The National Team Page 3
The women remember being paid a $10 per diem when they were with the national team domestically and $15 when they traveled abroad. At the same time, the men’s national team received a $25 daily stipend. The women ate only during team meals and then squirreled away their per diem so they’d have something to show for their trips with the national team.
“We were getting $10 per day. There was absolutely no ulterior motive other than dying to represent your country,” says Tracey Bates, who earned 29 caps, or game appearances, between 1987 and 1991. “There was real purity in that.”
Before the 1991 World Cup tournament started, the federation bumped up the stipend for the women to $1,000 a month—at least while they were in camp. But that small stipend didn’t change the fact of the matter: To compete in the tournament, players were spending money to be part of the team, not making it. Time with the team meant leaving jobs that paid livable wages and sacrificing the opportunity to advance in whatever career they had started outside of soccer.
“This team has probably given up more money for this run at the World Cup than any team ever,” Michelle Akers told reporters in 1991. “The players have all quit their jobs two or three times. Nobody has any money.”
Carin Jennings, the Golden Ball winner of the 1991 World Cup, was one of them. Unlike the younger players at the tournament, such as Julie Foudy and Mia Hamm, Jennings was out of college and needed to make a living. She had a marketing job in Irvine, California, but when she asked for a three-month leave of absence for national team duty, her employer said no. She quit so she could keep playing and compete in the 1991 World Cup.
“Carin quit multiple jobs to continue on with the team. Thank god—she was so amazing for us,” Bates says with a laugh. “She just chose to make the national team her priority. It was kind of the running joke: Well, Carin quit another job!”
Many players made ends meet by continuing to live with their parents after they finished college or, if they were married, relying on their spouse’s income. But after a while, some players just couldn’t do it anymore. They were making little money, and they didn’t know if they would ever make more, even as they tried to juggle national team duties and their careers.
For Shannon Higgins, it was becoming more and more difficult to leave her job as a coach at George Washington University for short stints to play for the national team. She could’ve moved back in with her parents, but she didn’t want to keep putting her future on hold. At just 23 years old, right after winning the 1991 World Cup, she retired from playing soccer—not because she wasn’t good enough anymore but because she couldn’t keep scraping by.
“If I moved back home with my parents and got a waitressing job, I could’ve probably been okay, but that wasn’t where I wanted to be,” Higgins says. “I was trying really hard to make the ends meet at that time. I either had to commit myself to the next four years or walk away.”
And so she walked away.
Every player has to call it quits at some point—April Heinrichs was forced to retire after the 1991 World Cup due to injuries—but being broke shouldn’t be the reason for it. The injustice of seeing talented teammates quit playing the game they loved—a game they were so good at—planted an idea in the minds of the players who were able to stick around. They needed to take control of their own futures.
“If you didn’t have a means to supplement it, then a lot of players decided they were going to retire,” Julie Foudy says. “That’s what got us thinking this way in the first place. I remember thinking: This does not seem right. Players have years and years of time left in them to play physically and mentally but are having to make an economic decision.”
That eventually led to the first big, public fight the players had with U.S. Soccer.
* * *
By the time the 1996 Olympics were set to be played in Atlanta, Georgia—the first time women’s soccer would be an Olympic sport—the U.S. national team was the favorite to win gold. Even though they fell short at the 1995 World Cup, coming in third, expectations remained high.
As such, the U.S. Soccer Federation, which paid them $1,000 per month when they were in camp, would offer a bonus only if the women won a gold medal. The women were outraged—the men had been offered a bonus for any medal, and the women wanted the same.
The players didn’t know how to respond until they gained some inspiration from a fellow athlete in another sport: tennis legend Billie Jean King. At a small closed event hosted by the Women’s Sports Foundation, Julie Foudy was one of eight female athletes who sat down to exchange stories and ideas. Foudy listened intently as King talked about the fight within tennis for women to be paid equally to the men, and a lightbulb went off for Foudy.
“I was like, Oh my god, that’s us,” Foudy remembers. “We’re going through the same problems.”
If anyone was going to take the story from Billie Jean King and run with it, it was Foudy. Her teammates nicknamed her “Loudy Foudy,” and she jokes that as the youngest of four kids growing up in San Diego, California, she learned to speak up for herself from a young age. When Reebok later approached her about endorsing their soccer balls, Foudy wanted to know how they were made first and visited Pakistan to tour the manufacturing facilities herself. She wasn’t one to quietly brush things aside.
In other words, Julie Foudy was a team captain for a reason. On the plane ride back from the event with Billie Jean King, all she could think about was how the team was about to sign a new contract with U.S. Soccer that didn’t improve working conditions and didn’t offer them anywhere remotely near what the men were paid.
So, after that meeting with the Women’s Sports Foundation, she called King to ask her how the national team could get the federation to listen to them.
“You just don’t play. That’s the only leverage you have,” King told Foudy. “They depend on you, you’re representing them, you make them money, and you have to say no.”
And that’s exactly what the veteran players did.
Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm, Briana Scurry, Michelle Akers, Joy Fawcett, Kristine Lilly, Carla Overbeck, Carin Jennings, and Tisha Venturini rejected U.S. Soccer’s offer for a contract for 1996, and the nine players did not attend a training camp in December 1995, just months away from the Olympics.
Hank Steinbrecher, U.S. Soccer’s secretary general, told reporters that the players were being greedy, quipping that they were more worried about lining their pockets—or, rather, shoes.
“Our team is favored to win it all and we cannot award mediocrity,” he told the media. “It seems some players are more concerned about how green their shoes are, instead of bringing home the gold.”
When a reporter asked him what he meant by that, he added: “Bonuses are paid for superior performance. Our expectation is to be playing for the gold and winning it. That’s where the bonus should go.”
Steinbrecher’s comments incensed the players. Their resolve to boycott the Olympics if necessary was only strengthened. Michelle Akers responded in the press by calling an Olympic boycott a “definite reality.”
“If we medal or win, the opportunities for our sport will be wide open,” she told reporters before a media blackout between the two sides. “We understand how big the Olympics are. We hope the federation keeps that in mind.”
The U.S. Soccer Federation seemed baffled by how difficult the players were being. From Steinbrecher’s view, the federation had increased its spending on the women’s program and spent more than other countries did around the world on women’s programs.
“They didn’t understand the level of angst happening among the group,” Foudy says, “especially because you had a team that had been together for so long. You have some teams that play together for a couple years and then they cycle off. But this group, we’d been through everything together for a while.”
Foudy adds: “We’d joke in the beginning, Oh, it builds character. But by the end, it was like, Okay, I am up to my fucking eyeballs in character.”
For players like Brandi Chastain and Shannon MacMillan, who had fallen out of favor and didn’t make the 1995 World Cup team, it was a chance to earn their way back into the fold.
Chastain had struggled with back-to-back ACL tears, but was determined to get back on the national team. She had been carefully monitoring every detail—her diet, her sleep, her training—and waited for an opportunity to return. Even though accepting a call-up made her a “scrub” or a “scab,” her former teammates were supportive. Julie Foudy encouraged her to go.
MacMillan had been on a similar path. After she lost her spot on the national team, she went back to Portland, Oregon, and sobbed in the office of Clive Charles, her former college coach. Once she was finished crying, he told her: “All right, I’ll see you this time tomorrow, and I’m going to kick your butt in training.” She was confused. She had been told she didn’t have a spot on the national team, and she also didn’t have a club or school to play for. What would she be training for?
“You’re going to have an opportunity, and you’re going to be ready for that opportunity,” he told her sternly. “So, you have 24 hours to mope and feel sorry for yourself, and then I’ll see you on the field.”
At their first national team camp since being cut, Chastain and MacMillan played well while the veterans were locked out. Coach Tony DiCicco saw a spot for both of them on the team—but not at their usual positions. Both had been forwards all their lives, but if they wanted to play for the national team, that was about to change. DiCicco told Chastain she’d need to become a defender while he told MacMillan she had to move to the midfield. Both players agreed and never looked back.
Months after the dispute started, the federation and the locked-out players reached a compromise. The women would receive a bonus if they won gold or silver. The men still got bonuses for winning gold, silver, or bronze, but at least the women were no longer limited to just gold.
Of course, they won gold anyway, which was worth a $20,000 bonus each for the players—and both Chastain and MacMillan were among them—but being heard by U.S. Soccer was a small victory that would prepare them for the clashes to come.
DiCicco, the team’s beloved coach, generally stayed out of money matters. After all, it wasn’t his place. But he did tell U.S. Soccer: “If you want this team to achieve special things, you’ve got to treat them special.”
CHAPTER 3
“Screw You, We’ll Show You Differently”
When the national team’s bus got snarled in traffic midday on the way to Giants Stadium, that’s when the players knew something special was happening. At first they didn’t realize it, but the gridlock was caused by an unprecedented groundswell of fans flooding into the stadium to see the opening of the 1999 Women’s World Cup—and it was only a sampling of what was yet to come.
The tournament would go on to be a pivotal moment in history, one that changed the sports landscape of the United States forever. It was unprecedented in its scale and its reach, with records for TV ratings and attendance shattered. Millions of people—young and old, male and female, in the United States and abroad—saw women athletes in a new light.
But before that happened, few people believed it was possible—and the naysayers had been loud.
Julie Foudy was sitting in front of a room full of reporters in San Jose, California, for the World Cup draw months before the tournament was set to begin. Carla Overbeck, her national team cocaptain, was seated at a table with her in front of a wall of cameras, ready to take questions. The first one came from Jamie Trecker, an ESPN columnist.
He stood up and suggested the players and the World Cup organizing committee were lying about ticket sales. They were trying to position the Women’s World Cup as a major world event but, as he later put it, “I don’t see any evidence that the world cares.” The organizers, he theorized, were making a mistake by trying to make the event about more than just soccer.
“Good way to start off the press conference,” Foudy quipped.
