Women’s Super League (Soccer)

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares149 Views

    The Problem in Coaching Style Without Substance

    by

    England’s 8-0 thrashing of Norway was a stunning triumph. But it also exposed a failure of leadership.As the changing room door closed behind them, England’s players could not help but laugh. They were halfway through what was, in theory, the most arduous challenge awaiting them in the group stage of Euro 2022. They were facing a Norway team sprinkled with representatives of Lyon and Barcelona, Chelsea and Manchester City, the powerhouses of the women’s game.And they had, in the space of a single half, scored six goals.It was not a cruel laughter, or a mocking one. It was, instead, a disbelieving laughter, a giddy laughter. The entire experience seemed somewhat surreal to many of the players, as if there had been some sort of glitch in the code. Once they had regained some measure of composure, the first question many asked was simple:What had just happened?Routs happen, of course. It has not been long since Sarina Wiegman’s England scored 20 goals in a single game against Latvia. It has been only three years since the United States did its bit for the talking-point business by beating Thailand, 13-0, at the World Cup, giving rise to at least a week of discussion on the relative ethical merits of celebrating goals in a blowout.Routs happen both in men’s and women’s soccer, and in both cases they generally prompt further interrogation about the health of the sport. In the men’s game, as a rule, that focuses on the yawning financial chasm that has spirited the elite club sides away from their opponents. In the women’s, it is more likely to emphasize the difference in resources that separate richer nations and poorer ones.Beth Mead, England’s hat-trick heroine.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEngland’s drubbing of Norway, though, did not fit that pattern. Norway does not, of course, boast a handful of impossibly wealthy clubs pouring money into their women’s sides. It is not home to one of the strongest leagues in the world, staffed now by some of the best players on the planet. It does not, on a very basic level, possess as many human beings as England. Its talent pool, as a result, is naturally smaller.But Norway is not Latvia, and it is not Thailand. Its developmental structures have been good enough to produce Ada Hegerberg, gradually reasserting her claim to being one of the world’s best players; and Caroline Graham Hansen, a vital cog in Barcelona’s attack; and Chelsea’s Guro Reiten; and Julie Blakstad, a star in the making; and Maren Mjelde and Maria Thorisdottir, two of the elite players who have been tempted to England by the booming Women’s Super League.This was not a humiliation that could be cleanly attributed to structural inequality, a defeat that could be dressed up as a learning experience, the inevitable denouement of vastly superior firepower. It was not inevitable at all, in fact. It was, in many ways, self-inflicted.What was most striking, during that surreal first half in which England’s delight metamorphosed first into euphoria and then a dizzying, incredulous frenzy, was the precision of Wiegman’s team’s ruthlessness. It would not be quite right to suggest that England scored the same goal eight times. But it would not be entirely wrong, either.The plan was simple. Ellen White, the central striker, would drop deep, drawing with her one of Norway’s two central defenders, neither of whom is blessed with what might be termed searing pace. Beth Mead, helped by the relative inexperience of Blakstad, her direct opponent, would fill the deserted channel. With a single pass, either from midfield or from Lucy Bronze, the right back, Norway’s penalty area unfurled in front of her.Maria Thorisdottir got an up-close look at several of England’s goals.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMartin Sjogren, Norway’s coach, would later suggest that it was England’s first goal, a rather soft penalty, that had unsettled his team. “We began to crack a little and made some poor decisions,” he said. There is some truth in that. Thorisdottir, having conceded the penalty, seemed to freeze, unsure of her every touch, her every move, as if haunted by her error.Sjogren’s claim is not, though, the whole truth. To attribute Norway’s collapse exclusively to individual mistakes is, at heart, to confuse symptom with cause. The problem, the one that caused Sjogren’s side to bend and break so spectacularly, was not an isolated series of unrelated incidents but a systemic shortcoming. England showed its hand, and its opponent failed miserably to adapt.Part of the responsibility for that lies with the players, of course. Mjelde and Thorisdottir, certainly, are experienced enough to have identified their team’s weak point and reacted accordingly: sitting just a little deeper, perhaps, or refusing to be coaxed out of their line by White’s movement, or drawing Blakstad in closer for greater protection.But a vast majority of it falls on the shoulders of Sjogren himself. A sequence of individual errors could be evidence of some great psychological failing, but it is distinctly more likely to be proof of a flaw in a team’s strategy. High-caliber players make consistently poor choices only when they are faced with limited options. And that, ultimately, is down to the coach.The caliber of player in women’s soccer, particularly in Europe, has risen steeply in recent years. The slick, technical style that has proliferated at this summer’s European Championship has offered ample proof of that. It is hard to make the argument, though, that the quality of coach has tracked quite the same trajectory.Or, perhaps better, the type of coach. There has long been an emphasis on player development in the women’s game, for wholly obvious, entirely understandable and broadly admirable reasons. It is that focus that has allowed the game to foster a whole