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    Can This Man Fix France’s Women’s Team?

    Hervé Renard has led two men’s teams to the World Cup. But in taking over his country’s talented but troubled women’s squad, he may have his toughest job yet.The banner hangs just beneath the central staircase of the elegant hotel that has been taken over by the France women’s national team for the World Cup. Hervé Renard wanted to make sure no one in his squad could miss it.The motivational words emblazoned across it are typical of the type of positive messaging teams rally around before major sporting tournaments. But for this French squad, and for Renard, its well-traveled coach, the words carry extra significance after a period many on the team would prefer to forget.“Only team spirit,” it reads, “can make you realize your dreams.”Renard used the phrase the first time he met the French squad earlier this year, only months before the World Cup. That was not long after he was chosen to replace the fired coach Corinne Diacre, but even then he knew it was a message that might resonate with a team that even its own federation had concluded was “fractured” beyond repair.“We were missing unity,” Renard said in an interview on a sunny terrace in front of the team’s base camp last week. It was perhaps the biggest understatement in women’s soccer.France has arrived in Australia this month as a World Cup favorite on the mend. Torn apart by bitter feuds, it has in recent months lost players, welcomed them back, and then lost them again. It has changed coaches, changed approaches and changed tactics. And now it has asked Renard, a respected 54-year-old with a decorated men’s World Cup résumé but no previous experience coaching women, to carry it at least as far as the semifinals.He started the process, he said, by being open about what he did not know.“For me everything was new because I did it know women’s football, how to manage the girls,” he said. “I was lucky because on our staff a lot of people were already working with women’s football. So I was listening.”What he inherited was a talented team in disarray. Its longtime leader, Wendie Renard (who is not related to Hervé), had announced that she would not play in the World Cup to preserve her mental health. Two other stars had followed suit, saying they would not return unless there was a change in leadership of the team.France’s longtime captain, Wendie Renard, had said she would skip the World Cup rather than play for the team’s former coach. William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere had been previous controversies under Diacre, the coach at the time, but nothing quite so serious or existential. A mutinous mood had turned into an open rebellion.Faced with a crisis as the World Cup loomed, the French soccer federation acted, announcing after a brief investigation that Diacre had to go. The rupture between her and the team, the federation said, had become so significant that it “has reached a point of no return.”Hervé Renard, enjoying a successful and lucrative stop on an itinerant coaching career in Saudi Arabia, said he acted on impulse as the news broke. He contacted Jean-Michel Aulas, one of the most influential men in French soccer and a member of the French federation’s board. Renard met him a decade ago, when he narrowly missed out on becoming the coach of Lyon’s men’s team. He told Aulas that he wanted to be considered for the opening.It promised a significant change of course for his career. Renard said that until the moment he picked up his phone to message Aulas, he had only once before considered coaching women: a flight of fancy that came as he watched France play in the last World Cup. His interest then, he said, had lasted “maybe just for a few seconds.”But now that his interest in coaching a women’s team for the first time was reciprocated, he faced a problem. To accept the job, he would need the permission of soccer officials in Saudi Arabia, where he was under contract, and he would need to accept a significant pay cut. The Saudi job, Renard explained with a smile, paid at least “20 times” what he would earn coaching France’s women.“When you are in Saudi Arabia it’s not exactly the reality,” he said. “So sometimes it’s good to go to reality.”Months later, Renard said he still cannot quite explain why he tossed his hat in the ring, before looking down at the French crest on the left breast of his tracksuit. Having coached five other national teams, he said, the chance to lead the country of his birth was clearly a major draw. But even then, some things, Renard said, cannot be explained. “I still don’t know why exactly I decided,” he said.Renard’s most recent World Cup experience came as the coach of Saudi Arabia, which was the only team to beat Argentina, the eventual champion, at the 2022 championship in Qatar.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesRenard is sanguine about his rare feat of coaching in two World Cups within a year. “The most important thing is not to participate in two World Cups in six months,” he said. “It’s to do something” in them.Of all the teams Renard has coached, his current squad is the highest ranked, at fifth in the world — a lofty profile it has maintained despite never making it beyond the semifinals of a major tournament. Renard said that is now possible.“We have to believe in ourselves,” he said.He is under orders to reach the semifinals, he said, a target he has accepted. “We can’t come here when you are fifth in the world and say, ‘Oh, no, a quarterfinal will be enough.’ No. We need to have a very a high challenge. So our first target is to reach the semifinals. Then afterward we will talk about other things.”Renard has had only months to mend a fractured squad, to inculcate the team spirit that his banner demands and that he believes his players need to win in what he considers the most competitive Women’s World Cup in history.In his first training camp, Renard told the team he was not interested in what happened in the past. He did not want to litigate past games, past feuds, past grievances — all the things that had made the atmosphere in the camp so poisonous that stars like Wendie Renard said they would rather not play for France at all. But he could not avoid confronting one final pretournament controversy.Kheira Hamraoui, an experienced and gifted midfielder and a regular on the national team, was attacked in 2021 by masked men following a dinner with her club, Paris Saint-Germain. The fallout had reverberations for both the club and the national team, with a former teammate on both teams, Aminata Diallo, charged with involvement in the attack, and others angered by Hamraoui’s initial claims that they or people they knew were also involved.The bizarre episode shadowed the national team for more than two years. Faced with reviving it in the France camp, Renard said he decided against bringing Hamraoui to the World Cup, and told her in a face-to-face meeting why she would not be selected.He said he told Hamraoui that she was not going to start, and that a place on the bench would be unsettling for a player of her experience. “I think for this kind of player, you start in the first 11 or it is very difficult to sit on the bench,” he said. “We can’t go forward in a competition if we don’t have a fantastic team spirit.”Renard acknowledged that not every choice he makes will be the correct one. But he said he has been frank with his players about what he knew, and what he did not.“I said to the girls: ‘Maybe I will make some mistakes. If I say something wrong, just let me know.’ But step by step, you learn how to manage,” he said.His players, for the moment, say they are hearing the right things. “He keeps pushing us to be the best versions of ourselves,” midfielder Grace Geyoro said in a recent interview. Said Wendie Renard: “As long as everyone has the same vision and a willingness to pull in the same direction, then we can achieve something great.”France’s women’s team practicing in Sydney on Saturday.Carl Recine/ReutersThe World Cup takes place with the sharpest focus on women’s soccer in the sport’s history, and with teams and players using the platform to push for greater recognition and compensation for their efforts. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has more than tripled prize money from four years ago, to $110 million. Its critics have said that new figure does not go far enough, that it should be the same as the $440 million prize pool awarded to men at the 2022 World Cup in 2022.Hervé Renard acknowledged the progress women’s soccer has made, particularly since the last World Cup. But, perhaps controversially, he said that “women still have to be a little bit patient” when it comes to pay.As interest continues to grow, he said, so will the earning potential. But commercial reality, he said, was reflected in the sports’ differing revenues, and he put forward an analogy to make his point.“If you have one restaurant with 1,000 meals in the evening and one with 300, it’s not the same,” he said. “At the end of the night in the register, it’s not the same amount. Football it’s the same. It’s business.” More

