All Things Sports

Around a month ago the findings of a highly anticipated investigative report into women’s soccer in the United States were released and they were even worse than previously imagined. While previous allegations of sex abuse in the sport were known, with some even sparking the investigation in question, these findings showed that the issue was widespread, going all the way to the top. The report highlighted misconduct by coaches that executives knew about, but did not act on out of fear of lawsuits by the coaches accused and finances that were never secure. Not only that, they found that the abuse and misconduct were systemic, starting with the youth leagues where verbal abuse is common and boundaries blurred. Now I am no expert, but how is women’s sports supposed to develop if a sport, soccer, that needs to be developed along with it actively works against them? Why is women’s soccer actively working against women?

If women’s sports is going to develop, then, at the very least, it needs to help women and encourage them to play sports. A culture like the one discovered by the report does the exact opposite. The culture in women’s sports, especially a sport like soccer that has a global audience, needs to encourage women to play sports. Now this is just one sport, and there has not been evidence to suggest that there are culture problems in all the other sports, however it’s the inaction by executives that I think is most important. They are the ones with the most amount of power, they knew that this was going on, yet they actively chose not to act on it. With that kind of power, you should not be hesitating because of lawsuits and finances. A league is only as strong as its players and the executives failed to protect their players.

Another big issue: the abusive culture starts early. A key fact from the report that may go unnoticed is that women are trained to go along with abusive coaching early. If a culture constantly puts women down, starting when they are children, then it makes it extremely hard to change it because everyone is so accustomed to it.

This culture needs to change and it needs to change fast. If  US Women’s Soccer is to develop further and gain more recognition for the right reasons, then a culture change is absolutely necessary. It needs to start in the youth programs and it needs to go all the way up to the top.