galaxy of emergent stars — Vivianne Miedema and Delphine Cascarino and Lauren Hemp — and help them flourish.Ellen White scored two of England’s eight goals on Monday.Damien Meyer/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut development coaching is a different skill, a different art, from what might be termed results coaching: The first is concerned with process, after all, and the second with outcome. It is hard not to wonder if a coach more focused on the latter might have acted more swiftly to staunch Norway’s bleeding, or even to shut the game down entirely, accepting a 3-0 defeat as the price to pay to avoid embarrassment.It is that which may prove the decisive factor at the Euros over the next two weeks. Most of the genuine contenders for the trophy — England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and, at the outside, Spain — have an abundance of attacking talent. Generating players who can decide games is where women’s soccer, like men’s, now pumps most of its resources.It is possible, of course, that the tournament’s eventual champion will simply be the team with the greatest weight of sheer, glimmering ability, the one most capable of expressing its own brilliance, the one that shines brightest. It is more likely, though, that the team left standing will be the one that is best prepared and most willing to make everyone else look dull.Not as Old as They LookKalidou Koulibaly is trading Napoli blue for Chelsea blue.Massimo Pinca/ReutersReceived wisdom would have it that Chelsea’s decision to spend $40 million on Kalidou Koulibaly is a bad idea. He is already 31, and by the time his contract at Stamford Bridge comes to an end, he will be 34. Even if he has proved a wise investment, there is precious little prospect of the club’s being able to recover any of its costs.The general rule of thumb, when it comes to accepted best practice in soccer, is that well-run teams buy young and, with a degree of cold-eyed dispassion, cull the old. Chelsea’s decision to commit so much money to a veteran central defender like Koulibaly, by those standards, suggests that the club’s new owner and sporting director, Todd Boehly, has not quite internalized the game’s abiding logic.That logic, though, feels somewhat outdated. The idea that players are old — and therefore worthless — as soon as they hit their early 30s dates to an era before the sport took things like nutrition seriously, when players did not have personal osteopaths, when their every move, from their early teens, was not governed by the diktats of sports science.It may well be, in fact, that being 31 today has very little in common with being 31 in 2010, or being 31 in 2000. Koulibaly — his quality perhaps slightly underestimated by the fact that he has spent the last eight years of his career in Italy — could yet have six or seven years of elite performance in him.It should be noted that Thiago Silva, the player with whom he will partner at Stamford Bridge, arrived at Chelsea a couple of years ago, at age 35, for what many assumed was a swan song. It has gone rather better than that. Perhaps, for elite players, the clock ticks a little more slowly now.An Update on BarcelonaLast week, you may remember, Barcelona was busily trying to persuade Frenkie de Jong — a player who does not appear to be in any desperate rush to leave Camp Nou — that the only way that he might be allowed to stay is by agreeing to a new, reduced contract.This week, you will be delighted to know, the very same Barcelona has spent somewhere in the region of $65 million to acquire Raphinha from Leeds United, and then granted Ousmane Dembélé — a player who excels in exactly the same position as the Brazilian — a new two-year contract.Joan Laporta and Ousmane Dembélé signing away just a little more of Barcelona’s future.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockThese two Barcelonas — the one that needs its current squad to take pay cuts to stay and the one that can lavish a vast sum on new contracts — can exist because the club’s president, Joan Laporta, has hit upon the brilliant strategy of selling tomorrow to pay for today. Barcelona’s parlous finances mean it needs to raise $3 for every $1 it spends. Laporta has accomplished this by selling a portion of its future broadcast income. It may yet cash in some of its future revenue from hosting major events, too.Of the many and varied problems with this approach, perhaps the most galling is that Barcelona is risking its long-term health for players that it does not really need. This is a club, after all, whose very identity is rooted in its ability to nurture homegrown talent.For all its troubles, it continues to do just that. In Gavi and Pedri — a cheap signing, rather than an academy product, admittedly — it is already in possession of a midfield that will last a decade. Ansu Fati, should his injury issues abate, is as bright an attacking prospect as there is in world soccer.And yet still, Barcelona remains addicted to short-term fixes, to stocking its bloated wage bill with players who are, if far from mediocre, hardly the sort worth risking everything. Andreas Christensen, Franck Kessié and Raphinha are all fine players. They all make Barcelona stronger. But are they worth gambling with tomorrow? Come to that, is anyone? Is the idea of a couple of trophy-less years nurturing a new generation so unpalatable to the club’s board and its fans that it is compelled to spend money it does not have?That’s all for this week. As ever, all thoughts, questions, ideas or responses are welcome at askrory@nytimes.com, and some of them are welcome on Twitter, too. And remember: If you’re in the general vicinity of Britain, you are four days away from the last ever Set Piece Menu*, so feel free to come along and wave us off/make sure we’re finishing.Have a great weekend,Rory*Unless we all get fired More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      Is Euro 2022 the Payoff for England’s Women’s Soccer Play?