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    England has been strong but shaky going into this tournament.

    It is an interesting time for the England women’s team, which arrives at the Women’s World Cup among the tournament favorites but also in perhaps its most uncertain state after two years of largely smooth sailing.The Lionesses are the champions of Europe, a triumph that has precipitated a sea change for women’s soccer in England in terms of popularity and expectations.“With this England team,” Coach Sarina Wiegman said, “everyone expects us to win.”But in this World Cup, England is arguably a weakened champion. In the months since claiming its European title, what began as the loss of one key starter to injury, striker Beth Mead, has become three. Midfielder Fran Kirby will miss the World Cup, too, after having surgery on a knee. Leah Williamson, who captained England as it conquered, has, like Mead, torn a knee ligament.Recent results have proved similarly worrisome. A goalless draw in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Canada, England’s last game before the World Cup, was the team’s third straight scoreless performance.Yet Wiegman remains pragmatic and steadfast. Again and again in her recent interview, she returned to the same questions that have become touchstones for her and her team: “What do we want to do? How do we want to play? What are the roles and the tasks in the team?” More

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    Lionel Messi Ventures Into Charted Territory

    The Argentine star’s signing is seen as a way to push soccer into the American mainstream. But it’s already there.Tempting Lionel Messi to the United States could not solely be a matter of money. The money had to be right, of course. It had to be competitive. It was, Jorge Mas knew, perfectly possible that his attempt to persuade Messi, the greatest player of his generation, to sign for Inter Miami would fail because of money. But it would not succeed because of it. Not exclusively, anyway.Nor, really, could Mas rely entirely on the other selling point he had identified as a possible advantage. Miami would appeal to Messi’s family, that was true. He and his wife, Antonella, already owned property there. His sons liked it. There was a strong, proud Argentine community in South Florida that could provide him with the maté and the facturas and the asado he required.And while Miami could not offer Messi complete anonymity — he would still be mobbed when he went to the grocery store — it could offer him a version of normalcy in which it was theoretically possible for him to go to the grocery store in the first place. That, Mas was sure, would be appealing, but it could not be the whole appeal.Instead, over the yearslong span of his courtship of Messi — Mas has said that he first hatched the idea in 2019, and has spent no little time since manifesting it into being — he chose to emphasize something else.This, he repeatedly told Jorge Messi, the player’s father, agent and maven, was his son’s chance to leave a unique legacy. “When, in the history of a sport is there the possibility of changing the sport of a country?” Mas asked Jorge Messi. His son, Mas said, had the “opportunity and ability to change soccer in the United States, in the largest commercial market in the world.”This week, Mas at last had the moment that vindicated not only all of his labor, but the nature of his pitch. In the pouring rain at the DRV-PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, he could finally present Messi not just as an Inter Miami player, but as what he called “America’s No. 10.”True, there is work to be done. Soccer stadiums are called things like the Parc des Princes and San Paolo. It is wholly unacceptable that Messi might retire at something called the “DRV-PNK Stadium,” particularly considering that it is in Fort Lauderdale.But still, Mas sensed that he was standing on the cusp of something epochal. For soccer in the United States, he said, there would always be “a before and an after Messi.”Lionel Messi with the team that brought him to America: Jorge Mas, Jose Mas and David Beckham.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressThis is, of course, a leitmotif in the story of soccer in the United States. It is a sport in constant search of its moment of ignition. At some point, the theory runs, the world’s game will assume its natural position at the top of the American sporting pyramid. Mas, doubtless, is sincere in his belief that the arrival of Messi will — at the very least — accelerate that process.It goes without saying, too, that soccer in the U.S. still has plenty of room for growth. Some of those areas are tangible, or at least demonstrable: Attendances — not helped by the fact that some teams in Major League Soccer do not play in soccer-specific arenas — and audience figures and sponsorship revenues can all increase substantially.Mexico would doubtless claim to be home to the highest-caliber domestic league in North America. M.L.S. certainly has some way to go before it can consider itself a peer of Ligue 1 in France, say, let alone the Premier League.And some of categories for growth are more intangible. Soccer does not yet have the grip on the American psyche that the N.F.L. can muster, for example. It is not as central to the culture as the N.B.A. It does not command the same sort of affection as baseball. It still feels, in many ways, far younger and far newer than it really ought to feel, especially this deep into its ascendant phase.For all that it is agreed that soccer in the United States needs to grow, though, at some point it is probably worth pausing and reflecting on what the actual target might be.Soccer, like all European cultural artifacts, has long been obsessed with cracking America, the place that has come to be seen as its final frontier. And plenty of people in the U.S. have spent vast swaths of their time working out how to make soccer happen. Nobody, though, has quite defined what success might look like.Messi needed no introduction in Miami.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe landscape into which Messi descended this week, for example, is vastly different from the one David Beckham — his forerunner turned employer — encountered when he arrived in Los Angeles in 2007. At that stage, M.L.S. consisted of only 13 teams. Toronto F.C. marked the league’s first, ginger outreach into Canada. It was still not uncommon to hear discussion of whether the entire business would survive.Messi, on the other hand, finds himself entering a competition that now sprawls across much of a continent, from Vancouver to New York, Montreal to Miami. M.L.S. now has 29 teams, with a 30th, based in San Diego, set to be drafted into the league in 2025. It has an innovative, potentially lucrative streaming deal with Apple TV+ that served as a core part of the league’s pitch to Messi. The question is not whether M.L.S. will pull through. It is whether it has been a little too eager to acquiesce to all of those teams and all of those cities lobbying for expansion.Far more significant, though, is the game’s imprint on the United States as a whole. Soccer is now the second-largest participation sport in the United States, behind only basketball. One Gallup poll found that more people regard it as their “favorite” sport, whatever that means, than would say the same about ice hockey. Last year, the FIFA video game outsold Mario Kart and at least one edition of Call of Duty.Will Ferrell, Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera and LeBron James all own portions of teams, either at home or abroad. Soccer is referenced on Modern Family and (the dearly departed) “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” It is hard to find a picture of Drake not wearing some team’s jersey. Kim Kardashian single-handedly taught millions of Americans about the greatness of Vincent Candela and Aldair when she was pictured wearing a vintage Roma jersey. That is not an afterthought: It is what cultural cut-through looks like.All five of Europe’s major leagues have television deals in the United States. NBC has, in no small part, used its multiyear Premier League offering as a backbone for its Peacock streaming service. Fox, ABC, ESPN, Paramount, CBS, Univision and Discovery all broadcast soccer.Messi made his Inter Miami debut on Friday night.