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    Spain, With Flourishes, Bounds Into Women’s World Cup Quarterfinals

    When you think about it, even the own goal was impressive.Yes, Spain scored fives times in its 5-1 victory against Switzerland on Saturday to advance to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. Yes, the goals had come in all types, a veritable tapas menu of how to put the ball in the net: nifty passing, fancy footwork, opportunistic finishes.But even the own goal, the one that Spain defender Laia Codina wishes she had back, the one that ensured that Switzerland’s humbling exit from the World Cup was not a shutout, was a looker — a smooth finish in which Codina caught her own goalkeeper out of position and beat her cleanly from near midfield.OH NO, IT’S AN OWN GOAL FROM SPAIN 🤯 pic.twitter.com/eTfLdXfB1d— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) August 5, 2023
    It was a self-inflicted wound, but not a deadly one. Spain was back on top six minutes later thanks to Alba Redondo.Aitana Bonmatí made it 3-1 with some wonderful footwork that left at least two Swiss defenders lying on the grass around her. Codina atoned for her own goal with one into the correct net just before halftime, and Jenni Hermoso pounced on an errant backpass to make it five midway through the second half.But Spain knew it was over long before that. It will move on, to face the winner of Sunday’s Netherlands-South Africa game in the quarterfinals, the latest step in a reconstruction project that began after the team nearly broke apart in a mutiny against its coach, Jorge Vilda, last year. That project now will continue for at least one more game, and with the players brimming with confidence.The victory was the team’s first in the knockout rounds of the major tournament. Given how comprehensive it was, it might not be its last in this World Cup. More

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    Spain’s Team Went to War. At the World Cup, It Has to Win the Peace.

    A failed rebellion against Coach Jorge Vilda ended with a dozen players dropped for the Women’s World Cup. Those who remain might be good enough to win it.A couple of days before Spain’s first genuine test of this World Cup — an encounter with Japan in Wellington, New Zealand — team officials became aware of an issue. The players, it turned out, were bored. Their families and friends, who had traveled halfway around the globe to watch their games, were bored. Some of the squad had young children in tow. They were bored, too.Spain had chosen the town of Palmerston North as its base for the tournament. It made perfect sense. The team was guaranteed to play all of its games until the semifinal on New Zealand’s North Island. Palmerston, a university town a couple of hours north of Wellington, and a short flight from Auckland, fit the bill.But three weeks into their stay — Spain arrived in New Zealand well in advance of its first game, hoping to draw the sting from the jet lag — the place had started to pall. New Zealand’s second-largest noncoastal city boasted precious little to do, particularly in the evenings. The players, and their families, wanted to move.Even with the game with Japan looming, the Spanish federation acceded to the players’ request. Officials began the laborious task of moving an entire elite sports team — 23 players, 31 coaches and support staff, piles of equipment and mounds of accouterments — to the James Cook Hotel in Wellington in the middle of a tournament.And as if that was not enough, the federation did what it could to help the dozens of family members who formed the team’s traveling caravan with their arrangements, too. Logistically, it was a considerable heave. The kind that is hardly ideal from a sporting perspective. In Spain’s case, though, it was worth it, just to keep the peace.Alexia Putellas, the two-time Ballon d’Or winner, racing upfield against Japan.Marty Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFew teams arrived in Australia and New Zealand with more pedigree than Spain. Jorge Vilda’s team, after all, boasts not only Alexia Putellas, the two-time Ballon d’Or winner, but also Aitana Bonmati, the midfielder regarded as her heir apparent. They are two of nine members of the squad drawn from Barcelona, European club soccer’s unquestioned powerhouse.No team, though, landed in quite such a fragile state. Last September, in the aftermath of Spain’s elimination from the European Championship a month or so earlier, 15 players sent the country’s federation a boilerplate email withdrawing themselves from consideration for the national team.The signatories included not just Bonmati, but Patri Guijarro, Mariona Caldentey and Mapi León, central figures in the great Barcelona side, as well as Ona Batlle, Laia Aleixandri and Leila Ouahabi, some of the country’s most high-profile exports. Three players — Putellas, the forward Jenni Hermoso and Irene Paredes, then the national team’s captain — did not send the email but were seen as giving it their tacit support.Spain had, in an instant, lost the core of its golden generation.The precise nature of the