      by

      At least a half-dozen nations will arrive at this summer’s European Championship thinking they can lift the trophy. But the pressure to win might be the highest on the host nation.BURTON-ON-TRENT, England — It was only 13 years ago, England defender Lucy Bronze figures as she scrolls through her memories, when she needed to pack bags in a supermarket to earn the money she needed for her bus fare to Derby, where she and her Sunderland teammates were to play in the Women’s F.A. Cup Final. It was only a couple of years after that when she was still juggling her nascent career at Everton with a job at Domino’s Pizza.Fast forward to 2022. The rapid rise of women’s soccer in England, and in much of western Europe, is such that Bronze and nearly every other top professional waved goodbye to those kinds of side jobs long ago. Today, Bronze is widely recognized as one of the best women’s players in the world: a three-time Champions League winner, Barcelona’s star summer signing and a key member of an England team that harbors ambitions of winning this month’s European Women’s Championship.“Here we are, in 2022, and players get like helicopters to do appearances,” Bronze, 30, said after an England training session in June. “Do you know what I mean? It’s gone so far, so quickly, and I don’t think anyone could have forecast how huge it was going to be.”England’s Beth Mead and Lauren Hemp during a recent rout of the Netherlands in a friendly.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via ReutersThe do-you-know-what-I-mean moments come quickly in women’s soccer these days. Record-setting attendances. Landmark television agreements. Equal-pay milestones. In 2022, a supermarket chain is far more likely to sponsor an England player than to employ one.That makes the start of this summer’s Women’s Euros, a three-and-a-half-week tournament that opens with the host England’s match against Austria on Wednesday night, another pivotal moment for the game experiencing a surge in both interest and investment.At least a half-dozen nations will arrive in England’s stadiums thinking they can lift the trophy after the final on July 31. But the pressure to do so might be the highest on the host nation, which continues to pump millions of dollars into the sport but has yet to win a major women’s trophy.Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United, will host England’s opening match against Austria on Wednesday. The game is sold out.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThe stakes for England are high: It will roll into the tournament fresh off lopsided victories over three other tournament participants — Belgium (3-0), the Netherlands (5-1) and Switzerland (4-0) — and eager to build on a semifinal run at the last World Cup, with the next one now just a year away. The Lionesses, as England’s team is known, have not lost a match since Sarina Wiegman took over as their coach in September.That means there is no hiding from the expectations. The faces of England players now adorn billboards in shopping centers and packaging on store shelves. The BBC will air every one of the tournament’s games on its channels or (for a few simultaneous kickoffs) its streaming platform. And England’s three group-stage matches are already sold out.More than 500,000 tickets to the tournament have been sold, guaranteeing the tournament’s attendance will more than double that of its last iteration, in 2017 in the Netherlands. The bulk of those who turn out to cheer England will be expecting the host nation to set a new standard.That could be why Wiegman has made an effort to moderate expectations — “I think there are many favorites for this tournament,” she said recently. “We are one of them.” — even as England’s soccer federation as leaned in on “the pride, the responsibility and the privilege” of the team’s cause.Still, her players know the game’s sudden growth, as well as the chance to play a major tournament on home soil, has placed them in a pivotal moment.“I didn’t really have a female role model growing up in terms of football, so I think it’s massive for that,” England midfielder Keira Walsh, 25, who plays for Manchester City, said of having the Euros on home soil. “But not just for young girls — I think for young boys, they can see the women playing in the big stadiums with sellout crowds at a home tournament. I think it’s only going to grow respect for the game in that way as well.”The tournament comes during an exciting time for women’s soccer in Europe. Its 16-team lineup features some of the world’s most talented squads, including Sweden, currently ranked second in the world; the Netherlands, a World Cup finalist three years ago; Germany, an eight-time European champion; and Spain, which boasts a talented team but, now, not Alexia Putellas, the reigning world player of the year, who tore a knee ligament in training on Tuesday). Norway is bolstered by the return of Ada Hegerberg, and France by the core of that country’s dominant club teams, Olympique Lyonnais and Paris St.-Germain.It is England, though, that may face the highest expectations to deliver.Historic investments by the country’s biggest clubs in the Women’s Super League, England’s top domestic competition, have attracted some of the world’s best players, produced new revenue streams and lifted the standard of play for a new generation of England stars. All but one member of England’s 23-player Euro squad played in the W.S.L. last season, including the veterans Bronze and Ellen White and rising talents such as Walsh and Lauren Hemp.”I don’t think anyone could have forecast how huge it was going to be,” England defender Lucy Bronze said of the growth of the women’s game in Europe.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via Reuters“We’ve seen, over the years, how much the women’s game has grown,” said Hemp, 21, who this year was honored as England’s best young women’s player for a record fourth time. “I think having this home tournament is only going to help it grow even more.”For all the gains, though, players, even the best ones, know there is still a long way to go. The investments in the W.S.L. remain a fraction of the money poured into the men’s game in Europe, and the salaries, television deals and prize money — while significantly improved — still qualify as a rounding error when compared with the men’s paydays.UEFA, the governing body for European soccer, has faced criticism over its choices of stadiums in the group stages, with Iceland’s Sara Björk Gunnarsdottir branding the use of Manchester City’s Academy Stadium, with a tournament capacity of 4,700, as “disrespectful.” And a survey of 2,000 male soccer fans in Britain published earlier this year found that two-thirds had “openly misogynistic attitudes” toward women’s sports, irrespective of age.Still, for veterans like Bronze, the tournament shows how far the women’s game has come and presents an opportunity to raise its profile even more. The new crop of young players she sees at training every day, she said, exhibit a fearlessness that she didn’t have at their age and symbolize a future — for themselves and for England — that could be even brighter.“I look at some of the players now, who maybe haven’t been to a tournament, and I think, ‘Oh, God, when I was you, I was panicking a bit more,’” Bronze said. “But they all seem a little bit more calm.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Soccer