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressRobert Lipsyte, once a titan of these pages, might have bemoaned last week that European soccer does not have the same “emotional” impact to someone in Brooklyn as the fate of the Nets or the Mets might, but the evidence would suggest there are plenty of people who might disagree with him.By many measure, in other words, soccer has made it in America. It has the toehold in the United States that it has always craved. To borrow from the wrestling parlance of last week’s newsletter, the sport has got over, and spectacularly.That the sport does not perceive it that way — that it still feels as if this is a land to be conquered — might be to do with sheer, naked greed. Or it might be to do with just how accustomed it is to a monopoly position. Across most of the world, soccer is inarguably the national game, the sport of choice, by such a distance that everything else pales in comparison.In those countries where it encounters resistance, then — in the United States and Australia, with their established quadrumvirates of major sports, in particular, as well as India and Pakistan, where cricket remains king — anything less than total obliteration of any opposition is treated as failure. Soccer confuses popularity with primacy.That approach, though, is infused with futility. The Women’s World Cup this summer will, ideally, make more Australians like soccer. It will not make anyone turn away from Australian Rules Football to do so. Messi’s presence in the U.S. will expand the sport’s cultural reach. It is unlikely to affect viewership for the Super Bowl.It is not a zero sum game. You do not only have to like one sport. Soccer can get bigger in the United States, of course. Messi’s glamour, his star power, the brilliant white heat of his talent will help pull in new viewers and, slowly, turn them into fans. There are always more hearts and minds to win, more eyeballs to retain.Much of the work, though, has already been done. The change has already happened. Soccer has made it in the United States. As Mas might put it, we left the before behind long ago. We are already in the after, and have been for some time.Cruel BlowSam Kerr’s Instagram post, published only a couple of hours before Australia’s opening game at the World Cup on Thursday, was written in what can be recognized as the striker’s straightforward, matter-of-fact style. She had picked up a calf injury. She would loved to have been available for the match with Ireland. That would not be possible.The aim, surely, was to project an air that this was — to use the technical term — no biggie. Kerr did not want to be a distraction from a game her country has been anticipating for years. Still, her absence will have sent a shiver of anxiety through those fans heading to Stadium Australia. This was supposed to be Kerr’s tournament, after all, her chance to stage a “Cathy Freeman moment” of her very own.Of substantially greater concern, though, was the statement published not long afterward by Australia’s medical staff, the one that said Kerr would miss the first two games of the tournament. That would be just about tolerable: Tony Gustavsson’s team should be good enough to see off Nigeria, just as it had Ireland.Sam Kerr will miss at least the first two games at the World Cup.Carl Recine/ReutersThe really bad news was in the fine print. The extent of Kerr’s injury will be assessed only after Thursday’s meeting with Nigeria in Brisbane. There is no guarantee, in other words, that Kerr will be fit in time to play in the group stage at all. It is not an exaggeration to say she will struggle to be in peak condition much before the tournament’s final rounds. And that is far from a worst-case scenario.That is, of course, devastating not only for Kerr, but for Australia as a whole. In the buildup to the tournament, she has been more than willing to absorb expectation, to shoulder the burden of hope. It is to her credit that it does not seem to faze her in the slightest.And yet that role carries with it a cost: It is not just the country that has a tendency to look to Kerr for inspiration, but the team itself. Australia with Kerr is a potential world champion; Australia’s case without her is not nearly so convincing. Its fans know that, and so do its players. They, more than anyone else, will be hoping that the tone of her message was meaningful, that the injury really is no biggie.Psychological EdgeAs the World Cup has drawn closer, that part of The New York Times’ sports department that is based in Europe — all three of us — has been cleft into factions.One is very much of the view that the United States will, ultimately, lift a third World Cup in a row over the course of the next month. One believes that is hopelessly optimistic, and has taken to making dread prophesies of round-of-16 exits at the hands of Sweden. (Tariq has claimed, again and again, that “predictions are the preserve of the hubristic and the small-minded.”)These groups do not align along national grounds. I have no vested interest in the U.S.’s success: As demonstrated by my outright refusal to use the word “cleats,” I am not American. It is clear that this iteration of the national team is not as strong as those that emerged victorious in 2015 and 2019.Alex Morgan, standard bearer (in person) and statue (in New York).Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesIt is, instead, effectively two teams slightly clumsily stitched together: one from yesterday, taking part in what is in some senses a valedictory tour, and one for tomorrow, fizzing with energy and rich with promise. Teams that win tournaments exist in a Goldilocks zone, neither too young or too old. The Americans are both.And yet — with the U.S., there is always an “and yet” — the U.S. retains a psychological edge over almost every opponent it faces. Particularly during World Cups, it has an aura, the sort that can only be acquired over a generation, or more.Teams do not have to beat the U.S. as it is; they have to beat the U.S. as they perceive them to be. They have to overcome their own admiration of the jersey, as much as the players that now fill them. That is a powerful advantage for the U.S. Whether it will be enough, of course, neither faction knows, not really.CorrespondenceIt has been an educational week in the inbox. Michael Markman reminded me of something I did know, once, a long time ago: “The grammarian term for a base word that functions as either a noun or a verb is a gerund,” he wrote. (I had always assumed it was a participle that served as a noun, but I am willing to be corrected.)Someone only identifying as Red, meanwhile, informed me of something that I did not know at all. (And, I think, had no real reason to know.) What has come to be termed “generational wealth” lasts only for three generations, they wrote, in reference to Jordan Henderson’s looming move to Saudi Arabia. “That is the average of new wealth for the past 200 years.” I mean, whichever way you look at it, three generations is quite a long time. Maybe not a monument more everlasting than bronze, but definitely not bad.There were two subjects that dominated, though. One was your sincere, and sincerely appreciated, concern for the fate of this newsletter, and the mutually educational space it has fostered in the last few years. I won’t reproduce them out of deep-seated bashfulness, but suffice to say they were received with immense gratitude.And the other was the validity of parallels between soccer and professional wrestling (a vague existential uncertainty generates quite an exciting, devil-may-care freedom, I have found.) “Is the prime example of this not the transfer market?” asked Todd Reid, knowing the answer to his question was, “Well, yes.”“It consumes as much, if not more, energy and coverage than matches themselves,” he wrote. “And add in the Saudi Arabia story line, and it’s a morality play set on the global stage, discussed and debated whether or not anyone ever actually watches a Saudi League match or not.”There was a welcome reminder from Richard Duran on generalizations, too. “Not everyone reads the constant chatter about transfers, wages, Saudi involvement. I choose to enjoy soccer while the clock is running and it is still a beautiful game.” This is an admirable approach, and a legitimate correction. To some extent, though, how the industry that surrounds soccer presents the sport is as significant as how people choose to consume it.And finally, Mark Harris has arrived, asking for a little bit of self-reflection. “How ironic that you don’t perceive that you are one of the prime instruments in pushing the behind the scenes stories over the actual sport,” he wrote. “Read the last year or so of your articles and tell me if I’m right.”This is a charge I probably cannot deny, admittedly, but I’m going to take it as a compliment. Nobody has ever called me a prime instrument before. Not even when they’re really angry with me.That’s all for this week, and for a little while: Remember, this newsletter will graciously cede the limelight to our daily World Cup briefing for the next few weeks. You should subscribe. We know, after all, that you like soccer and you like receiving newsletters. It’s basically a product designed with you in mind. I’ll be writing it sometimes. But you should subscribe anyway. More

