Dunn, Crystal (1992- )

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    A New Era of Soccer Moms Navigates a Rapidly Changing Game

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    Women have long blended motherhood and elite sports. But as soccer expands its support systems, it is also demanding ever more of its players.Julie Ertz was on the clock.On one sunny morning in May, Ertz, a defender for the United States women’s soccer team, rolled out of bed early to dress and feed her infant son, Madden, and pack him for a trip. Then she scrambled to collect her soccer gear and headed off to a meeting with her club team, which was followed by several hours of practice.As soon as training ended, Ertz was back in her car, hustling to deliver her mother-in-law and Madden to the airport in Los Angeles for a flight to Phoenix. At their home there, Ertz’s husband, the Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz, would take over parenting duties for several days while Julie and her National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City F.C., played a match on the East Coast.In the days and weeks that followed there would be more days like that one: more airport farewells and happy reunions, more training sessions and road trips, more time away from Madden and Zach. As Ertz, 31, described this crazy schedule and her daily challenges juggling roles as a soccer star and a first-time mother, her eyes filled with tears.“I didn’t know if I’d be back,” she said of returning to soccer only months after Madden’s birth, in hopes of playing in her third Women’s World Cup. “I just didn’t know if that was going to be logistically possible. I don’t think any athlete wants to ever hang up their boots. But, you know, you become a mom and your whole life changes.”Parenthood has long created professional hurdles for women in every occupation, but also professional consequences: lost jobs, missed promotions and even promising careers sacrificed to the realization that motherhood and full-time work can sometimes feel incompatible, as there are rarely enough hours in the day to give 100 percent to both.That calculus is no different for world-class soccer players like Ertz and the other moms playing at the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand — a cohort that includes two other members of the U.S. team, Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn, but also players from countries including France, Germany and Jamaica.As professional athletes, they all had spent years taking care of their bodies, honing their performances, plotting their careers — focused, ultimately, on themselves. Having children changed that. “Now I can’t steal a nap if I wanted to,” said Dunn, who has a 1-year-old son, Marcel.In interviews, players who chose to step away the sport to have a baby, said they did so asking themselves the same difficult questions: Will my body ever be the same? Will my focus ever be as sharp? Will I even want to return?But as women’s soccer experiences a surge of interest and investment that has professionalized the game, raised incomes and made it harder than ever to keep a place on the world’s best teams, athletes who want children are facing a new question:How much room is there in elite soccer for moms?Casey Krueger, right, did not make the U.S. World Cup roster after racing to get back on the field after her pregnancy. Brad Smith/USSF, via Getty ImagesHard ChoicesCasey Krueger, a defender on the U.S. team since 2016, thought she could make it back in time for this World Cup. When she found out she was pregnant in 2021, the tournament was still nearly two years away. But after she had a baby boy last July, she worried she might not have enough time to make the roster.An emergency cesarean section had complicated her delivery, so she hired a pelvic floor therapist to work with her and hopefully hasten her return. By April, Krueger felt she was close: During a friendly match against Ireland, she looked to be in pre-pregnancy form.Yet she did not make the final cut. During her time off, other players had moved ahead of her on the U.S. depth chart. She is watching the World Cup from home.“It was a risk I was willing to take,” Kreuger said in a video call, as her son wiggled in her arms, before the U.S. team was named. “But as soon as you see their precious face, you realize that they’re worth anything.”Players worldwide are taking that risk, or at least taking control of their choices. The former U.S. midfielder Carli Lloyd, for example, said she chose not to play on into her 40s because she and her husband wanted to start a family. Another U.S. player, Becky Sauerbrunn, decided to freeze her eggs last year while she continued her career.Germany midfielder Melanie Leupolz is playing in the World Cup after having a baby last year, but one of her former teammates, goalkeeper Almuth Schult, is pregnant with her third child and is not. Jamaica has two mothers on its roster. One, Cheyna Matthews, has three sons. In a video published before the World Cup, she choked up when describing how one of her boys always asks why she has to be away from home for “too many days.”“We just sacrifice a lot to do what we do,” she said.U.S. Soccer, the governing body of soccer in the United States, said there have been 17 mothers who have played on its national team in its history, starting with Joan Dunlap in the mid-1980s.Morgan, the star U.S. striker, and her husband, the former player Servando Carrasco, employ a nanny to help care for their 3-year-old daughter, Charlie. But Morgan, 34, prefers to bring Charlie along on many of her trips with the U.S. team, at times setting up an inflatable bed so her daughter can sleep next to her in hotels.