grievances that had forced the players’ hand remained oblique in public — the email referred only to “the latest events that have occurred in the national team, and the situation they have created” — but, privately, the list of complaints was both long and, in the context of women’s soccer, distinctly familiar.The players, now ensconced in professional environments at their clubs, felt the national team program was outmoded, not up to the standard they had come to expect. The facilities the federation provided for them were subpar, the players believed. They traveled to some games by bus, rather than plane, as many of their rivals did, or as they would at club level.Vilda with Luis Rubiales, center, the federation president, in Wellington on Monday.Jose Breton/Pics Action/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesVilda, the coach, was said to have fostered an oppressive workplace environment, one in which the players’ every move was monitored by his staff. Nobody ever confirmed as much, but it was widely assumed that his removal would be required if the players were to contemplate returning.The federation, though, decided on a less conciliatory approach. Vilda was, in the words of Luis Rubiales, the federation president, “untouchable.” If the group of “15 plus three,” as it had come to be seen, did not want to play for Spain, that was fine: Spain would go and find some people who did. Vilda called up a scratch squad, and immediately embarked on a run of 16 games in which his team drew once, lost once, and won the rest. Among the teams it defeated was the mighty United States, but also Japan, Jamaica and Norway.As the World Cup drew closer, though, the hard-line stance started to soften. Hermoso and Paredes, only informally associated with the strike, were called back into the team, forging a path for the others. The Spanish players’ union volunteered to mediate a meeting between the holdouts and Ana Álvarez, the federation’s director of women’s soccer.Ana Álvarez, the federation’s director of women’s soccer.Luis Millan/EPA, via ShutterstockThe federation refused, but made an alternative suggestion: Álvarez would meet with every player individually, giving them an opportunity to lodge their complaints. Through May and June, she held more than a dozen meetings with the disaffected players, inviting some to Madrid and traveling to Barcelona to see others.Each meeting lasted two or three hours, according to people in soccer with direct knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private, and personal, discussions. Álvarez sought to understand the roots of their discontent, to gather feedback, to ask how each player would like things to change in the future. Most of the meetings were cordial, and constructive.At the end, though, there was an awkward coda. The players had removed themselves from international contention by email. They had to make themselves available again in the same way. The federation would not risk calling up anyone who might reject the olive branch.Conscious of not only their own professional ambitions but various commercial agreements, the majority of the players acquiesced. Guijarro and León were among the handful who refused. “Some things have to change, and if they don’t, then it won’t go away,” León told the Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo earlier this year. “Missing the World Cup will bother me a lot, but I have values and beliefs.” Her Barcelona teammate, Guijarro, cited “consistency” as her explanation.Patri Guijarro, left, and Mapi León, second left, during a Barcelona match in March. They are missing the World Cup.Albert Gea/ReutersWhen Vilda named his World Cup squad, though, only three of the players to have signed the original email — Bonmati, Batlle and Caldentey — were included. The others had all been omitted. The coach had decided, instead, to prioritize those players who had helped Spain prepare for the tournament.Still, the situation was febrile. The 23 players under Vilda’s aegis might all have “wanted to be here,” as Paredes put it, but that unity of purpose veiled deep schisms. His squad now contained both mutineers and their replacements.He had done what he could to ease the tensions, not only visiting a Barcelona training session in the spring but, according to those players who had remained in the national team squad throughout, relaxing his approach. “It has been a tough, special season,” Vilda said on the eve of the World Cup. “But it has given us chance to learn. The federation has always been open to dialogue, and to solve things.”The decision to listen to the players’ requests to move their base midway through the tournament, then, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of that détente, but it is not the only one. Spain now boasts a vastly expanded coaching staff, including for the first time both a nutritionist and a podiatrist in the traveling party. The standard of accommodation and transport has improved, too.The players were encouraged to expand that further, too, by inviting family and friends along at the federation’s expense: Each member of the World Cup squad was granted an