      Barcelona Femení and the Pursuit of Perfection

      by

      Barcelona Femení is the champion of Spain and Europe, and perhaps the most dominant club team in the world. The team’s coach and his players expect it to be better.BARCELONA, Spain — These are the bare statistics of Barcelona Femení’s season so far. The team has played nine games in the league. It has won nine games in the league. It has won them, in fact, by such a margin that the word “won” does not quite capture it. Barcelona’s first game ended, 5-0. So did its second. In its third and fourth games, it scored eight.That was only the start. The next week, it beat Alavés by 9-1. Late last month, it faced Real Sociedad, the one team still vaguely, theoretically, in its slipstream at the summit of La Liga Fémenina. That finished 8-1. In the middle of all that, it found time to deconstruct Arsenal, the otherwise unbeaten leader of Britain’s Women’s Super League, too.Including its two appointments in the Champions League, Barcelona has played 11 games this season. It has conceded three goals — one each to Alavés, Real Sociedad and Arsenal — and it has scored a scarcely believable 60. Its coach, Jonatan Giráldez, has weighed all of that evidence before drawing his conclusion: Barcelona really should have scored more goals.The natural assumption might be that he is, if not joking, then perhaps exaggerating for effect, but Giráldez is quite serious. In his mind, it is a simple equation: You just have to place the numbers in proper context. “We have generated more than 200 chances,” Giráldez said. “So if you look at it like that, we have not scored very many.”Barcelona’s ledger this season: played 11, won 11, scored 60, allowed 3.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesThis is a manager’s job, of course: to demand constant improvement from players, to refuse them the luxury of resting on their laurels, to eschew the very idea of being satisfied. “That’s what coaches are like,” said Marta Torrejón, the experienced Barcelona defender, “always wanting more.”Giráldez’s reasoning, though, is rather more pragmatic. He was promoted to head coach last summer after the unexpected departure of his predecessor, Lluís Cortés, only weeks after the club had won not just the Spanish league and its domestic cup but also its first Champions League title, crushing Chelsea, 4-0, in the final.Giráldez, 29, was given the job ahead of a cluster of other applicants — at least 20 coaches from around the world speculatively sent in their résumés — essentially as a continuity candidate, someone who knew “our ideas and our identity,” as the club’s sporting director, Markel Zubizarreta, put it.To Giráldez, the job is a considerable privilege and a constant pressure. Barcelona, now the foremost team in women’s soccer, has standards to maintain and expectations to meet. He does not ask for more from his players out of rote instinct; he does it because he knows that what appears to be a slight fissure at this stage of the season could prove a fatal fault line later on.“We have conceded two goals from set pieces this season,” Giráldez said. (The third, scored by Real Sociedad’s Sanni Franssi, came from a counterattack.) “One from a corner, one from a free kick. When you win a game, 8-1, that goes unnoticed, but we have to improve that, because when we play in the final rounds of the Champions League, against Lyon or Paris St.-Germain or Wolfsburg, that action could send us home.“If we have 25 chances in a game, the goalkeeper saves 13, and 12 go wide. In a more balanced game, we would not have so many chances, so we have to make sure we take more of them. We have to work out why we did not score more goals: We got nine against Alavés, but I had the sensation that we could have scored 15. Why didn’t we?”Barcelona’s 29-year-old, first-year coach, Jonatan Giráldez.Ritzau Scanpix/Via ReutersIt is important, he quickly adds, to recognize that it is very hard to score eight goals in a game, to appreciate and to celebrate that. And then demand even better.“You can win, 8-0, and still have a lot of things to improve,” Giráldez said. “My job is to detect what we have done badly and modify it. It is about improving every detail.”Those details are not easy to find at Barcelona, not these days. In the eight years since Torrejón joined the club, it has changed almost beyond recognition. “It is like a different place,” she said. “From zero to 100.”When Torrejón arrived, training sessions still took place in the evening, because the players either attended college or went to work during the day. Already a fixture on Spain’s national team back then, she had joined on the promise that Barcelona would turn professional. There was talk of significant investment, attracting a sponsor, building a winning team.When the move came, in 2015, it felt “like luxury,” Torrejón said: arriving at Barcelona’s training complex in the morning, having breakfast together as a team, enjoying access to the club’s medical services and its conditioning staff and its state-of-the-art facilities. Still, though, “thinking about winning the Champions League was impossible,” she said.Alexia Putellas, already honored as Europe’s player of the year, is a finalist for the Ballon d’Or.Tt News Agency/Via ReutersAsisat Oshoala scored one goal and set up another in a 4-0 win over Arsenal in the Champions League in October.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockBarcelona did not choose, unlike many of its peers, to use the financial clout of its parent club to accelerate its growth. “For 10 million euros,” or about $11.5 million, “you could buy a team of the best players in the world,” Zubizarreta said. “There are teams out there that are projects based on doing that. Lyon has done it. Chelsea has done it. Manchester City has an English core but they have done it, too.”Barcelona, he said, wanted to do it differently. “The best thing we can do is be ourselves,” Zubizarreta said. Instead of upgrading its squad with a patchwork of superstars, it decided to allow the players it had to flourish, to build a team that was “distinctively Barcelona.”Progress was halting. “It is very hard to climb the ladder organically,” Torrejón said. There was a Champions League semifinal appearance in 2017, but for three years in succession the team finished second in the league to Atlético Madrid. In that, perhaps, lay the only conceptual difference between the club’s men’s and women’s divisions. “The men’s team not winning trophies to invest in the future would not, maybe, be the best-received news,” Zubizarreta said.The reward seemed to come in 2019. Barcelona finished second in the league, again, but qualified for its first Champions League final. It met Lyon, the sport’s equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, in Budapest, and was swept away in the first half.