“You basically tend to your child like every step that you’re not on the soccer field or in the gym or in a meeting,” Morgan said. “I think it just gets easier, or maybe it doesn’t get easier, but you get more used to kind of wearing multiple hats all the time.”At times, Morgan said, the “aunties” on the team take over as unpaid babysitters because her husband or other family members aren’t always available on team trips, part of the kind of extended, unofficial family on which many of soccer’s moms rely. After one exhibition match this spring, for example, Charlie tugged at her mom’s shorts during an unsuccessful search for defender Emily Fox. “Where’s Foxy?” Charlie kept asking. “I want Foxy!”But the aunties can only do so much. So for years, U.S. Soccer has subsidized nanny care on road trips. The initial gains were made after pressure from the team’s early mothers, but over time even more support was built into the team’s collective bargaining agreement, including daily travel stipends and paid transportation for children and their caregivers. In the U.S. camp, at least, that has made it easier for the mothers on the team to focus on their jobs.Five mothers, a record for the program, were at the U.S. team’s training camp in April, when highchairs were pulled up to the dining tables and strollers wove paths through the team hotel. At the team’s exhibition matches this spring, the players’ children had their own suite, its door marked with a sign reading, “USA NANNIES.” Inside, the catering included Goldfish crackers and juice boxes.U.S. forward Alex Morgan has made her daughter, Charlie, a fixture at her team’s games.Brad Smith/ISI Photos, via Getty ImagesMixed SupportWhile accommodations for players with children have become more common, the ruthlessness of the sport still comes through sometimes, especially in Europe, where the concept remains relatively new.“Usually, the thinking was that when you were pregnant, your career was over,” Schult told the German outlet Deutsche Welle. “So they were not prepared for having children around.”When Iceland’s Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir took maternity leave from her French team, Olympique Lyonnais, in 2021, the team refused to pay her full salary. So with the help of FIFPro, the global players’ union, she filed a claim with FIFA, global soccer’s governing body, and won a landmark judgment. Gunnarsdottir called it “a wake-up call for clubs.”Sarai Bareman, the head of women’s soccer at FIFA, helped create those new rules, which mandate that clubs grant pregnant players a 14-week maternity leave paid at two-thirds salary and ensure they have a spot on the roster when they return. Now Bareman, a former player, has a young child of her own, a toddler who could be seen running around FIFA’s main hotel in Auckland during the World Cup.Bareman said eight players had registered with FIFA to have their children travel with their teams at the World Cup, and that several others had made private arrangements. The support they receive, and their visibility, was uncommon even a decade ago.“I think it’s very much driven by North America, because we’ve seen some very high-profile returning mothers,” she said. “I honestly feel that has influenced a lot of other female players around the world to be more publicly open about the fact that, yes, they’ve got kids, too. Their kids are there. That’s a massive, massive part of their life.”Morgan had Charlie in 2020, and returned to the sport just in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, often wearing a gold ring with the word “MAMA” that she bought for herself as a reminder of her priorities. Since then, she has regularly included Charlie in her postgame celebrations on the field, carrying her around to see the fans and letting her frolic on the grass. Morgan’s 10.1 million Instagram followers are treated to regular updates on Charlie, including one last week with photos of them after they had been reunited after several weeks apart. “She made it, and my heart is full,” Morgan wrote in the post.No amount of support, though, can ease those separations. One afternoon last week, Morgan excused herself from reporters to say good night to Charlie on a video call. But there was no answer. Charlie had already gone to sleep. “Oh, no,” Morgan said, frowning before she sighed loudly and returned to her interviews.Jessica McDonald brought her son to the 2019 World Cup. She knows other players who left the sport after having to choose between their soccer careers and starting a family. Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesRole ModelsThere was a time, not too long ago, when players tried to play down their motherhood. Jessica McDonald, a member of the United States’ World Cup-winning team in 2019, said that in the many years before she made the national team, she would “walk on eggshells” at her clubs when it came to her son, Jeremiah.“I remember having coaches that said, ‘Oh, are you playing like crap today because your son was up all night?’” she said. “I’m like: ‘First and foremost, my son has got nothing to do with anything that’s happening with me and my career. And how dare you try and rub that in my face?’”It wasn’t until she started playing professionally in North Carolina, where she had an extensive family network to help her, that McDonald decided she and Jeremiah were going to be a package deal. She wasn’t making enough money to afford child care at the time, she said, so she took Jeremiah to practices and set up his stroller on the sideline. When the team took breaks, McDonald would jog over to check on him, or to give him a bottle or change his diaper.When Jeremiah got older, McDonald decided that she no longer cared what coaches thought. She became even more proud of being a mother, she said, delighting in letting Jeremiah run around the field after her games, sometimes in his Batman or Superman costumes. Not every player, she said, found a way to make it work.