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    With Women’s World Cup’s Expansion Come the Soccer Games of a Lifetime

    Vietnam, one of eight nations playing in their first Women’s World Cup, will face the U.S. this week. Its presence highlights the growth of women’s soccer, but also the challenges that remain.When Vietnam fielded its first women’s national soccer team in 1997, its players wore oversized jerseys made for men. At times, the team had to travel an hour and a half from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, to reach an available training site. Some players pushed carts on the street and sold bread to sustain their nascent playing careers.In the years after the Vietnam War — called the American War here — ended in 1975, economic reform took precedence over sports. The Vietnam Football Federation, which governs soccer in the unified country, was not established until 1989. In its early days, soccer was widely considered a game for men, too hard and demanding for women to play. With little money available, the sport hardly seemed a desirable career choice for girls. But that did not matter in most cases: Many parents were reluctant to let their daughters play.“Society didn’t accept the existence of such a team,” said Mai Duc Chung, 74, Vietnam’s women’s national coach then and now.A quarter of a century later, Vietnam is one of the dominant teams in Southeast Asia. This month, it will play for the first time in the Women’s World Cup, starting with a game against the United States, the two-time defending champion, on Friday night (Eastern time) in Auckland, New Zealand.Mai Duc Chung has coached the Vietnam women’s team for more than two decades.Vietnam’s arrival is the culmination of its nearly decade-long plan to develop women’s soccer, in part through expansion of the World Cup field from 16 to 24 and now to 32 teams, making this year’s tournament the largest in history. That growth is giving opportunities to nontraditional powers: Eight nations in this year’s tournament, fully a quarter of the field, are participating for the first time.This will be the biggest soccer moment for Vietnam and the other first-timers, a group that includes teams as diverse as Haiti, Ireland, Morocco and the Philippines. It will mean increased visibility and funding, enhanced professionalization of the sport and additional financial rewards. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has promised at least $30,000 in prize money to each player participating in this year’s tournament.But that same growth will bring inexperience and the prospect of severe competitive imbalance when the newcomers face off against the world’s best teams. It was with great fulfillment that Vietnam qualified ahead of its fiercest rival, Thailand. But gratification comes with burdensome pressure to avoid embarrassing performances, like losing by 13-0 to the United States, as Thailand did in the last Women’s World Cup in 2019.Vietnam’s players are paid about $850 a month to represent the women’s national team.FIFA’s improved bonus structure for World Cup players will mean a $30,000 payday for each one.“We witnessed the fiasco, and it’s a lesson learned for Vietnam,” said Huynh Nhu, the team’s star forward. She spoke through an interpreter, as did others interviewed for this article. “Thailand suffered such a big loss, they just kind of fell backward, and their fighting spirit is no longer there. No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting.”Participating in the Women’s World Cup represents great national pride and international sporting achievement for Vietnam, a country that has won only one Olympic gold medal (in air-pistol shooting, at the 2016 Rio Olympics) and has never qualified for the men’s World Cup, and where men’s soccer is better known for regular episodes of corruption and match fixing.But similar pride and similar hardships overcome are echoed across the other debutantes in this year’s field. Ireland’s captain, Katie McCabe, grew up playing on boys’ teams, encouraged by an older brother and parents who now watch her play for the London club Arsenal. Haiti’s players navigated a national system in which federation officials have been accused of coercing young players into sex, and Morocco’s overcame profound traditional biases and frequent family objections to become the first team from a majority Arab country to qualify.“No matter what happens against the United States and other powers, we will keep fighting,” one Vietnam player said.Vietnam’s team has come as far as any of them. Once shunned, or simply ignored, the Vietnamese women are now national names. They were welcomed by their country’s prime minister after earning their World Cup place in a qualifying tournament in India last year and were given a parade on a double-decker bus through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Their World Cup matches will be broadcast live to their fellow citizens on various platforms.More than any Vietnamese player, Huynh Nhu, 31, represents possibility and inequality that coexist in her country and, effectively, for women’s soccer worldwide. She is the first female player from Vietnam to play for a club team in Europe, having scored seven goals in the recently completed season for Lank F.C. Vilaverdense in Portugal’s top division. After the World Cup, Huynh Nhu is expected to extend her contract with the club, which has reportedly offered to double her salary to 3,000 euros (about $3,200 per month).That is a stark contrast to the average salary of $200 to $300 per month in the semiprofessional women’s league in Vietnam. On an annualized basis, those salaries remain below the country’s per capita G.D.P. of $3,756.50 a year, according to the World Bank. Players often take second jobs to supplement their incomes. Before moving to Portugal last season, for example, Huynh Nhu operated a business selling coconuts in her rural hometown in the Mekong Delta.She said that she now had corporate affiliations with Visa, Coca-Cola and LG electronics. And she is the face of the unprecedented news coverage and sponsorship attention currently being lavished on the Vietnamese women’s national team. While away from their clubs and