Women’s World Cup (Soccer)

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      The Morocco Women’s Team Has Already Won

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      Khadija Rmichi’s path to the Women’s World Cup started on a bicycle.Rmichi, a goalkeeper, grew up in Khouribga, a mining city in central Morocco. As a girl, she tried many sports, including basketball, but always grew bored with them. She was frequently drawn instead to the soccer played by boys in the streets. Sometimes she enjoyed just watching the games. Many days, she couldn’t resist joining in, even when she knew it would mean trouble.“It was considered shameful to play with boys,” Rmichi, now 33, said in an interview in April. “My older brother would hit me and drag me home, and I would just return to the street to play whenever I had a chance.”A local coach liked her spirit. He told Rmichi that if she could find enough girls to form a team, he would train them. So she hopped on a bike and toured Khouribga’s side streets and playgrounds, looking for teammates. When it was necessary, Rmichi said, she would take her sales pitch directly into the girls’ homes, helping to persuade reluctant parents and families to let them play.“I tried to get into other sports,” she said, “but I just wanted to play soccer.”Morocco goalkeeper Khadija Rmichi, top. She and her teammates won’t win the World Cup, but that’s not the point of their journey.A Team of FirstsOne of eight first-time qualifiers in the Women’s World Cup field, Morocco may not win a game playing in a group that includes a former champion (Germany), an Asian regular (South Korea) and the second-best team in South America (Colombia).But the fact that Morocco is playing in this tournament, which began Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, and that its women’s team exists at all, is serving as an inspiration and a measurable source of pride at home and abroad.Morocco is the first Women’s World Cup qualifier from North Africa, and the first from a majority Arab nation. Still, its squad was little known even to most Moroccans before it hosted the event that served as the continent’s World Cup qualifying tournament on home soil last July. As it posted win after win, however, the country’s stadiums started to fill with fans, many of them seeing the team play for the first time.In a country where soccer is revered but where interest in the women’s game is a new phenomenon, that success raised the team’s profile. “They showed us that they can fill stadiums and make Moroccans happy,” the team’s French coach, Reynald Pedros, said. “They did it on the African stage. Now we are hoping to do the same on the international one.”Morocco’s presence in Australia this month is a testament to the efforts to develop women’s soccer in the country through government investments and a concerted effort to unearth talent not only in cities like Rabat and Casablanca but also from the vast Moroccan diaspora in France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.Nesryne El Chad, above, a 20-year-old central defender. She grew up in Europe as did several of her Morocco teammates.That diversity was on display on a cold but joyful night earlier this year in Prague, where the team had come to face the Czech Republic in a pre-World Cup exhibition match. During the evening training session, Pedros gave instructions to the group in French, and the players shouted commands and encouragement to one another in a mix of Arabic, French and English. An interpreter stood by the field in case he was needed. For most of the practice, he was not: Most of the players had by then established ways to communicate even when they didn’t share a common language.Their diverse paths were sometimes bound by similar threads. Sofia Bouftini, a 21-year-old who grew up in Morocco, initially faced resistance from her family when she expressed an interest in taking soccer more seriously. Like Rmichi, she had fallen in love with the sport playing against boys while longing to be part of a real team.