allowance of $16,000 to pay for the travel and lodging.A training session in Wellington. Spain moved its team to a new training base after players complained of being bored. Amanda Perobelli/ReutersThe newspaper El País has reported that dozens of parents, siblings and children are in New Zealand, sitting behind the dugouts at Spain’s games, arranging their activities on a WhatsApp group titled “Free Tours.”The players have been allowed to spend considerable amounts of down time with them. Even after the game with Japan ended in a deflating 4-0 loss, they were given a morning off to see their loved ones. The atmosphere, according to those on the squad, is much more relaxed and “flexible” than it has been at previous tournaments.There has been a concerted attempt among the players, too, to defuse any lingering tensions. They have veered toward the traditional: long sessions playing two card games, Virus and Brandy, and a renewed focus on forfeits — singing or dancing in front of their peers — for those players who lose games in training.“Things are not forgotten,” Paredes said in an interview with El País. “But we must put them aside knowing that we have a common goal and that we are going for it.”The sense of purpose is such that Bonmati, one of the signatories of the original email, even cast the defeat to Japan as a bonding experience. “This is going to unite us more than ever,” she said.Whether that is how it plays out, of course, remains to be seen. Should Spain lose to Switzerland on Saturday in round of 16, it is not difficult to imagine the uneasy truce breaking.Spain’s preparation for this World Cup, one it genuinely believed it could win, has been fraught and tense and, at times, toxic. It has had enough drama.What it needs, from this point on, is for everything to be as boring as possible. More

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    From Equal Pay to Ending Abuse, Soccer’s Fight for Fairness Spreads

    The success of the U.S. women’s soccer team on the field and at the negotiating table has been a model for players elsewhere. In other countries, those battles are heating up.LONDON — There is always something to shoulder, the world’s best women’s soccer players know. Second-class facilities. Failed leadership. The persistent fight for equal opportunities. The glacial battle for equal pay.Just last week, a comprehensive report revealing systemic abuse across American women’s soccer left players devastated, but not surprised.“It’s really sad to say, but in a way, I think we’re used to having to deal with one thing or another,” United States forward Megan Rapinoe said of the report’s findings before her team played England on Friday. “It seems to bring us closer.”It is that sense of collective struggle that has repeatedly galvanized the United States women’s team in its battles with U.S. Soccer. It’s also what has made them leaders to colleagues and rivals around the world, players and teams with their own struggles, their own priorities, their own goals on and off the field.England’s players, for example, said this week that they would use their next match to raise awareness of a campaign for girls to have equal access to soccer at school. In Spain, the team that will take the field against the United States on Tuesday will be without 15 key players who have been exiled for demanding that their federation engage with concerns about the team’s coach.And in Canada, the women’s team — the biggest regional rival to the U.S. and a leading contender to win next summer’s Women’s World Cup — has drawn a line in the sand with its federation, saying it will not accept any new contract that does not guarantee equal pay between men and women.“A lot of it has to do with respect and being seen and valued for what we’re providing to our federations,” the United States captain Becky Sauerbrunn said in a recent interview about her team’s equal pay campaign. “We’re doing the same work that the men are doing. We’re playing on the same pitch. We’re traveling and training and playing games, usually the same amount, if not more. Why would they get paid more than us?”In Washington last month, Sauerbrunn sat at a table alongside several teammates after a match and signed the equal pay deal. It was, for her, a moment worth savoring.“What’s so frustrating for us sometimes,” she said of that moment of triumph and celebration, “is that we feel like this should have been given so long ago.”It is an issue that a growing number of federations are continuing to work to address, either through proactive agreements or after pressure from their players. Since 2017, when Norway’s federation became the first to announce an equal pay agreement between its national teams, a host of nations have followed suit, including federations in New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, England, Ireland and — just this summer — Spain and the Netherlands.Still, nearly all of those deals shade the definition of equal pay by offering men’s and women’s players equal match bonuses but only equivalent percentages of the vastly different prize money on offer from FIFA at competitions like the World