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
