Kicking Center

Rachel Allison

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813591315
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Girls and young women participate in soccer at record levels and the Women's National Team regularly draws media, corporate, and popular attention. Yet despite increased representation and visibility, gender disparities in opportunity, compensation, training resources, and media airtime persist in soccer, and two professional leagues for women have failed since 2000.In Kicking Center, Rachel Allison investigates a women's soccer league seeking to break into the male-dominated center of U.S. professional sport. Through an examination of the challenges and opportunities identified by those working for and with this league, she demonstrates how gender inequality is both constructed and contested in professional sport. Allison details the complex constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the selling and marketing of women's soccer in a half-changed sports landscape characterized by both progress and backlash, and where professional sports are still understood to be men's territory.

1

Women’s Soccer in the United States

The question of soccer’s cultural position in the United States sparks lively debate in both academic and public forums. This discussion often takes a turn toward the humorous, the juxtaposition of “soccer” and “America” a supposedly tickling oxymoron. Take, for instance, the satirical news site the Onion, which has made many a joke at soccer’s expense. Mention of soccer on the website in 2011 was located next to headings for football, hockey, and motorsports under the title “Women’s Sports/Soccer.” The humor here, of course, lies in the suggestion that soccer is somehow “unmanly,” a sport more closely linked to women and femininity than to more evidently masculine endeavors like ice hockey. The feminization of soccer emerged also in the site’s declaration a year earlier that soccer, at long last, was coming out of the closet. A video of a mock news conference featured an actor playing the part of an official from Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international organizing body for soccer. In the glare of camera lights, the actor declared, “Soccer is not ashamed of what it is. Soccer is a gay sport.”

The perceived emasculation of soccer is at the heart of the sport’s “ambivalent” status in American spectator sports culture.1 Those sports at the center of the nation’s preoccupation, such as American football, are linked to uniquely cutthroat forms of masculinity that reward the highest levels of force deployed by the male body.2 Soccer, in stark contrast, is often deemed a less competitive and physically demanding sport more appropriate as a form of recreation than as a legitimate contender for sports fan eyeballs. This denigration of soccer for its supposedly less-than-masculine attributes also coexists with perceptions of its national foreignness. For example, politically conservative public figure Ann Coulter published a web diatribe in 2014 that went viral for its claim that America’s pastime was no longer baseball, but “hating soccer.”3 In support of this claim, Coulter pointed to immigrants: “If more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.” Further, Coulter argued that the widespread inclusion of girls on coed recreational youth soccer teams across the nation was evidence of the sport’s weakness: “It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”

While this opinion is certainly extreme, designed to draw online traffic as much as to spark meaningful debate, it does point to the role that sports often play in broader cultural controversies. Despite the overlap of sports with leisure and entertainment, they are eminently social, both a reflection of the structures and inequalities that characterize our society and a place where these are actively built and contested. Beyond the formal rules of play, sports involve complex configurations of cultural meaning that construct the boundaries of social belonging.4 Gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, social class, and citizenship intersect as core components of the cultural meanings that sports possess. And the meanings attached to sports are not static but continually evolve with a sport’s development over time, its play across varying local, regional, national, and global contexts, and the actions of individuals and groups with particular interests and worldviews.5

In the United States, soccer has frequently become a tool to mobilize and assert political sentiment as part of national “culture wars.”6 Soccer has become “a powerful symbol in the struggle between those seeking to define America in their own image.”7 For some, like Coulter, a dislike of soccer is underpinned by an assumption that authentically American (and thus most valuable) sports are those linked to middle-class, white, U.S.-born, heterosexual masculinities. From this perspective, soccer is compromised because of its links to those outside of this frame as a “foreign, feminine, and adolescent” sport.8 Here, the roots of soccer’s supposed marginalization in the United States are its youth, its feminization, and a “residual ethnicity” that derives from its developmental origins outside of the United States and its popularity among immigrant and ethnic minority populations.9

In the academic literature, soccer’s “outsider thesis” explains the sport’s cultural marginalization somewhat differently. In their 2001 book, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, political scientists Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman locate soccer outside of “hegemonic” sports culture, which refers to “those very few team-anchored contests involving some kind of ball-like contraption that have come to comprise a cultural preoccupation bordering on obsession way beyond the actual contests produced on the field, arena, or rink.”10 Soccer, these scholars argue, was crowded out of hegemonic sports culture in the United States until very recently for three interrelated reasons.11 First, the much earlier development of baseball, American football, and basketball, as well as the widespread dissemination of these sports through the educational system, meant there was little room for soccer. Second, those who did play and watch soccer (primarily immigrant men) often valued the sport as distinctly un-American, a way of cultivating and maintaining ethnic ties.12 Third, soccer lacked a centralized organizational network.