“It was a mirror,” Zubizarreta said. “We could see how far we had to go.”As soon as he returned from Hungary, he sought out the club’s conditioning experts. There was no shortage of talent, but he knew that Barcelona’s players had to be fitter, faster and stronger to compete with the very best clubs in Europe.What followed, according to Giráldez, an assistant coach at the time, was a “brutal” change in the way Barcelona trained. “We could improve quickly at the start,” he said. But the further up the curve the players got, the harder they had to work even for the smallest gains.That approach became so embedded in the club that it has endured even what might have appeared to be its apogee: the treble acquired under Cortés last season, capped by a destruction of Chelsea in the Champions League final that echoed Barcelona’s own experience against Lyon two years previously.And so, even now, Giráldez can watch his team, champions of everything, scoring five and six and eight and nine against its opponents, with its goal difference — in the league alone — of plus 52, and ask for more. And not only can his players understand his gentle chiding and detailed tape sessions, but they can also appreciate them.“The secret is that we are competing with ourselves,” Torrejón said. “You compete with your rival for points or for qualification, but with yourself to be better every day, for your place in the team. That is the biggest struggle: with yourself. The coach might always want more, but we do as a team. We are never satisfied.“Why be happy with scoring four when you should have scored eight?” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      Everton's Women Are 'Not Shy About Being Ambitious'

      by

      A series of changes, big and small, has a strengthened Everton believing it can hold its own with deep-pocketed rivals in England’s Women’s Super League.LIVERPOOL, England — Some of the changes have been small, so small as to be imperceptible, at least from the outside. This summer, for the first time, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the uniforms of its women’s team. It is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder that, in women’s soccer, many little battles are still being won.Those small changes, though, still have an impact; they still offer a marginal gain. The laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who is supposed to be analyzing video or planning coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All that time saved can now be put to proper use. Everything can be just a little bit better.And some of the changes have been considerable, like the nine new players who have joined Everton squad over the last few months. There is Toni Duggan, an experienced England international, the German defender Leonie Maier, the Italian midfielder Aurora Galli, and three players signed from Rosengard, Sweden’s champion-in-waiting, dubbed the Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates.The most significant change, though, at least as far as the club’s coach, Willie Kirk, is concerned, is the one that is hardest to describe. It struck him, most clearly, while away with his team on a preseason camp in Scotland last month. Something, he could tell, had clicked.Everton’s coach, Willie Kirk, has found it easier, and cheaper, to close the gap between midtable and the top than his men’s counterparts.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images“Maybe it is self-belief,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it is the feeling of watching another player walk through the doors and thinking: Yep, that’s another quality signing. Maybe it is knowing that not one player can be sure they’re starting in the next game, and that competition driving standards.”Kirk may not be able to name it, not precisely, but he is happy to talk about it. The first time Izzy Christiansen, the club’s vastly experienced midfielder, sat down with Kirk — in the winter of 2019 — her abiding impression was of a coach who had absolutely “no fluff,” she said. He did not try to give her the hard sell as to why she should sign with Everton.“There wasn’t a pitch,” Christiansen said. He simply bought her a coffee — “That’s one way to persuade me to join a club,” she said — and explained how he saw her as a player, what he thought she would bring to the team, and what he, and his club, were trying to do. “It was matter-of-fact,” she said.He is exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We are not shy about being ambitious,” Kirk said.It is telling that, when asked if the plan for the season is to challenge the Big Three of England’s Women’s Super League — Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal — when the season opens on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “That’s what we intend to do,” she said. “To compete, and to surpass. We want to take the club back into the Champions League, where it belongs.”Of course, the landscape of women’s soccer has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, in the decade or so since Everton last graced that competition. At the start of the 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. They were teams mostly populated by British players; few, if any, trained in the same facilities as their respective men’s teams.Chelsea used deep pockets and expensive signings to climb to the top of the Super League last season.