“My grandmother advocated for me and convinced my father,” she said. “My dad was against it.” He eventually relented, Bouftini said, when he realized how talented she was.ExpectationsSitting in his office this spring, Pedros, 51, cautioned that expectations for his team should remain realistic. The stakes for his squad, a first-time qualifier to the biggest championship in women’s soccer, aren’t the same as those for the men’s team, which won admirers far and wide in December as it became the first African team to advance to the semifinals.Matching that achievement should not be the measuring stick this month, Pedros said. “Comparing them to the boys,” he said of his players, “is not a good thing.”Morocco’s men had participated in international tournaments many times, he pointed out, before mounting the stunning run in Qatar that produced cheers at home and praise nearly everywhere else. The stars of the men’s team are employed by some of Europe’s best clubs, and so long ago learned how to perform on soccer’s biggest stages. For the women, he said, it will all be new. Success will be marked in smaller steps. “There won’t be 20,000 Moroccan supporters in the stadiums in Australia,” he said.Playing the long game is something the country’s sports leaders seem to acknowledge. On the sprawling Mohammed VI football complex in Salé, close to Morocco’s capital, Rabat, ultramodern facilities built in 2009 are where the new generations of soccer players are being groomed to become tomorrow’s champions.Morocco in the tunnel and on the field for a warm-up match against the Czech Republic in April.But for those who started before such facilities were available, the path to elite soccer was not always easy. For the players who came to the team after growing up in Europe, choosing Morocco was a complex question of opportunity and identity. But even those who had better opportunities to learn the game and train in the European countries where they grew up acknowledged they often faced similar resistance from their families.Nesryne El Chad, a 20-year-old central defender, grew up in Saint-Étienne, France, a city steeped in soccer. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she learned the game playing against boys during recess when she was at school. When her family traveled to Morocco during summer vacations, she said she would buy a ball from a shop and play on the beach.When she was 12, her parents realized she might be talented enough to have a future in soccer, so her mother enrolled her in a sports study program and made sure she was excused from some of the household chores that her siblings had to do, so that she could rest on Sundays before games. Her father, a black belt in karate, initially resisted the idea of a soccer-focused future for Nesryne — until, she said, his own mother told him to let her play. He ended up taking her to every practice, and every game, and is now one of her most fervent supporters.It was never a question, she said, which country’s colors she would wear if given the chance.“I was raised feeling Moroccan,” she said. “I always wanted to play for Morocco.”Voices From HomeA few hours inside the Ledni Stadium in Chomutov, close to the Czech Republic’s border with Germany, showed both how infectious Morocco’s success has become for fans, at home and abroad, and how far the team still has to go.The crowd that had defied the cold to watch Morocco’s friendly in April was mostly Czechs, including a group of loud, inebriated hockey fans who had spilled inside 30 minutes into the game after leaving a different event nearby. But there were also small pockets of Moroccans — expatriates mostly, some of whom had traveled more than 100 miles to attend. They were filled with purpose and belonging, drawn in by an urge to express love for the country where they had been born, and by the need to share that sentiment with others who would understand. Gender mattered little to them.Morocco’s team was little known even to most Moroccans before it qualified for the Women’s World Cup on home soil last July. Now it will play on the sport’s biggest stage.“To me, girls or boys, it’s all the same,” said Kamal Jabeur, 59, who had come about 190 miles from the city of Brno. “We came here because we wanted the girls to not feel alone.”Jabeur stood perched on his seat the entire game, cheering and chanting, “Dima Maghrib” — Always Morocco. His enthusiasm, while welcome, only did so much: Morocco lost to a Czech team that didn’t qualify for the World Cup. A few days later, it did the same against Romania, another nonqualifier, by 1-0 in Bucharest. Rougher nights could lie ahead.On Monday, Morocco will open its first World Cup with its toughest test yet: a date against Germany, one of the tournament favorites, in Melbourne. The players know their countrymen, and their families, wherever they are, will be watching.El Chad, the central defender, said her grandfather has made a habit of watching all of her games from a favorite cafe back in Morocco, where he likes to boast to his friends and neighbors about his granddaughter.El Chad knows the joy that games like the ones she will play this month can bring. She hurt a foot jumping with joy while watching one of Morocco’s wins in the men’s World Cup on television. This month, it is her team’s turn. She hopes to inspire similar sentiments, though not similar injuries, no matter the outcome. More