Markovits and Hellerman’s elaboration of the historical roots of soccer’s cultural status remains one of the foremost analyses of the sport in the United States to date. However, historians and scholars of sport have also challenged this account on several points. For one, the proposition that soccer is a long-standing outsider gives short shrift to the sport’s rich U.S. history, which includes moments of popularity as well as obscurity.13 Since the publication of Offside, the assertion of soccer’s second-class status has decreasingly squared with evidence of the “gradual, dramatic rise of soccer in the landscape of American sports.”14 This rise was certainly evident during the 1994 World Cup, which took place in the United States. Despite some uncertainty as to the tournament’s reception, the World Cup was a resounding commercial success, with record game attendance. U.S. television viewership has increased for each subsequent World Cup, with the 2014 tournament in Brazil garnering 4.5 million U.S. viewers, up from 3.2 million in 2010.15 The television audience for the 2011 Women’s World Cup “averaged 13.458 million viewers, making it the most-watched and highest-rated soccer telecast on ESPN.”16 In 2012, the Luker on Trends and ESPN study of sports preferences found that “pro soccer” was rated the second most popular sport among young men ages twelve to twenty-four.17 The number of Major League Soccer (MLS) teams stood at twenty in 2016, with ten of its nineteen teams in 2012 earning profit.18 While MLS previously paid for their games to be available to a television audience, in 2014 ESPN, Fox Sports, and Univision signed an eight-year contract to broadcast MLS games worth $720 million total, a 900 percent increase on the league’s prior contract.19 These and other metrics demonstrate soccer’s rapid and recent growth in size, audience, and financial profile, a growth either ignored or downplayed by those who would continue to claim the sport’s total marginalization. In optimistic contrast, political scientist Glen Duerr interprets such statistics to indicate that soccer has definitively broken in to hegemonic sports culture to “become the fifth major team sport in the United States.”20

The outsider thesis is also limited in centering men’s soccer as most relevant to the contemporary cultural position of the sport. Ongoing discussion over whether the United States has or will accept soccer as a full member of its sports culture typically looks to the status of the men’s game, often using indicators from the U.S. men’s National Team, MLS, or European men’s leagues.21 Women’s soccer, in comparison, remains largely on the outskirts of academic and public debate, invoked (as in Coulter’s antisoccer screed) only sporadically to argue for the continued marginality of competitive soccer played by men.22 High levels of media and popular interest in women’s soccer, as during the 2011 Women’s World Cup, are argued to both reflect and reinforce the effeminate, and thus culturally marginal, status of soccer in the United States.

Within Markovits and Hellerman’s analysis, for instance, women’s soccer is purported to occupy a space of “exceptionalism,” with the U.S. Women’s National Team emerging as a global powerhouse because the sport has historically been marginal among men.23 As their argument goes, if soccer has been outside the powerful, resource-rich, and male-dominated center of American sports culture, then women have had more opportunity and support. One result of the space afforded to women in soccer has been the comparatively early development of the U.S. Women’s National Team program and, consequently, the early and ongoing competitive dominance of U.S. women on the global stage. In essence, the thesis of exceptionalism holds that women’s soccer has “snuck in” to a corner of U.S. sports culture precisely because, among men, it has often been secondary and small scale in the realm of mass spectator sport.24

As a corollary of the outsider thesis, the hypothesis of U.S. women’s soccer’s exceptionalism is also limited. Exceptionalism posits that women’s soccer has somehow “made it,” glossing over the inequalities that continue to present challenges for women’s soccer players, teams, and leagues. As sports historian Jean Williams queries, “In what ways has women’s soccer ‘succeeded’?”25 If professional soccer is the measure of success, then in fact the U.S. men are far more successful, while women “face a quite different set of career options.”26 As Williams argues, “In spite of mass participation and elite success, women’s football [soccer] remains separate and unequal in terms of resources, participation, and prestige.”27

In addition, the thesis of exceptionalism reflects an androcentric bias where the status of men’s soccer is believed to be the most influential factor determining the status of women’s soccer. Events within men’s soccer have undoubtedly shaped women’s soccer; for example, the profits of the 1994 World Cup helped fund the 1999 Women’s World Cup.28 However, the women’s game also has its own unique story within American culture. As evidenced by my opening this book with the 1999 U.S. Women’s World Cup victory, this story includes moments of extreme visibility and welcome reception; rather than understanding these as a function of American apathy for men’s soccer, however, they are a product of a far more complex set of social relations. And these runaway triumphs of Olympic and Women’s World Cup tournaments not only reflect but also create the cultural position of soccer in the United States, contributing significantly to recent gains in the sport’s visibility and popularity.29