Overbeck smiled politely and jumped in. “Well, we still have six months to go, and we think people will show up,” she said. “And we do think it’s bigger than soccer. It’s empowering in a lot of different ways, and that’s why we play.”
For the 1999 Women’s World Cup to be a success, a defiant approach needed to be taken against the naysayers, whether they were journalists or executives at the highest rungs of the sport. FIFA, the all-powerful governing body that oversees soccer throughout the world, didn’t see much potential in a Women’s World Cup. Initially, they vehemently opposed putting games in large, marquee venues like Giants Stadium.
FIFA had already made the men’s World Cup one of the most profitable sporting events on the planet, but by 1999, expectations were still low for the Women’s World Cup. The women’s tournament had been hosted only twice before, and both times it was relatively small.
By 1995, FIFA finally called the tournament the FIFA Women’s World Cup—no longer the “FIFA World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup”—but it was still treated as minor. With Sweden as host country, three of the 1995 tournament’s five venues seated just 10,000 people or less. The U.S. played their opening match versus China in front of only 4,635 people, which would be the largest crowd they saw the entire tournament.
“You hardly knew the World Cup was there,” says JP Dellacamera, a broadcaster for ESPN who covered the tournament. “There was really no media presence. There were no signs anywhere. I didn’t get a sense that this was a big event, and the crowds they got showed that. The venues were small, and I would describe them as more of high school stadiums.”
For the players, it felt like participating in friendly matches—not competing for the top prize in the sport.
“It was a Podunk tournament, and just like any other overseas trip, at best,” recalls Tiffeny Milbrett, a forward who scored 100 goals for the national team over her career.
So, when the 1999 Women’s World Cup came around and the United States prepared to host, FIFA continued to have low expectations for the tournament.
At the time, FIFA was run by Sepp Blatter, who these days is known more for his sexist comments and for being banned from FIFA over accusations of corruption and bribery. But back then, as the most powerful man in soccer, Blatter worked closely with Alan Rothenberg, the former president of the U.S. Soccer Federation who oversaw the 1999 Women’s World Cup organizing committee. Rothenberg quickly got a sense of how Blatter felt about the women’s version of the sport.
“Sometimes he was trying to be funny, but he talked about the girls in cute uniforms—silliness, but offensive nonetheless,” Rothenberg says.
Rothenberg remembers that when the U.S. asked to host the event, FIFA didn’t need much convincing—they were happy to have someone volunteer and worried more about preventing financial losses.
“When we went to FIFA, they insisted that we do it with small stadiums all in the northeast in order to minimize travel costs,” Rothenberg says. “We argued the time was right and the interest in the United States was high enough that we could do more than that. They just said no.”
The U.S. organizing committee didn’t relent, but the most FIFA was willing to concede was that the final—the biggest game of the tournament—could be hosted at RFK Stadium, a venue that seated around 50,000 people.
That is, until they saw the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The crowds to see the U.S. women gradually built over the tournament, and by the time the gold-medal match arrived, a massive crowd of 76,489 showed up to see the U.S. win. The gold-winning match wasn’t aired live on TV, so most Americans didn’t even know about it, but it proved Americans were willing to pack a stadium for a big even
t.
“They finally said, Okay, you guys can go ahead and do it in big stadiums. Of course, they gave us permission, but they didn’t give us any money, so we had all the risk,” Rothenberg says. “They took no additional financial risk, so from their standpoint, they had nothing to lose. Honest to god, I think it was like, Here are these crazy Americans. They think they can do this, so godspeed, go do it.”
Ticket sales would be the main source of revenue, particularly due to a lack of major sponsors. Both Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, who had spent hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring men’s World Cups and the Olympics—including the 1994 men’s World Cup held in the U.S.—weren’t interested in the Women’s World Cup.
But there was no blueprint for selling hundreds of thousands of tickets for a stand-alone women’s soccer event. That had simply never been done before.
In the months leading up to the Women’s World Cup, the crowds showing up to see the national team’s warm-up matches weren’t remotely close in size to the lofty goals the World Cup organizing committee had set. In the last friendly matches before the tournament, the team played in front of 6,767 people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, against the Netherlands on May 13, 1999, and 10,452 people in Orlando, Florida, against Brazil a week later. Other than one gold-medal match at the Olympics three years earlier, Americans had never turned up to see the team in numbers that could fill Giants Stadium.
With no track record of attracting the massive crowds they wanted, the organizing committee devised a “plan B” early on in case ticket sales didn’t pan out.
“We were concerned as to whether it would actually be successful or not, so when we went around to stadiums to sign them up, we blacked out time for concerts,” Rothenberg remembers. “We figured if ticket sales were lousy, we could have a concert beforehand and fill the house.”
Marla Messing, the CEO of the organizing committee, built out a conservative ticketing model to see if the tournament could be put in big stadiums without losing money. If tickets didn’t sell, she planned for decorations to block out empty sections in the upper bowls of the stadiums so the games’ atmospheres wouldn’t suffer.