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressThe W.S.L. of 2021 is starkly different: dominated by the polyglot squads constructed, at lavish expense, by Chelsea, City and Arsenal. The former boasts not only the most expensive women’s player of all time, the striker Pernille Harder, but the highest-paid female player in the world, Sam Kerr.Manchester City can call on the backbone of the England national squad — the captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White, half a dozen others — and has sufficient financial clout that it was able to tempt one of Everton’s best players, the Australian wing Hayley Raso, to Manchester this summer. Arsenal, meanwhile, can lay claim to possessing possibly the world’s best player: the Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, it picked up one of the American star Tobin Heath.Those three teams have stood, almost unchallenged, at the summit of the W.S.L. for some time. They have combined to win the last five titles — Chelsea claiming three — and have accounted for every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. They are, as Kirk admitted, a formidable barrier.And yet the club believes it can break that stranglehold. “I’ve made it clear to the players that to do it we will have to punch above our weight in terms of budget,” he said. “Finance does come into it, but we feel we are there.”He credits the club’s “clever” recruitment, led by its sporting director, Sarvar Ismailov — a nephew of Alisher Usmanov, the business partner of Everton’s majority owner Farhad Moshiri, who has now been appointed to the club’s board — for much of that growth. “We have to be flexible, and we have to be smarter,” Kirk said.Within the club, Ismailov is credited with both having a keen eye for talent and an ability to drive a bargain: There are, Kirk has said previously and approvingly, “not many in the women’s game who like him.” It was Ismailov who led the campaign to land perhaps the most eye-catching of Everton’s summer recruits, the 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison, the club’s record signing.Anna Anvegard, left, and Hanna Bennison, center, are teammates in Sweden. Everton added them both, as well as Nathalie Björn, with the three players earning the nickname Swedish House Mafia.Jamie Sabau/Getty ImagesBut that is only one element. When she looks back at the club she joined almost two years ago, now, Christiansen sees “something special,” something that Kirk traces not just to the raft of new players.“We have improved our working practices,” he said, a category that doubtless includes the hiring of a uniform attendant. “We have signed a lot of previous winners. We have always had a positive environment, but that breeds a winning culture.”It is a trend he sees across the club. Everton is working on building a new stadium (principally) for its men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, are both Champions League winners. The ambition for the women’s team, in Kirk’s eyes, is no different to the ambition for the men’s.Perhaps, though, that relationship does not function quite as it is often presented. Everton has been condemned — through sheer economics as much as anything else — to life in the upper mid-table of the Premier League. It would cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees to even have a hope of overhauling Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s men’s teams.In the women’s game, though, it can now consider itself a force. It can talk of winning a place in the Champions League, and it can think, not entirely idly, of winning a championship. It can contemplate meeting clubs that exist on a different stratum in men’s soccer as something approaching equals in women’s.That has not come cheap — Bennison alone cost a “substantial six-figure sum” to coax from Rosengard — and it has not been straightforward. But Everton, unlike many of its peers in the no-man’s-land below the elite in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, to challenge, and perhaps to surpass. That impetus has not flowed from the men’s team to the women’s but, if anything, the other way round.That is what all of those changes, the small and the large alike, have added up to: a club that has a stage on which to be truly ambitious once more, and a team that is not afraid to talk about it. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Soccer

      As Women's Soccer Grows, So Does Its Competitive Divide

      by

      The success of a handful of top women’s teams is a testament to their clubs’ commitment. But a growing competitive divide should be addressed before it’s too late.MANCHESTER, England — It is remarkable, really, what you can fit into that time when there is time for one last chance. A corner whipped in, a header flashed toward goal, a finger outstretched to divert its flight just enough so that when the ball lands, it is on metal rather than nylon.The last chance, it seemed, had come and gone. As it turned out, that was just the first of the last chances. The second fell to one of the world’s finest players, almost surprised to be all alone in an ocean of space, unable to react in time. And then the third: the most ruthless striker in the game running clean through, the championship within reach. There was time, still, but space was suddenly at a premium.And then the whistle blew. A game drawn, gratification delayed. Manchester City Women and Chelsea Women had fought each other to a standstill, 90 minutes and a little more of high drama and impeccable quality delivered by a collection of superstars and punctuated by four goals, shared evenly. It was the perfect title decider in all but one sense: It did not decide anything.Instead, the draw meant that the race to crown this season’s Women’s Super League champion would go to the wire. Both City and Chelsea had two games left; Chelsea led the table by only two points. If Emma Hayes’s team — simultaneously managing its quest to reach the Champions League final — slipped, Manchester City would be there to pounce.Both have played once since, and both won. Which means that everything is at stake on Sunday afternoon, the final day of the season. Chelsea will be home against Reading, and should, in all probability, claim its fifth title in seven years. But while City is on the road, it has the (theoretically) marginally easier engagement, at West Ham.Chelsea’s women, like its men’s team, have advanced to the Champions League final.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressFor the W.S.L., it is the perfect denouement to the season. Not simply because great tension always generates great sport, regardless of the circumstance, but because these two teams have done more than any others in recent years — Arsenal apart — to drive the standard of the league skyward.Between them, Chelsea and City have drawn some of the world’s best players to England. Chelsea paid a world-record fee to sign the Danish forward Pernille Harder from Wolfsburg, not long after it had reportedly made Sam Kerr, the Australian striker, the best-paid female soccer player on the planet.City, meanwhile, has tempted Rose Lavelle, Abby Dahlkemper and Sam Mewis, three members of the United States’ World Cup-winning squad, to Manchester. They count a group of England internationals among their teammates, including the striker Ellen White and — brought home from Lyon, for so long the leading light of the women’s game — the defenders Alex Greenwood and Lucy Bronze.It is no surprise, then, that the W.S.L. is now seen by many as the finest, strongest women’s league in the world. And while it is a little harder than normal to gauge