because without giving men and women a material incentive, neither gender will pass the ball to the women on the team, and neither team will place women on the forward line (even though, in the United States, many women playing in such leagues are more likely to have played competitive soccer through high school and college than their male teammates).

I learned the truth of this by playing on women’s teams after a long time of playing in co-ed situations. You get more time on the ball, and there’s also more pressure on you — you can’t drift in and out of the game. It’s both more fun (because you can play a lot harder against people your own size) and more stressful (because you are given more responsibility).

Interestingly, coed play is a relatively new idea here in the UK (see FA site statement about the topic and a 2006 Guardian story)- partly because there is so little out there for girls and women in general. Girls can play with boys until they are 11 (the FA is experimenting with changing this), at which point they are disallowed from playing with boys (other countries, like Germany, allow girls to play with boys up to 17). There seem to be very few adult coed leagues out there – the whole idea poses some interesting challenges to the UK footie fan.

Coed soccer is harder to organize than single-sex soccer, but it has some real rewards – I think we learn a lot about each other, about collaboration, about the integration of differences into a team. I think it does us gals good to compete with and against men, and vice-versa. (See Honolulu Advertiser story about coed play – from which the image right was pulled.)

I played with friends in a weekly kickabout for four years in Los Angeles, and we never instituted 2-point rule – we’d never heard of it, and would never have entertained it. None of us would have stomached it – least of all the women. We work out the division of labor together – and over four years of playing together and processing what it means to keep the game mixed and open, we’ve built up a good sense of each other’s strengths, and how to create a game that gets everyone involved (like a three touch rule).

In a world in which sexism didn’t exist at all, in which it didn’t inform how men and women think about themselves and each other, no coed league would need that “2 point” rule — teams would choose their line-up by skill and size. Until that day arrives, however, I’m happy to hear guys shouting to their back 4: “Mark the girl! Mark the girl!”

First published at ‘From a Left Wing‘.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Before Christmas, the media here in England was whipping itself up into a froth over what has become known as Manchester United’s “Rape Party” – a private-ish holiday bash for which players paid a planner to “harvest” cute girls from the city’s shops, sidewalks, and bars.

WAGS were left at home as the guys (a few pictured here, ripped from The Sun‘s website) went from a strip club (where they could never have behaved as they would later on), to a bar, to a hotel they’d rented out for the night (see standard tabloid story by The Mirror). Newspapers here recited tales of players groping and molesting their guests, and settled on their favorite story – of a woman who was “roasted” by six players, who left her with the compliment that she was “a great shag.”

The night took a predictable turn when a rape was reported to the police – and here, of course, the story gets murky: a 26 year-old model reported having been raped by a 19 year-old player (who was “quizzed” by police and released). The truthfulness of her complaint is now, again predictably, in dispute. Rumors abound that her boyfriend had been thrown out of the party, and was the person who phoned the police. The scandal has died down: Man U won its games following this event, seems in form as a team, and that’s that. Few seemed genuinely bothered by the fact that money which flows to the team from fans is being used to fund the worst impulses of a bunch of spoiled assholes who can’t imagine bonding with each other unless it is via and through the body of some woman they’ve “used” together.

Sir Alex Ferguson has said very little – word is he’s banned parties, but the party line is that it’s a “club matter”.

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The American Parallel

Americans will recognize the harmony between this event and the party thrown by Duke University Lacrosse players last year and the ensuing fiasco as the local authorities and university used this event to exorcise themselves of past demons. The call to the cops was in that instance placed by a stripper who had been hired to perform. The charges from that case were eventually dismissed – but not before her complaint surfaced the obscene racism and sexism of the culture of that team and that campus. At the very least, those young men managed to transform bad judgement (in throwing a wild party and hiring strippers, etc.) into an intensely abusive and creepy display of entitlement.

This story looks only slightly less complex, but even more offensive. Duke, as far from perfect as it is, is not an unreflective embodiment of patriarchy in and of itself – Duke has as many women students as men, anti-discrimination policies in hiring, and was recently led by a woman president. Racism and sexism thrive within its walls, but the extreme versions of those attitudes manifested by players on that team do not represent the institution’s public face, or even its present mission. Manchester United, on the other hand, is a men’s organization – with some under 16 coaching as window dressing. The story of this party has been swallowed up by indifference to the ways that it reminds us of just what a patriarchal culture looks like.