Beyond outsiderness and exceptionalism, soccer in the United States is no longer the poorer cousin of football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey. It is a sport on the rise. I hold that women’s soccer, rather than playing second fiddle to the men’s game, has been central to the sport’s growing momentum. In the second half of the twentieth century, organized soccer for girls and women experienced unprecedented growth in tandem with many transformations to postwar American society. These changes included expansion of and increased enrollment in higher education, greater opportunities for women in education and the workforce, feminist activism, advocacy, and policy efforts to advance the equality of women with men, shifting family formation patterns and the expectations attached to parenthood, the racialized and classed geographic reorganization of society, and the formalization of youth sport. Together, these developments contributed to the rapid expansion of girls’ and women’s participation in soccer. At the same time, the sport became embedded in emergent processes of racial and class distinction among white, middle- and upper-class suburban families. It is these associations that helped move the sport of soccer toward the cultural mainstream.30 Soccer in the United States took on new layers of cultural meaning, splitting along a youth-amateur/adult-professional sport divide that was concomitantly aligned with gender, race/ethnicity, and social class. More recent associations of youth soccer with girls, whiteness, and class privilege have not displaced but coexist with earlier linkages of elite soccer to men, ethnic minority communities, immigrants, and the working class, with both constellations of meaning informing the contemporary cultural position of soccer in the United States.31

The individuals working for and with Women’s Professional Soccer I present in this book had routinely crossed between youth and professional soccer in their social roles as parents, friends, coaches, workers, and fans. Their experiences document the distinct set of cultural associations that operate within each of these soccer worlds in the United States. On the one hand, soccer has emerged as a culturally dominant and top participation sport for white, suburban, class-privileged girls. Today, girls and young women are easily accepted in soccer and resources are rarely lacking, although they may not be equivalent to the resources accorded boy’s and men’s soccer. In contrast, the women’s game remains somewhat more marginal at the professional level, where the sport retains associations with men, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and the working class, and gendered resource disparities are more profound. This firsthand experience with varied meanings across the landscape of soccer generated an acute feeling of uncertainty as to the potential for a stable, long-lasting women’s professional league in the United States. The very concept of a women’s and professional soccer league invokes privilege and marginalization, insiderness and outsiderness at once.

Women’s Soccer: Historical Development

In the second half of the twentieth century, soccer began to gain cultural associations with white, class-privileged suburban communities. Perhaps foremost among the factors producing these ties was the postwar migration of white, middle- and upper-class families to suburban areas. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of suburbanites grew from forty-one to seventy-six million, composing 37 percent of the U.S. population in 1970.32 As sport studies scholar David Andrews and his colleagues note, this large-scale geographic reorganization of society “wrought the most profound influence on differentiating the collective experiences of class and race.”33 The swelling suburbs were predominantly, though not exclusively, white and affluent, while cities retained concentrated minority populations that varied in social class. The overwhelming whiteness and wealth of the suburbs resulted from selection out of cities but was also solidified by a host of discriminatory formal and informal practices designed to exclude minority and poorer families, including “legal covenants, real estate practices, federal housing policies, private lending practices, and violent intimidation.”34

The growth of the suburbs signaled a new set of consumption and lifestyle practices whereby white, affluent families constructed belonging and community through differentiating themselves from what was urban and, by implication, from racial minorities and the poor and working classes. What was suburban was defined in explicit contrast to what was urban, with suburban modes of living communicating and solidifying the confluence of racial and class privilege. Emergent lifestyle practices served to unite “the fragmented subjectivities of America’s suburban population into a necessarily imagined normalized community, which underpinned the normality of whiteness.”35

Youth sports became enmeshed within these practices of racial and class distinction in the suburbs. Sports were uniformly believed to be beneficial to youth development, contributing to the physical, academic, and moral discipline that marked identity and worth among suburbanites.36 Youth sports participation also aligned with a class-based parenting style that sociologist Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.”37 As Lareau explains, middle- and upper-class parents seek to develop, or “cultivate,” their children’s abilities through organized activities, thus preparing them for future educational and occupational success. Furthermore, expectations for “intensive” mothering and “involved” fathering also pushed privileged parents toward time and resource investments in their children’s extracurricular activities.38

However, it was not just sports but competitive sports that suburban parents sought for their children. As sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman argues in Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, sports, as with competitive organized activities more generally, are believed to impart skills crucial to the future reproduction of class position among many white, affluent parents.39 Given widespread perceptions of risk and competition in education and the workforce, competitive activities are believed to give children the edge they need in the quest for achievement. In direct contrast to recreational youth sports p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Kicking Center
• Chapter 1. Women’s Soccer in the United States
• Chapter 2. Business or Cause? Contested Goals
• Chapter 3. We’re Taking Over! Constructing the Fan Base
• Chapter 4. Image Politics and Media (In)visibility
• Conclusion: Kicking Forward?
• Appendix A: Participant Demographic Information
• Appendix B: Methods
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author