Cup. The prize pool for the men’s tournament in Qatar next month will be $440 million — multiples more than what will be available to women at their next championship.The new U.S. Soccer agreement is different: The American teams will be paid the same, dollar for dollar, for competing for their country because they have agreed to pool their World Cup prize money. Over the lifetime of the deal, that is expected to shift millions of dollars that would have gone to the men in previous years to the members of the women’s team.Players in other nations still have far to go. But they have been taking notes.In June, the Canadian women rebelled against their federation — just over a year before the next World Cup — over the cause of equal pay. “The women’s national team does not view equal FIFA percentages as between our respective teams as equal pay,” said its players in an open letter in which the team indicated its ambition to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. women’s team.The team, the Canadian players said, “will not accept an agreement that does not guarantee equal pay.”That spirit of equal reward, and equal opportunity, is spreading.“The younger generation now will believe that they all should be having the same opportunities, and they all should be having the same chances,” said Vivianne Miedema, the Arsenal and Netherlands star, who worked with her federation and alongside her Dutch teammates to achieve their equal pay deal.“It’s not just a money thing,” Miedema added. “It’s a movement that’s been created. I just don’t really think women and men should be treated in a different way.”In Spain, a dispute involving a group of 15 national team players is about more day-to-day concerns. They have refused to play for their country until their federation addresses the methods and management of their coach, Jorge Vilda, whom some members of the team want removed.The Spanish federation responded by not only refusing to engage with the complaints but also exiling the 15 players who went public with their demands. Instead, the federation will field an understrength squad in Tuesday’s high-profile friendly against the United States, one of Spain’s most important opportunities to test itself against a World Cup rival before the tournament next summer.“If 15 of the best players in the world wanted to share feedback I’d respect them enough as people and players to take their concerns seriously,” Sauerbrunn wrote on Twitter.The Spain team that will face the United States on Tuesday will have a different look after more than a dozen players were dropped after raising concerns about the coach, Jorge Vilda, at top.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockRapinoe echoed that sense of solidarity, saying, “It’s uncomfortable to know the just general level of disrespect for women’s teams and women’s players around the world.”That is why, for Miedema and other top players, the fight isn’t only about pay. Resources are just as important, from the fields teams play on to equal access to equipment and medical personnel to the quality of coaching.“One of the most important things that we’ve been continuously fighting for over the last couple of years is that we’ve got the same facilities, we’ve got the same opportunities, starting at a young age,” Miedema said. “Because that’s how the level of women’s soccer will increase.”But alongside progress in the women’s game — record attendances, unprecedented television ratings, record salaries and rising transfer fees — the scathing inequalities players continue to face were being laid bare. The abuse scandal, documented in excruciating detail in a report by the former Justice Department official Sally Q. Yates last week, was just the latest example.Miedema, in an interview before the Yates report was published, suggested oversight was just as important as pay and other working conditions. But the issue of the huge gap in prize money was too big, and too widespread, she said, to be left to individual federations to resolve.“I think that’s something that needs to be led by FIFA and UEFA,” she said, a reference to European soccer’s governing body.Lise Klaveness, the president of Norway’s soccer federation, has committed her federation to that kind of top-down equality. But she also has urged UEFA and FIFA to make a similar commitment.“Soccer is the biggest sport in the world and in Norway,” said Klaveness, a former national team player. “We’re everywhere, in every schoolyard, everywhere. So, it’s very important for us to look at ourselves as something that meets all girls and all boys, and that you should feel the same value.”Sauerbrunn’s advice to other teams, including the Spanish side she and her teammates will face on Tuesday? Keep fighting. Keep asking. Keep trying.“When you’re negotiating, sometimes you’re going to have to be creative, you’re going to have to persevere because you’re going to hear ‘no’ a lot,” she said. “We had to keep making ground slowly.“But you’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t ask. And I would definitely say that the collective voice is so much stronger than just a few individuals.” More