“There’s a lot of talented women out there who have thrown away their talent to be moms because they didn’t have support from coaches or enough pay,” McDonald said of players in the pro leagues that feed the national team. “And if that didn’t happen, I firmly believe that there would be more moms on the national team right now.”McDonald did not know it at the time, but other players were watching her succeed with Jeremiah at her side, and were inspired by it. Sydney Leroux, a forward who played for the United States when it won the 2015 World Cup, was one of them.Leroux had her first child, a boy named Cassius, 14 months after winning the World Cup. Nearly three years later, in the summer of 2019, she had her second, a daughter named Roux. After rushing back to the field in 93 days — Leroux was counting — she said she was sure she was doing everything to pick up where she left off. Until, that is, the coach of her club team explained to her that the national team was no longer interested in her. Its coaches had moved on, Leroux recalled him telling her, because “you had a bad year.”“How do you even say someone’s had a bad year when they didn’t play one game? I was pregnant,” Leroux said. “It was obviously clear that they didn’t want to go in that direction, and they just used my pregnancy” as an excuse.After a recent practice with her current team, Angel City, Leroux, 33, said she didn’t “care about the national team anymore whatsoever.” She is happier now, she said, because her children have given her more perspective on life.“I feel like I have so much more to give,” she said. “I think playing just because I love it still has been the best thing that I’ve ever done.”Sydney Leroux no longer plays for the U.S. women’s team. But she said her own experience led her to push for higher pay and better support for players with children.Katharine Lotze/Getty Images‘Dream to Do Both’Even after she left the national team, Leroux said, she continued to push for the N.W.S.L. to offer higher pay and better support for players with children, including those who wanted to adopt them, because she understood the struggle: Back then, she said, she was spending more on child care than she was making from her club.Julie Ertz said that she is “indebted to these moms who had little to no resources but wanted to dream to do both,” and the example of players like Leroux and others, including the three mothers who were her teammates at her first World Cup, in 2015, gave her the confidence to believe that she could return to the national team, and to the World Cup, less than a year after Madden was born.But in the months as her body healed and she worked to get back into playing shape, Ertz couldn’t help but wonder if she had set her career on a new course. Was she OK with the possibility that she might drift away from the national team? Or that she might have to retire from soccer altogether if it kept her from being the best mom for Madden that she could be?Those are questions she will continue to wrestle with as she seeks the right balance. Soccer doesn’t define her life, she said, but she admitted that “it has created me.”“I will never be ready to ever say goodbye to the sport,” she said.Crystal Dunn and her son, Marcel.Marlena Sloss for The New York Times More

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      The Yates Report Isn’t the End. It’s Just the Start.

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      Women’s soccer players tried to raise the alarm about abuse for years. When they say there’s more, people should listen.Somehow, at the end, Megan Rapinoe could still sound enthusiastic. She had spent the previous 20 minutes answering question after question about the “devastating” findings of the Yates Report, trying to explain how it feels to know that the sport to which you have devoted your life has permitted a culture of “systemic abuse” to fester, finding a way to put into words how painful it can be to read, in stark black and white, that which you have always known.Rapinoe had met each and every one of the questions, as she always does, with the habitual, measured candor that has become her hallmark. Not once did she intimate that she had said all she had to say. Not once did she try to change the subject, to guide the conversation onto ground less harrowing, less bleak. She was asked, again and again, to describe and to parse and to relive her trauma, and the trauma of so many of her colleagues and friends, and she did so, until there were no more questions left.Her anger — her tone pitched both to convey and control it — was clear, but so too was her fatigue. Rapinoe and her teammates have had to “shoulder a lot” over the years, as she put it. The struggle to free the sport, their sport, of both abusers and the individuals and the structures that have both harbored and nourished them is not their first battle. This team has fought for equal pay and for social justice, too. “We have a lot of experience,” Rapinoe said.At that point, for just a moment, she sounded tired. But then, almost as an afterthought, someone pointed out where she was, what was about to happen: Rapinoe was sitting inside London’s Wembley Stadium, preparing for a game on Friday night that will match the United States, the reigning world champion, against England, now officially ensconced as Europe’s premier team.Every single seat at the stadium was sold, snapped up almost as soon as they went on sale: 90,000 or so fans would be coming to watch a game that, to many, has the air of a sneak preview of next year’s World Cup final. And, in an instant, Rapinoe’s enthusiasm was clear. “I am so excited for this game,” she said. “This is a really special moment for our sport.”The U.S. captain, Becky Sauerbrunn, and several of her teammates spoke this week of the need to find joy in their sport anywhere they could. Friday’s game against England at Wembley is a start.