interest levels in the midst of the pandemic — there are, after all, no attendance figures to report — viewership is growing. Last year, a weekly highlights show on the BBC, despite a late-night slot, attracted an average of half a million viewers.Sam Mewis is one of three top Americans at Manchester City, which will need a win and a Chelsea defeat on Sunday, the final day of the season, to claim the title.Jennifer Lorenzini/ReutersIn theory, that pattern will hold. In March, the cable network Sky agreed to pay more than $10 million a year for the domestic broadcast rights to W.S.L. games, with some remaining on the free-to-air BBC. The league signed deals last year to showcase its games in Italy, Germany and the United States. According to a survey by RunRepeat, a data analysis firm, that increased exposure should meet a willing audience.But that progress also presents a pressing challenge. It is to their immense credit, of course, that Manchester City and Chelsea have invested so much in their squads, but it has — with rare exceptions — left them severely overmatched against the rest of the league.Between them, the clubs account for all but one national title since 2014. This year, Arsenal and Manchester United, each with a cadre of high-class recruits, have just about been able to keep pace, but the rest of the W.S.L. has been cut adrift, and the gap that has opened between the leaders and the pack is stark.In January, Manchester City beat Aston Villa, 7-0, one week and then Brighton, 7-1, the next. Bristol City, battling relegation, has conceded eight goals in a loss to Manchester City and nine in a defeat at Chelsea. The day before that particular humbling, back in September, Arsenal scored nine against West Ham.Bristol City sits last in the Women’s Super League, having won only twice all season.Andrew Boyers/Action Images, via ReutersIt is the same across much of Europe. Later this month, Chelsea will face Barcelona in the Champions League final. Barcelona’s domestic record this season is simple: 25 played, 25 won. It has scored 127 goals and surrendered only 5. In one 17-day stretch in April, it won consecutive games by scores of 7-1, 9-0 and 6-1.Juventus has won all 19 of its games in Italy, scoring six against Florentia and nine against Bari. In France, Lyon has lost once all year — to Paris St.-Germain, the team that is on the cusp of denying Lyon a 15th title in a row. Even that is relatively unusual: Until that defeat, Lyon had not lost a domestic game since 2017.None of that is to blame the clubs who have invested in their women’s teams. It is strange, in fact, that more teams cut off from success by the economic disparity in the men’s game have not poured more resources into their women’s sides, where glory comes much cheaper. Chelsea’s Harder, the most expensive player in the world, cost somewhere in the region of $300,000, which is not quite what Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang earns in a week.The commitment from Chelsea and City and the rest has, without question, been not only a completely valid business decision, but a driving force behind the sustained growth of the women’s game, capitalizing on the boom generated by the success, in particular, of the 2019 World Cup. The task for the leagues, though, is to ensure that their competitions have breadth, as well as height.In Continental Europe, the answer is simple. Spain’s top flight, for example, is not yet fully professional; the expectation is that, as more teams go full time, they will be better placed to start to reel in Barcelona. In England, the hope is that the imminent television deal will not only swell coffers across the board, but also encourage those clubs that have been wary of investing that they will see a return on their money.Lieke Martens and Barcelona are unbeaten in the league for two years running.Joan Monfort/Associated PressAs dangerous as it can be to compare the dynamics of the women’s game with the men’s, though, the evidence suggests it is not always quite that straightforward. One of the dangers of the model employed to grow the W.S.L. — using the renown of brands from the men’s game to kick-start the women’s — is that, ultimately, the thinking remains the same. What worked, or was perceived to work, for the men is applied unthinkingly to the women. That is, after all, how it is done.The risk is that it is not only the successes that are copied, but the mistakes, too. The greatest challenge facing the men’s game is the lack of competitive balance both between and within leagues: the presence of an entrenched and unreachable elite slowly eroding first the hope and then the interest of everyone else.There is no reason for the women’s game to be forced into that same pitfall, for the W.S.L. to split into the same miniature divisions that fracture the Premier League. Whether the mechanism to prevent it is financial (a tweak to the distribution of revenue) or sporting (some sort of draft model) is not clear, but it is worth discussing.That meeting between Chelsea and Manchester City, the game with all those last chances, was as compelling as any there will be in any league, anywhere in the world, this season. Its drama was exquisite, its cast stellar, its execution flawless. It was the sort of game that should be spread around the many, rather than monopolized by the few.The Country That Cried WolfThere are many, within soccer, who resent England’s tendency to, at the slightest opportunity, wheel out that rusty old cliché about being the sport’s home. It is bad enough that it does so when bidding to host a tournament far in the future — witness the slogan for Britain and Ireland’s 2030 World Cup campaign — but it is barely tolerable when the effort is dressed up as not just a chance to return the game to its roots, but an act of charitable salvation, too.It happens, essentially, for every major tournament. It happened before the World Cups in South Africa and Brazil: Neither could afford it, so play it in England. It happened before the World Cup in Russia: Putin is bad, play it in England. And it has been happening for 11 years about the World Cup in Qatar.None of the lawmakers, observers or, yes, fans who offer the suggestion seem to appreciate not only the degree to which they are offering an almost offensively easy solution for enormously intricate geopolitical issues — “To solve the human rights problem in Qatar, I would simply play the World Cup in England” — but also how presumptuous it sounds. Mostly, though, they do not seem to get quite how annoying it must be for everyone else.It is somehow fitting, then, that the first time there is a case to be made for their reflex argument, nobody wants to hear it.It’s not coming home.Matthew Childs/Action Images, via ReutersAs previously noted in this newsletter: It would make sense, in the midst