training and participating in international competitions, members of the national team can earn about $850 a month, according to Mai, the national coach. (Journalists said money was deducted for meals and housing.)Mai with a photo of the first Vietnam women’s national team in 1997.Players have also been awarded bonuses by the Vietnamese Football Federation and sponsors for recent triumphs. Not all bonuses are known, and it remains unclear exactly how much of the bonus pool is divided among the players and the coaches. But the publicized pool is equivalent to $8,000 apiece for winning the Southeast Asian Games in May for an eighth time and, according to journalists, $15,000 or more for qualifying for the World Cup. Bonuses are not always financial, either; they can also include motorbikes and cars.Those figures are “very modest” compared with what top male soccer players can make in salary and endorsements in Vietnam, said Cao Huy Tho, an executive, former sports editor and longtime advocate for gender equity at Tuoi Tre, a leading newspaper in Vietnam. But “it’s very meaningful, life-changing for the women, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.”Huynh Nhu’s family, for instance, is building a three-story home, which includes a shrine to her career and appears to be the tallest in the area, in her hometown, Tra Vinh.Women in Vietnam’s national league who do not play on the national team endure a far more modest existence. League attendance is extremely low, roughly 100 to 300 people per match, journalists said, leaving many businesses reluctant to sponsor teams.The parents of Huynh Nhu, Vietnam’s top forward, keep a display of memorabilia from her career in a room in their home.When a team representing Son La Province in northwest Vietnam struggled to maintain sponsorships in recent years, its players’ monthly salaries plummeted to as low as $130 or even $70 — much less than could be earned doing factory work. Some players left for better-paying jobs, and Son La is no longer in the league. Last year, as the club faced disbanding, its coach, Luong Van Chuyen, lamented to an online newspaper that he had only four players available. The others, Luong said, “quit to return home to get married and to become workers.”The issue of disparate treatment of female soccer players reached the highest levels of government after Vietnam qualified for the Women’s World Cup. In greeting the returning players, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh called them “diamond girls” but also noted that they still faced prejudice in playing what many still consider a man’s game, as well as hardships resulting from precarious incomes and lack of security in retirement.“We need to pay more attention to women’s football,” Pham said, calling on soccer officials, government agencies and sponsors to help develop a sustainable model for the sport. It is unclear what steps, if any, have been taken to pursue that goal.Soccer was introduced to Vietnam in 1896 during the French colonial period. The country claims to have fielded Asia’s first women’s team, which played briefly against men in the early 1930s. After the Vietnam War, though, an unofficial prohibition of women’s soccer existed into the early 1990s, according to Cao, the journalist who began covering the sport later that decade.Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, commonly known as Bich Thuy, 29.Huynh Nhu, 32, the captain of the team. Her new goal is to score in a World Cup.To circumvent the ban, Cao said, a sympathetic pharmacy executive in Ho Chi Minh City transported female players to matches against men’s teams by hiding them in cargo trucks covered with tarpaulins. When a women’s national team was officially formed in 1997, Nguyen Thi Kim Hong was one of the players who sold bread to maintain their careers.“It was our passion only; money was never the purpose for the first generation,” said Nguyen, now 51 and the goalkeeper coach for the women’s national team.Even some of today’s current stars faced resistance from their parents when they began playing. Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy, 29, was the youngest of three children, and though her father had been a soccer player, her parents worried that if she moved away from home in central Vietnam, “nobody will mother you anymore.” Eventually, she said, her father became her biggest supporter.In February 2022, after Vietnam’s bid for World Cup qualification nearly imploded as the coronavirus ravaged the women’s team, Bich Thuy scored the most important goal in the country’s history — a deft touch with her right foot and a decisive and historic shot with her left in a 2-1 playoff victory over Taiwan, which FIFA refers to as Chinese Taipei. She dedicated the goal to her father, who died in 2016.Vietnam players in Hanoi. Their first game at the World Cup will come against the United States, the two-time defending champion.“I’m still feeling it now, like a dream,” Bich Thuy said of the goal. “My father always expected a lot of me. I’m sure he would be happy to see that.”Huynh Nhu, the team’s star, had more unconditional support from her parents. Her father, a former player, began coaching her when she was 3 or 4. Her mother worked in a market in rural Tra Vinh and brought home a soccer ball at Huynh Nhu’s request. Her father said he had attached the ball to a rope to keep her from kicking it into a canal outside the home. Now she leads Vietnam’s national team, with the aim of scoring a goal in the World Cup. That may be, for now, a more achievable goal than expecting to win a game in a group that includes the United States, the Netherlands (the 2019 World Cup runner-up) and Portugal, a fellow debutante that lies just outside the top 20 in the latest world rankings.Told that the benefactor of Thailand’s team at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, one of the richest women in the country, had exhorted her players by saying, “If you score, I’ll buy you a $5,000 Chanel bag,” Huynh Nhu laughed.“I look forward to having such a billionaire in my country,” she said.Linh Pham contributing reporting from Tra Vinh, Vietnam.Players on the Vietnam women’s team walking to their training field in Hanoi. More

