A man looks up at a promotional display for the Women's World Cup football tournament as he walks past Stadium Australia, in Sydney on July 18.FRANCK FIFE/AFP/Getty Images
The day FIFA’s boss, Gianni Infantino, turned down a suitcase filled with Saudi cash – that’s when you knew power had shifted.
In the lead-up to the 2023 Women’s World Cup, word got out that Saudi tourism was being signed up as a sponsor. ‘Visit Saudi’ TV ads – featuring spokesmodel, Lionel Messi, on various improbable hiking trips with tour groups – were unavoidable during the recent men’s World Cup in Qatar.
This was the first part of a charm offensive designed to win Saudi Arabia the right to play host to the 2030 men’s World Cup.
First major problem – human rights and democracy. The Saudis don’t want to hear about them, but people keep asking. How can we nip that in the bud?
Easy. Everyone loves the Women’s World Cup. Pay that tournament to do the reputational laundry.
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But the Women’s World Cup said, ‘No thanks, but no thanks.’ Players around the world revolted, which put an electric charge through their national teams, alarming the organizers in Australia and New Zealand, and then eventually causing alarm at FIFA.
Infantino had crawled so deeply into bed with oil money during the lead-up to Qatar, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the sheets. Per his expectation, the men’s teams didn’t care.
They made a great point of saying they did as self-righteously as they could whenever there were microphones around. But they didn’t really. Not enough to, you know, do anything about it.
The women’s teams are a different story. Many had a history of taking loud, disruptive action when they felt affronted. Values and ethics are front and centre in the sport’s narrative. Here was a fight they were itching to have, and one Infantino could not afford to lose.
So without mounting any defence aside from, ‘Hey, we were only talking about taking this money’, Infantino stood down.
“Of course, there were discussions with Visit Saudi and so on,” Infantino said in March. “At the end, those discussions didn’t lead to a contract.”
One assumes that “and so on” is the part where a deal that was reportedly done in theory had to be dismantled at speed. That “and so on” tells you how far the women’s game has come. They aren’t playing any more. They are bossing the bosses.
Every great sporting event has two narratives – an overarching theme on the way in, and then whatever happens on the field of play once its starts.
The 2022 men’s World Cup’s narrative on the way in was ‘Selling Out in Style.’
A year later, the Women’s World Cup is ‘Unwilling to Bend.’
It seems a very long time ago since people talked about this tournament in tones reserved for high-school volleyball – ‘Oh my God, they’re so good. This is really fun. How come I didn’t know about this?’
That was back when the women’s game followed an outline one could roughly call NATO soccer – Europe plus Canada and the United States.
The best teams – the U.S., Germany, Norway – featured big, tough athletes who relied on brute force to succeed. Wary of being called soft, the best women’s teams became the exact opposite.
The men’s game was big enough that it could afford a little play-acting and whining. Not so the women. They had to fight through the pain. Those early Women’s World Cups were a little like watching rugby if no one could touch the ball with their hands.
There’s a lovely soccer term that can mean all sorts of things depending on how it is applied – cultured.
A cultured player is not necessarily a great one, but one of refinement and class. Someone who doesn’t fluster, or seem to be trying too hard. A player who is always in control.
Opening the women’s game to its traditional hotbeds in the developing world opened it to culture.
Players such as Brazil’s Marta, still trucking at 37, or Spain’s Alexia Putellas, define the new prototype women’s player. High skill, high risk, high reward.
The blowouts of Women’s World Cups past are becoming less frequent. It would not be true that every one of the 32 teams competing has a shot. At this level, some of them just barely have a heartbeat. But none should embarrass themselves.
As has become its habit, Canada enters this as a bit of a surprise package. Could it win it? Sure.
That’s not an assured ‘sure.’ It’s more of a tossed off ‘sure.’
First thing – get out of the group. Not easy, but that should be doable. The real question is whether or not it can beat Australia in Australia. That match on July 31 is outlined in red as a tournament tipping point.
Finishing second in the group would not be good – putting them on an immediate intercept course with tournament co-favourite, England.
Even if Canada does win Group B, it will most likely have to go through France. That’s not great either. Beyond that, you’ve still got Brazil, Germany and Norway lurking about between here and the semi-finals.
And then in the final, you just know who it’s going to be – USA. The Canadian team has never been able to find any route in any significant tournament that does not eventually run it up against its best enemies.
It used to be in a Women’s World Cup that plotting the route for your team – assuming your team was any good – wasn’t hard. A few speed bumps and then the brick wall of the United States. That’s all it was.
Now it’s a series of trap-doors. At least a dozen teams are good enough to put a scare up the world’s best on any given day.
There is a scenario in which Ireland or Nigeria – the other two teams in Canada’s group – are the ones celebrating a famous victory over a defending Olympic gold medalist.
Which is all to say that, in 2023, the Women’s World Cup is no longer arriving. It’s arrived.