of a pandemic, to host this summer’s European Championship entirely in England. And it would make possibly even more sense to play this year’s Champions League final — currently scheduled for Istanbul, on May 29, but contested by two Premier League teams — in England (or maybe Wales). Turkey has just entered a new lockdown, after all. Its coronavirus rates are troubling. Encouraging around 10,000 English fans to travel across Europe for a game of soccer, in the current circumstances, is ridiculous.As things stand, though at least one English club has offered to step in, and though at least one of the finalists has asked UEFA to contemplate moving the game, it is unlikely anything will be changed. It is too late, too complex, too sensitive: Istanbul was, after all, supposed to hold the final in 2020. Forcing the city to wait another year would be unpalatable.But it is hard not to wonder if perhaps the entreaties of the English would be given more than a cursory hearing if the same demand had not been made quite so often over the last two decades. It creates the impression less that this is a coolheaded response to a unique set of circumstances, and more that it is fairly typical opportunism. It is a shame. For once, there is good reason to play something in England. It’s just that nobody has any reason to listen.Real Friends Ask QuestionsEden Hazard suffering against Chelsea. It was his smiles afterward that rankled some.Toby Melville/ReutersThe music was funereal. Josep Pedrerol, the host, sat in a television studio, cast in silhouette. When he spoke, his tone was somber, his cadence grave. A non-Spanish speaker might have assumed that he was pronouncing on some national sorrow, some unthinkable loss, or that he had just learned a close friend had recently eaten a beloved pet.He was, instead, telling his viewers that Real Madrid had been eliminated from the Champions League, and that they might like to blame Eden Hazard — overweight, apparently, and unforgivably caught smiling with some of his former Chelsea teammates. Hazard, Pedrerol said, had “laughed in the face of the Madrid fans.” After this brazen transgression, Hazard “could not play another second for Madrid.”It would be easy to laugh off the show that Pedrerol fronts — El Chiringuito, a gaudy staple of Spain’s late-night television schedule, the place that Florentino Pérez bafflingly chose to pitch his European Super League to the public at large — as a bombastic and overblown outrage factory. It is, in fact, not much of an outlier.This sort of thing does not happen only in Spain, of course; let those who are in glass houses cast the first accusation of underperformance and all that. But there has long been a strand of coverage of Real Madrid in general, and the Real Madrid of Pérez in particular, that adopts this sort of tone: utterly jubilant in victory, a toddler’s temper tantrum in defeat, with the blame always, reliably, directed away from the man who runs the club.Pedrerol knows his audience, of course. He is doubtless sincere in his views. There is an appeal, too, for fans to see their own disappointment reflected back to them. On Wednesday night, Pedrerol was manifesting what many of them were probably feeling. But if these outlets have Real Madrid’s best interests at heart, it is difficult to see how, exactly, they are helping.Is demanding Hazard be sold at the first opportunity the best way to encourage him to give his best to Real Madrid? Is treating every defeat as some sort of crime against nature likely to foster the sort of environment that allows a team to be built smartly and sensibly?And, most of all, is refusing to suggest that Pérez might in some way be accountable — given that he is more than happy to take the glory when times are good — really going to address Real Madrid’s issues at their roots? It feels unfair to describe the journalists who work at these outlets as little more than Madrid’s “friendly” news media, but there are times when it goes beyond that. They give the impression of being mere clients. Real friends, after all, ask questions.CorrespondenceA rare image of Donny van de Beek, right, playing for Manchester United.Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsLast week’s column on Dutch soccer has opened the floodgates. Well, the trickle-gates. Well, just this email from Jos Timmers:“Last year, Donny van de Beek went to Manchester United for an enormous amount, but he hardly ever plays. Now his participation with the Dutch national team in the European Championship is in danger. He is just one of the many talented players who are lured into a megacontract by the clubs with the deepest pockets and then languish on the reserve bench or, worse still, in the stands. I cannot understand how they are capable to cope with this situation.”The conundrum van de Beek — and the many others like him — faces, I think, is that it is hard to turn down the opportunity (sporting and financial) to play for one of the game’s modern giants. Players believe in their abilities. They have the confidence to assume that they will play, no matter how high the standard around them.But I also think this is an area where soccer could, perhaps, take administrative action to make the game a little less unequal. ESPN’s Gabriele Marcotti has suggested reducing the number of players any team can register in its squad to 19 or 20, rather than the current 25, with players under age 21 exempted. This would, he argues correctly, spread talent around more evenly: to make Manchester United less likely, in other words, to stockpile players of the talent of Donny van de Beek.I wonder if you could go farther, though. What if every player’s contract had a clause in it saying that they would be available for sale at a set price (or even for free) if they failed to play a specified percentage of games over the course of the season? At the end of the campaign, they would be allowed to move on (if they chose to do so), rather than being consigned to another year as a squad filler by a team with no real use for them.Hansi Flick, right, will hand Julian Nagelsmann a Bundesliga-winning team, and the expectation that he keep it on top.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSabine Brettreich asks how Julian Nagelsmann will fare at Bayern Munich, where he will take over from Hansi Flick this summer. I could be cheap and say I would guess that Nagelsmann will win the league, but that is perhaps to downplay how interesting the appointment is.Nagelsmann’s career has been unusual: no playing background to speak of, but a lot of coaching experience for someone so young. Bayern has always seemed his natural destination, but it is also a test: Will a playing squad of that quality afford him the respect that he deserves? My instinct is that it will work, but that is not, I think, guaranteed. More