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    Overlooked No More: Lily Parr, Dominant British Soccer Player

    She persevered at a time when women were effectively banned from the sport, and was the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Hall of Fame.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1921, the Football Association, English soccer’s ruling body, effectively banned women from playing the sport, deeming it “quite unsuitable for females.” But by then, a standout player named Lily Parr had already gained fame for her skill on the field.Her renown was part of the growth of women’s soccer at the time, exemplified by a match in which she played at Goodison Park in Liverpool that drew a crowd of about 53,000, with thousands more outside the stadium. (It would remain the largest crowd for a women’s club soccer match for 99 years, until Atlético Madrid hosted Barcelona in front of 60,739 fans in March 2019.)Though the association’s ban would hamper Parr’s career, barring her and other women from playing in stadiums, she competed where she could, in fields and parks in England and abroad, and continued drawing attention over her 31 years with the same team, Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club.In 1927, the English newspaper The Leicester Mail called her “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse.” By the time she retired from soccer, in 1951, she had scored an estimated 1,000 goals.Parr was “a great player in a great team,” said Gail Newsham, author of the 1994 book “In a League of Their Own!: The Dick, Kerr Ladies 1917-1965,” and she contributed to the club’s immense success alongside other star goal scorers like Florrie Redford, Jennie Harris and Alice Kell, the team’s longest serving captain.Soccer officials began lifting the ban in England — as well as those in other countries — in the 1970s. The first official Women’s World Cup was held in 1991, and interest in the event has grown considerably since then.This year, the Women’s World Cup, which is currently underway in Australia and New Zealand, includes an expanded field of 32 teams, up from 24.Club competition in England has grown, too; the Women’s Super League, which began in 2011, became fully professional in 2018. In the United States, the National Women’s Soccer League began in 2013.In 2002, Parr became the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Museum Hall of Fame, now in Manchester, and in 2019, the museum installed a life-size statue of her there, also a first for a British female soccer player.“We have come a long way since Lily Parr’s days, and she deserves recognition as a true pioneer of the sport,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, a spokeswoman for women’s soccer at the Football Association, was quoted as saying in The Guardian in 2019.Parr, with dark hair, leaps while training with her team. She drew attention as “a remarkably nimble and speedy performer” with “a kick like a cart-horse,” as one newspaper wrote.GettyLilian Parr was born on April 26, 1905, in St Helens, about 10 miles northeast of Liverpool, to Sarah and George Parr, a glassworks laborer. Growing up, she played soccer in the street with her brothers.Women had been playing soccer in Britain since the late 19th century, but World War I offered an opportunity for them to blossom. As men were sent to fight and women filled the country’s factories, the government encouraged soccer as an after-work activity.Parr went to work for Dick, Kerr & Co., a locomotives factory that had switched production to munitions during the war, and joined the company’s team as a left back when she was about 15.Her manner could be rough and abrupt, but with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor she enjoyed strong friendships with many of her teammates, Newsham wrote.In one perhaps apocryphal story, the team was playing at Ashton Park in Preston, England, northwest of Manchester, when a male professional goalkeeper declared that a woman would never be able to score on a man. Parr, famous for her powerful left foot, accepted his challenge. She lined up to take a penalty kick against him and broke the man’s arm with her shot.Parr and her team in 1939 discussing tactics for a forthcoming match.GettyParr, who later moved to left winger, exploded onto the scene in 1921.On Feb. 5 that year, she scored a hat trick — three goals in a single match — at Nelson, England; she scored another three days later at Stalybridge in a 10-0 win. In a 9-1 win in Liverpool at Anfield Stadium the next week, she netted five goals against a team of all-stars assembled by the comedian Harry Weldon. That May she scored every goal in a 5-1 win over a visiting French team.Parr’s shooting and crossing abilities, as well as her impressive physique (she was a sturdy 5 feet 10 inches tall or so), quickly made her a star, and she finished 1921 with 108 goals, according to Newsham.That year the team won all 67 games it played and scored some 448 goals in the process while allowing just 22. Other players, including Redford and Harris, contributed to the team’s dominance. In one April 1921 match at Barrow, for example, the team won 14-2 with seven goals from Redford, four from Harris and three from Parr. Redford led the year’s scoring with a 170 goals.On Dec. 5, 1921, the Football Association unanimously passed its resolution declaring that soccer “ought not to be encouraged” among women. It mandated that all of the association’s clubs “refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.” Because association clubs owned virtually all stadiums, women’s soccer on any significant scale was, in effect, banned.Similar bans were common across the world for much of the 20th century. The momentum that had been building since World War I screeched to a halt, and the sport, for women, withered on the vine.Parr’s team nevertheless continued to play in front of smaller crowds and on tours abroad. In 1922, she captained a trip to the United States. That October, the team tied a men’s team, 4-4, in Washington, D.C. Some sources suggest that President Warren G. Harding kicked off the game and autographed the match ball.As she continued playing, Parr trained to be a nurse and worked at what was then known as Whittingham Hospital, a psychiatric facility northeast of Preston. Some have viewed Parr as a queer icon, but there is no evidence that she was gay. “Like all our great football stars there are as many myths as there are facts, and we all embroider her story with our own influences,” said Jean Williams, a professor of sports history at the University of Wolverhampton. “That is why she means so much to so many.”Parr’s career lasted into her 40s; she played her last game in 1951. In 1965, she retired from nursing. A few years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She lived to see the ban on women’s soccer lifted in 1971, but died of cancer on May 24, 1978, at her home in Preston. She was 73.Only in recent decades has recognition of Parr and her club’s accomplishments gained momentum. Historical markers for her team are now at the Preston factory site, Preston North End’s stadium and Ashton Park. The English National Football Museum installed a permanent display about her life in 2021.“Lily is a lens through which to look at the women’s game in the ’20s,” Belinda Scarlett, then the curator of women’s football at the museum, told The Guardian in 2020. “It will tell the stories of all the women she played with and against.”She added that “women’s football probably wouldn’t have continued if those groups of women didn’t fight that ban and just play wherever the hell they could find a space to play football.” More