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThe Yates Report is, in effect, more than 300 pages of tragedy: personal tragedies compounded by the tragedy of chronic institutional failure, each one of them part of a mosaic that has left an open wound, an aching scar in the heart of women’s soccer. Given some of the revelations, it would be glib in the extreme to highlight one aspect that is more upsetting, more harrowing than any other. Much of it, as Rapinoe said, is “hard to read.”But there is a particular, keening sorrow in knowing that, so often, it was the same enthusiasm that so animated Rapinoe — even as a veteran, even after all she has achieved and, most significantly, all that she has endured — that was so often weaponized by those in power to silence those trying to safeguard the game and to protect those damaging it.The teams of the N.W.S.L., the league itself and even U.S. Soccer, the Yates report found, “gave little thought or attention to basic player protections.” Instead, investigators concluded, “the focus was on keeping eight teams on the field to ensure the league’s survival.”Those reporting abuse, in other words, were either ignored or discouraged by leveraging their passion for soccer against them, while those committing it were indulged — ushered into new jobs with hearty farewells — because, it seems, of an unwillingness to rock the boat in case everyone ended up submerged. The players believed in their mission to grow women’s soccer as a sport; they had a responsibility not just to themselves, but to the sport, too. And that, too often, was used against them.The Yates Report, it is to be hoped, will explode that enforced omertà. “I think this was kind of the nail in the coffin,” as Rapinoe’s United States teammate, Crystal Dunn, put it this week.What she referred to as “accountability,” but might better be described as “overdue bloodletting,” has already begun: Merritt Paulson, the owner of the Portland Thorns, has stepped away from the team’s decision-making process. Arnim Whisler, the owner of the Chicago Red Stars, has been removed from that club’s board. Neither has, as yet, been forced to sell his team, but the writing is on the wall.“Every owner and executive and U.S. Soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players and failed to protect the players, who have hidden behind legalities and have not participated in these investigations, should be gone,” said Becky Sauerbrunn, the U.S. captain, earlier this week. Rapinoe went a little further. She did not bother with euphemism when she declared that, from this point on, neither Paulson nor Whisler fit to be involved in women’s soccer at all. She has reached the stage where she is prepared to name names.N.W.S.L. players and fans are demanding accountability, even from their own teams.via ReutersBut that does not mean either the report itself, or the handful of senior figures scorched by their sudden exposure to sunlight, represents a conclusion. Publication is not enough. The fall of Paulson and Whisler, if and when it comes, is not enough.Here, too, there is a tragedy: The “horrific” details of the Yates report are not, and should not be mistaken for, the sum total of the problem. The investigators themselves note that they received several credible accusations of sexual harassment that they could not corroborate sufficiently for inclusion. And the players themselves know there is more to find.“This is not just in the N.W.S.L,” said Lindsey Horan, the United States midfielder, now playing for the French team Lyon. “This is women’s soccer, this is women in general. We have these problems all over the world. I sit here and I’m like: It’s not done. This is all over the world. Being a player in Europe right now, I know that.”Rapinoe has the same sense. “This report has come out in our country,” she said. “But the reality is it could be any country in the world.”There is more to be done, they know. They are angry and they are disappointed and they are tired, too. “Emotionally exhausted,” Rapinoe said. But — in a sport full of athletes finding their voices — that is the thing about this team, in particular. No matter how tired they are, no matter how bleak it is, they have never lost their enthusiasm for the fight.Let’s Blue Sky ThisTodd Boehly has, it seems, started something. It is little more than a month since the Chelsea owner — unprompted and ill-advisedly — suggested that the Premier League might like to consider staging its own version of an all-star game, and the idea has already mutated into something even bigger, even more unwieldy, and even more likely to be derided on talk radio.Various unnamed Premier League executives have, according to The Times of London, floated the possibility of staging a series of showpiece games across the world between teams comprising the best players from the top flights of England, Italy, Spain and Germany — sorry, France, you don’t make the cut, apparently — in order to expand soccer’s appeal to “emerging markets.”There are several red flags here. The fact the executives