As scandalous as it is to admit, I can understand why someone might make a false rape accusation. Most of the people attending that party have little opportunity to consider what feels exploitative, abusive, disempowering and why – and what avenues are available to them to protest and resist the behavior, and the attitudes that behavior manifests. What avenue is there really for anyone at a party like that to complain? To register their sense of outrage? Someone had a right to protest – and why not one of the women’s boyfriends? Frankly, that’s the kind of man I wouldn’t mind having as a friend. That party had all the hallmarks of the kind of thing at which people are victimized – at which, at the very least, a woman’s consent is used an excuse for the abuse of power.

I would like to imagine a football club whose culture produces both fiercely competitve athletes, and compassionate people. The two can and do go together. But to get from here to there would take a fair amount of self-examination – some real work.
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From Ladies Teams to Xmas Parties: a Manchester Continuum

Now, here’s my cross: I think the disaster of that party is on a continuum with the events that led to Manchester United’s abandonment of its women’s team (2005′s squad is pictured left). Yes, you read me right: There is no Manchester United women’s team. Manchester City (pictured right) however, does have one (the Man City ladies), and seems most proud of the fact!

Man U ladies were disbanded by the organization in 2005. The disbanded team played most of its life outside the organization’s umbrella – they formed in 1979 as “Manchester United Supporters Club Ladies” – this group eventually became founding members of the North West Women’s Regional Football League in 1989, and enjoyed increasingly competitive seasons at varying levels until they were brought into Man U, which had been running schools for girls through its community development programs. Some of the players in the disbanded team had come up through this system. Man U is required by law to offer training for girls in order to run a school for boys – and one gets the sense this is the ONLY reason they train girls at all.

Incredibly, in the letter sent to players informing them that the team was disbanded – and that they couldn’t play even on their own under the name – the organization’s leaders explained that it had never been their ‘intention to become involved in women’s football at a high level’. In his 2005 article for the Salford Advertiser, Tony Howard cites a Man U spokesman: “We have always made it clear the ladies’ and girls’ section was about community partnership and education rather than establishing a centre of excellence. Ultimately the hope is the boys will progress to the first team. So naturally more resources are put into that area because it is our core business.”

Enough said – women’s soccer is only as good as a side show. According to the May 2005 Man U shareholder’s newsletter, Hayley Bates (pictured here on the right), saw the dismantling of the team as the final expression of “a pattern of a lack of respect for the women and sexual discrimination since the inception of the women’s department.” The team members were given plastic water bottles as a send-off.

As I know the Man U guys in the office and on the pitch wouldn’t listen to anything that felt at all feminist-y, I would recommend they watch a couple of films about women athletes – like Dare to Dream: The Story of US Women’s Soccer, an HBO documentary about the US team that won the world cup in penalty kicks before a statium audience of 90,000.

Or This Is a Game Ladies, about top ranked Rutgers University Women’s Basketball team and their inspiring coach C. Vivian Springer (these women were infamously the subject of racist/sexist remarks from radio host Imas, who very much picked on the wrong group of woman – check out a recent highlight of their season here).

Anyway, what if Man U players make a point of talking to the women who play football in Manchester – Why not begin to learn about women by learning about women who have a lot in common with male athletes, but who enjoy none of their privileges?

The women of Manchester have a right to expect the city’s men to take an interest in their side – not just to defend it, but to, in fact, fight for it. FC United, the fan-owned club formed in 2005 by disgruntled Man U fans (wary of the new American owner Glazer whose takeover coincides with the axing of the women’s team) should, according to their website, be forwarding a ladies’ side about now. I look forward to seeing them in action.
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About the Author

Jennifer Doyle writes a blog from the unique point of view as a woman who plays (currently in a London league), who has a feminist perspective on the beautiful game, and expertise in amateur football in the Los Angeles.

There isn’t much sustained soccer commentary from a feminist perspective, there’s very little writing about amateur football, and most of the press in the football (UK)/soccer (US) is ill-informed. As Jennifer says herself: “My blog inhabits these odd corners in the field (excuse the pun).”

For more information visit From A Left Wing .

From Soccerlens.com - Football News