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    Even if U.S. Doesn’t Win the World Cup, Its Players Will Take Home the Most Prize Money

    The Canadian women’s soccer team has been demanding that its soccer federation agree to equal pay and equal working conditions for the men’s and women’s national teams for over a year. Players from England are frustrated that their country’s federation won’t offer performance-related bonuses. And the Nigerian team discussed boycotting its opening game over money […] More

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    Three top contenders took the field.

    After Australia and New Zealand, the co-hosts of the Women’s World Cup, kicked off the tournament with victories, the focus now shifts to the next games of group play, and to three top contenders taking the field: Canada, Spain and the United States.Spain and the United States are no strangers to the final rounds of the Women’s World Cup, and they will have to withstand the pressure of having a target on their backs. Canada faces a different sort of pressure: its so-far-unrealized expectations on the World Cup stage. It played Nigeria to a draw, 0-0, on Friday.After these games, there will be a clearer indication of which of these contenders are poised to make a championship run, and which have problems to address.Spain vs. Costa RicaSpain, whose roster contains several players from the powerhouse European club Barcelona, has lost only once in the last year. Spain is yet another program in a battle with its federation: A truce was called before the team set off for the tournament, but tensions remain.When Spain and Costa Rica played in the opening match of the 2015 Women’s World Cup, the Costa Ricans were able to hold the Spaniards to a 1-1 draw, a performance they’ll be looking to repeat.United States vs. VietnamVietnam, playing in it’s first Women’s World Cup match, has odds of winning the tournament at just 50,000 to one, but the team gave the highly rated German team a scare on June 24 by keeping a friendly close — the final score was 2-1.The United States was criticized after its opening performance in 2019, when the team beat Thailand by 13-0. In the lead-up to this Women’s World Cup, none of this year’s players would commit to refraining from a similar goal frenzy, and as a team looking to make history with a third straight title, the United State would take a win in any form.Nigeria vs. CanadaBoth teams momentarily set aside battles with their federations over investment and equal pay to play in their opening game, which ended in a scoreless draw.Canada, the reigning Olympic champions, made the quarterfinals of the World Cup in 2015 but lost in the round of 16 in 2019. Nigeria has won the Africa Cup of Nations 11 times but is facing a stiff challenge in a group that includes the host nation Australia.Philippines vs. SwitzerlandThe Philippines, in its first Women’s World Cup, features a roster with 18 American-born players. It lost Friday to Switzerland, a team with only one previous Women’s World Cup appearance (in 2015). Neither team is expected to advance far in this tournament. More

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    Biggest Gap for U.S. World Cup Players: Their Ages