are unnamed, for example. As a rule, if someone thinks they have a good idea, a real winner, they cannot wait to put their name to it. If, on the other hand, they are engaged in what might be described as a craven money grab, they tend to decide that they are “not authorized to speak on the matter.”So, too, the justification for the project. Does soccer really need to expand into emerging markets? What possible territory remains virgin to the great sports industrial complex? There are farmers in wild corners of Mongolia who will spend hours online screaming that Cristiano Ronaldo only scores penalties; seeing Sandro Tonali and Declan Rice in Shanghai will not add to their ardor for the sport.But putting that entirely understandable queasiness aside — and parking, just for a moment, the valid complaint that elite players do too much soccer-playing as it is — we must consider the unlikely possibility that this is, in fact, quite a good idea. Particularly, say, if these fixtures replaced preseason tours, and if the money they generated was weighted so that the smaller teams in each league got rather more of it.That does not mean it is not a craven money grab, of course. It is very obviously a craven money grab. If something is being suggested by a major soccer team, it goes without saying that it is because they think they have spotted an untapped revenue stream. But that does not mean it is necessarily devoid of merit.The Context of RecordsErling Haaland makes scoring look easy. It’s not.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesErling Haaland’s first goal on Tuesday night took him past Edin Dzeko and Mario Gomez. His second, not quite half an hour later, lifted him above Rivaldo and Luis Suárez. The Manchester City striker has now scored as many times in the Champions League as Ryan Giggs did. In 15.17 percent of the time.The speed with which Haaland — at age 22 — is rising up the list of the competition’s all-time goal scorers is blistering. He needs six more to overtake not just Wayne Rooney and Kaka and Samuel Eto’o, but Gerd Müller. There is no reason to believe, at his current rate of progress, that he will not have done that by the end of this season’s group phase.A decent run in the knockout stage should see him break into the top 20. Given that he has now scored 19 goals in only 12 games since joining City, that may not be the limit of his ambitions. He is a young man going places extremely fast.As breathtaking and as stirring as his achievements are, it is necessary to place them within just a small piece of context. Over the last decade or so, as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have broken almost every record available to them, each landmark has been greeted as proof of their wondrous talent. That, of course, is only right. The same applies to Haaland.But it is also the case that all of them are products, to some extent, of their eras. Messi and Ronaldo were playing, at the peak of their careers, for teams that had far greater financial resources than the vast majority of teams they faced until the latter stages of the Champions League. The competition was far more unbalanced, far less equal, than it had been even 10 or 15 years earlier.The same, once again, applies to Haaland, both at Manchester City and — to some extent — in his last stop at Borussia Dortmund. He is playing, for the most part, against teams that are hopelessly overmatched, in a way that the likes of Filippo Inzaghi, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Raúl Gonzalez, all above him in the list, were not.That does not diminish Haaland’s talent. Nor does it devalue his goals, or discredit his achievements. But it is important to remember, in an era in which records seem to fall with dread frequency, that they do so because the game is set up now to make them more attainable than ever for the precious few to have them in their grasp.CorrespondenceA curious question to open this week, from Lloyd Mallison. Curious not because it is bad — it is not; it’s a good question — but curious because it’s strange what catches each of our eyes. “Do you have any insight into the rehabilitation of Saúl at Atlético Madrid?” Lloyd asked. “After his pretty limp time at Chelsea, I didn’t expect to see him back starting again so soon.”I have no particular insight, sadly, other than to suggest that it is a welcome reminder of this column’s motto: There is no such thing as a bad (professional) soccer player. There are only players in the wrong systems, or working with the wrong coaches, or in the wrong context. Chelsea was not right for Saúl. That doesn’t mean Saúl cannot be right somewhere else.We had a couple of emails on the travails of Juventus, too, which act as a neat couplet. Joseph Blanco sent in some perceptive thoughts on the dangers of what we have come to call “philosophy,” pointing out that the game is “turning a generation of players into robots.” He is, in that sense, what we might call an Allegrista.Massimiliano Allegri, calmly pondering the merits of philosophy vs. culture.Massimo Pinca/ReutersHe disagrees, though, that Massimiliano Allegri’s anti-philosophy approach can be equated to Juventus’s scatter-gun approach to team-building. “I don’t think it’s fair to say the struggles of the team are the same as the organization’s shortcomings,” he wrote.That dovetails neatly with this observation from Tory Amorello: “I couldn’t help but think about how it would feel if you exchanged the word philosophy for culture. I think the way that managers talk about philosophy is somewhat limited to announcing a defined style of play. Take that concept away from the field, and it’s called culture.”That, perhaps, sums up the bind Juventus finds itself in far more succinctly than I managed: It is not a failing of philosophy, but of broader culture. I shall take that, repeat it on various broadcast media and do my level best, Tory, not to present it as entirely my own work. More

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      Black Players and Common Goal Join Forces for Anti-Racism Project

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew Anti-Racism Project Hopes to Push Soccer Past GesturesBlack players, joining with the charity Common Goal and backed by teams in North America, say they hope to reinvigorate the campaign against racism in the game.Wilfried Zaha and other Premier League players still kneel briefly before every match, but he and other Black players said the time had come to do more.Credit…Pool photo by Clive RoseFeb. 24, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETTony Sanneh saw the pattern while he was a player. It is precisely the same one he sees now, more than a decade after his retirement.Soccer confronts its struggle to combat racism only sporadically. The abuse of a player on the field, the denigration of a team from the stands, a sudden reminder of the lack of opportunities for Black coaches or executives — all of it sparks a conversation, a campaign, a vow to do better. “It is always talked about,” Sanneh said. “And then it goes away again.”Several prominent Black voices within the sport have suggested, in recent weeks, that it must not be allowed to happen again. After almost a year of protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that swept the globe after the killing of George Floyd, a number of players, in particular, have suggested that gestures are no longer sufficient.“It has become something we just do,” the Crystal Palace forward Wilfried Zaha said of players’ taking a knee before Premier League matches. “That is not enough for me.”The players say they want actions, not gestures, and Sanneh — a veteran of the Bundesliga, Major League Soccer and the 2002 World Cup — and others are hoping to kick-start that effort. Sanneh has joined with Common Goal, a player-led social movement in global soccer; clubs from the three major leagues in North America; and the American Outlaws, the United States national team’s largest fan group, to launch the Anti-Racist Project, a program designed to tackle all aspects of soccer’s problem with racism.The program’s scale is ambitious: It aims to engage some 5,000 coaches and 60,000 young people in more than 400 communities in its first year, using an educational antiracism tool kit established and honed by the work Sanneh’s personal foundation, based in St. Paul, Minn., has done over the last two decades. Sanneh said he hoped it could be “refreshed and globalized” to be rolled out beyond the United States next year.Flickers of players’ impatience with the pace of change in the game are already starting to show. In England, where the sight of players taking a knee is now part of the pregame ritual, the Brentford striker Ivan Toney has suggested it has become “pretty pointless.” “Take the knee and the people at the top can rest for a while now,” he said.The United States women’s team did not kneel during the national anthem before its game against Brazil on Sunday, a collective decision made by the team after nearly a year of protests. “It is all to say that we are now ready to move past the protesting phase and actually move into putting all of the talk into actual work,” the midfielder Crystal Dunn told reporters afterward.The United States women’s national team on Sunday ended its ritual of kneeling during the national anthem.Credit…Alex Menendez/Getty ImagesSeveral players, including Manchester City’s American goalkeeper Zack Steffen, have backed the project, but its advantage, according to Evan Whitfield, a former Major League Soccer player who now works with Common Goal, is the breadth of its coalition.“There is a rich history of player-led demonstrations,” he said. “That will continue, but what is unique about this is that sense of collective action.”For a long time, Whitfield said, “corporate entities and clubs” have sought to use “their messaging to pacify player voices.” There is a sense that has changed now, not only because clubs are prepared to “back up what they espouse” through action, but also because there are those, like Sanneh and Steffen and others, who have sufficient clout to “put their thumb on the scale.”The Chicago Fire of M.L.S., the Oakland Roots of the lower-tier U.S.L. and Angel City F.C., the National Women’s Soccer League expansion club that will join that league next year, all have lent support to the project.“I cannot tell you how important it is that we step up before we take the field,” said Cobi Jones, the former United States international who is now one of Angel City F.C.’s owners. “It shows everyone that the club has an understanding of where it stands on racism, that we are at the forefront. It is inherent in what we stand for.”The hope is that they will be just the first to take part. The project is, Whitfield said, “a call to action,” not just for other clubs, but “for leagues and fans, too.”“We had to step up and work collectively,” Sanneh said. “To use our success to work for others in this industry. We have to all work together to combat societal challenges.”Steffen was a little more succinct, echoing the views of a growing chorus of players. “We have talked a lot for the last few months,” he said. “Now is the time to take action, to get out there, and to show people that we are serious.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More