    The U.S. team includes past champions, veterans of the equal pay fight and 14 players experiencing their first World Cup. How they come together will shape the future.The story seemed like one Alex Morgan might tell around a campfire.Back in the day, the 34-year-old Morgan likes to begin, when players like her needed to find their way to their soccer games, they used something called MapQuest. It wasn’t an app on your smartphone, the kind with a reassuring voice that announced each turn and flashed a digital dot to show your location.It was a website, Morgan said, that generated a map and a list of step-by-step directions, which you had to print out on actual paper. Sometimes it fell to preteen kids like Morgan to read out the turns while a parent drove.“That was such a hard time,” the United States defender Naomi Girma, 23, recalled telling Morgan after hearing the story recently, feigning sympathy. “And she was like, ‘You don’t even know.’”Sports are often about gaps: talent gaps, experience gaps, compensation gaps. And in the weeks and months before the Women’s World Cup that began on Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, the players on the U.S. national women’s soccer team have found an unlikely bond in jokes, jabs and stories related to what may be their most notable feature: a generation gap.The team’s oldest player is Megan Rapinoe, 38, the iconic athlete who recently announced that she would retire after this World Cup and the end of her current professional season. The youngest is Alyssa Thompson, who is 18, just graduated high school and still lives with her parents. At least three of Thompson’s teammates — Morgan, Crystal Dunn and Julie Ertz — have children of their own.Thompson said that her older teammates sometimes play music that she doesn’t recognize, but that the different age groups find a middle ground with Cardi B. Sophia Smith, a 22-year-old forward, said she does recognize the music, though by genre, not by artist. “They sound like what my parents listen to,” she said.Alyssa Thompson, who at 18 is the youngest member of the squad, just graduated high school and still lives with her parents.Joe Puetz/Getty ImagesSmith admitted last month that she never has used a CD player and that she refuses to watch TV shows or movies if the video quality is “grainy.” One exception: videos of the 1999 Women’s World Cup final, a historic victory by the United States that spurred rapid growth of women’s soccer in America. Unlike some of her teammates, Smith has no memory of watching that team play — the final was played more than a year before she was born.Others recall a different game — the 2015 World Cup final, and Carli Lloyd’s stunning goal from midfield — as their touchstone moment. Four of their current teammates have far more vivid memories of that afternoon, because they played in the match.That generation gap, and how the U.S. team deals with it, is likely to be one of the prominent stories of the World Cup. But it is also a symbol of the latest pivotal moment in the evolution of the women’s game: a time of contentious debate about equal pay and human rights, and of battles for investment and demand for equal treatment with men. For the United States, a four-time World Cup winner, this tournament also presents a new, unrelenting challenge from rivals rising to meet the Americans’ level as leaders, spokeswomen and champions.Lindsey Horan, the U.S. team’s co-captain, is one of the veterans who won’t let the younger players forget that they have a role to play in that fight, and that winning games and championships is at the core of it.“There’s always pressure in this team,” said Horan, 29. “We live in pressure, and I think we make that known to any new, younger player coming into this environment that you’re going to live in that for the rest of your career on this national team.”The job for Coach Vlatko Andonovski has been to build a smooth-running machine from parts built in different eras. What makes the task even trickier for him this time is that the players at his disposal have a wide range of experience. Fourteen members of the 23-player roster are World Cup rookies. A few are sliding into roles long patrolled by veterans who are now injured, or retired, or facing their final games. It’s Andonovski’s first World Cup, too. “I’m not worried about the inexperience,” Andonovski said. “In fact, I’m excited about the energy and enthusiasm that the young players bring, the intensity and the drive as well. Actually, I think that will be one of our advantages.”“I’m excited about the energy and enthusiasm that the young players bring, the intensity and the drive as well,” said U.S. Coach Vlatko Andonovski.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBuilding chemistry among teammates isn’t that easy, though, especially when time is running out. Not even regular doses of Cardi B can change that. The team’s recent record reflects its struggles under Andonovski to fit new players into the roster of experienced ones.At the Tokyo Olympics — Andonovski’s first major tournament as U.S. coach — the team finished a disappointing third. Canada beat the Americans to reach the final, then won the gold medal. Just last fall, the United States endured its first three-game losing streak since 1993. One of the losses, to Germany, broke a 71-game winning streak on U.S. soil.The rest of the world, finally, appears to be catching up.Janine Beckie, a forward for Canada, said there were two or three teams at the 2019 World Cup that were strong enough to win it. But now, only four years later, she estimated that six or seven had to be considered serious title contenders.“This is definitely the most wide-open World Cup in history,” Beckie said. “I’m really interested in how this young U.S. team goes through this tournament. They can either have a fresh mind-set and recover quickly from game to game, or they can have players who are overwhelmed by the length of the tournament. Being there for a month from start to finish is really difficult, especially when you haven’t experienced that before.”That is why the older players on the U.S. team have been trying to prepare the newcomers for what to expect. So as they fielded questions about what to pack for a monthlong trip to the other side of the world — headphones, books and a favorite pair of comfy sweatpants were the bare minimum — the older players also have gone out of their way to make the younger players feel as if they have been on the team forever.“The important thing is, how do we make the young players feel comfortable?” said Emily Sonnett, who was a member of the 2019 championship team and this month is back for her second World Cup. “Because if you’re not having fun, why be here? And if you’re not comfortable, how are you ever going to play at your best?”Players young and old have come to learn that leading by example can be infectious. Rapinoe, whose outspokenness has at times made her the public face of her squad and her sport, has said the U.S. team considers it “incredibly important” to use its platform to “represent America and a sense of patriotism that kind of flips that term on its head.”For example, Rapinoe and others, including Morgan and the injured captain Becky Sauerbrunn, have spoken out about social issues like equal pay, sexual abuse, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial equality.Megan Rapinoe has said the U.S. team considers it important to “represent America and a sense of patriotism that kind of flips that term on its head.” Marlena Sloss for The New York TimesThe veterans haven’t pushed the younger players to be as involved in the same issues, players on both ends of the generation gap said. But many of the younger ones acknowledged that they feel a sense of duty to keep that aspect of the team alive.Girma said she was inspired by the national team’s activism to speak out about social justice issues while she was in college at Stanford. Shaken by the death of a college teammate there who killed herself, Girma and several of her contemporaries are now using their voices to highlight the need for mental health awareness.Forward Trinity Rodman, 21, said that responsibility is one the newer players have begun to embrace — “I’ve definitely tried to be more than a soccer player,” she said — but that every member of the team was united by a goal they all share.“We want to win so bad,” Rodman said, “and we’re going to do whatever we can to win.”That way, someday, they will have their own campfire stories to tell. More