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      Sophia Smith Has Been Ready for Her World Cup Moment

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      In the weeks before the Women’s World Cup, Sophia Smith admitted that she wanted to be the first United States player to score a goal in the tournament. Of course she did. Like every great athlete, she has long envisioned herself as a star.Growing up in Colorado as the youngest of three girls, Smith spent years trying to keep up with her sporty sisters. She was the sibling relegated to the middle seat of the car, the one who tagged along at basketball practices, the baby yearning to be noticed.Yet even as a young teenager, Smith said, she knew she was destined for something bigger. She told her parents that she had the talent and drive to be a “special” soccer player. Maybe the best ever. It hardly seemed like a long shot: She was not prepared, after all, to settle for anything less.“I’m a winner,” Smith said in an interview before the World Cup. “I have to win. It makes me sick to lose anything. Card game, anything. When it comes to soccer, I just find a way.”On Saturday in the United States’ 3-0 victory over Vietnam, Smith showed — yet again — that there was something to her gut feeling that she would be great.In her first World Cup game, Smith scored the U.S. team’s first goal of the tournament. Then she scored its second. Later, she had the assist on its third. And even then, she thought her day could have been better.“We could have scored several more goals,” Smith said. “Myself included.”It was a remarkable debut, which reinforced the view of many that Smith, 22, could leave Australia and New Zealand as the tournament’s breakout star. In a team filled with promise — eight United States players made their first World Cup appearances against Vietnam — Smith once again hovered high above the rest. Not that her teammates didn’t try to keep up.At times, it seemed as if every player on the U.S. team could have scored a goal or two, or three. Savannah DeMelo, making her first World Cup start and only her second appearance for the national team, had two great early chances. Rose Lavelle — finally back on the field after a long injury layoff — had at least two more after entering as a second-half substitute, including one shot that looked bound for success until it ricocheted off the crossbar.Not even Alex Morgan, the star forward in her fourth World Cup, could match Smith. Morgan missed a penalty kick in first-half injury time when her low shot was stopped by the Vietnam goalkeeper, Thi Kim Tranh Tran.Julie Ertz, left, and Alex Morgan battling Vietnam goalkeeper Thi Kim Thanh Tran.Rafaela Pontes/Associated Press“You know, we can always put more away,” said Morgan, who added that she was happy with the victory but not with her penalty attempt. “But I think the way the first World Cup game goes is not the way the last one is going to go.”U.S. Coach Vlakto Andonovski acknowledged that his team — which is trying to win an unprecedented third consecutive World Cup title — should have converted more of the two-dozen-plus chances it created, and said he would have liked to see more efficiency in those critical moments in front of the goal. The U.S. team has only several days to make those adjustments before it faces a much tougher test against the Netherlands, but Andonovski said that was plenty of time for his players to study what went wrong and to get back to its usual scoring rhythm.The deadline is soon. The Netherlands, a team the U.S. defeated in the 2019 World Cup final, surely won’t allow as many chances, and it surely will make the U.S. work harder on defense.Andonovski had little doubt, though, that the United States would be ready for the match on Thursday (Wednesday night Eastern). He said he was encouraged by how his team played against Vietnam, considering the 11 starters had never played a game together, and six of them — including Smith — had never played a World Cup match at all.“I’m sure the nerves had something to do with it,” he said of the substandard finishing. “So I’m not worried about it.”He added that he was encouraged by the style of soccer that the team played, and pleased with all the opportunities it created. Smith was just as upbeat. Once the team loosens up a bit and gets more touches and strings together more passes, she said, it will “settle down and feel more confident.”She did admit, though, to feeling nervous before the game, a sensation that she said was a first for her.That means she didn’t feel nerves when she helped Stanford win an N.C.A.A. championship in 2019, which included her scoring a hat trick in the semifinal. Or when she entered her first professional game with the Portland Thorns, in 2020, and scored after only three minutes.The World Cup, though, is another level entirely, even against Vietnam. Smith is at a new point in her career now, with new emotions and higher stakes. But ever since she was a kid, she has been ready.“Whoever scores, whatever the score is, a win is a win,” she said in the days before the Vietnam game. “And if it takes me scoring a lot of goals for us to win, I’ll do that.” More

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

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

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      Overlooked No More: Lily Parr, Dominant British Soccer Player

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

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

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

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

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

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      Sam Kerr Is Australia’s New Queen

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      Sam Kerr’s tone barely shifted. She had not, she said, had time to think about it yet. She had put it to the back of her mind. She had other things on which to focus her attention.Her response muted to the point of deadpan, Kerr gave the distinct impression that the offer, to some the offer of a lifetime, was just another bullet point on a busy schedule, another item on her to-do list: Barcelona on the road. Liverpool in the league. Westminster Abbey, to act as Australia’s flag-bearer at the coronation of King Charles III. Everton away.Of course, she said, she was conscious that being handpicked by Australia’s prime minister to carry her country’s flag at the coronation was an “amazing, amazing honor.” It would, she acknowledged, probably be the sort of thing she would “tell my kids about in 10 or 15 years.”It was just that the idea of it did not faze her. Indeed, such was her insouciance that she admitted that her first instinct when offered the role was to turn it down. She thought she was too busy to attend a coronation. She assumed she would have a training session that day. She did not want to miss training simply to carry a flag.Sam Kerr, left, and Australia during parctice.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose that know her, though, would offer a supplementary explanation. Kerr has long been regarded as possibly the finest player in women’s soccer. She was, for a time, the highest-paid female player on the planet.Her teammates, colleagues and friends are unanimous in asserting that nothing that status has brought — the profile, the money, the attendant pressure — has left the slightest mark on her. “She comes across as real chill,” her Australia teammate Mary Fowler said. “For any of the pressure that I may feel, it’s multiplied for her. So I’m just like: Props to her for being able to deal with that and come across as if it doesn’t affect her.”That, she said, is just who Kerr is. It is also exactly who Australia needs her to be this month as she prepares to carry her country on her shoulders once again at the Women’s World Cup. (The start of her World Cup, though, will have to wait: On Thursday, Kerr was ruled out for at least the first two games with a calf injury.)At 29, Kerr has been a superstar for some time. Four years ago, when Chelsea was preparing its bid to sign her, the club’s management had to present a case for the investment. Both the fee to acquire her services and her salary were, at the time, substantial commitments by the standards of women’s soccer.Their case was that the money was dwarfed by her marketability. Kerr was, by that stage, the face of the sportswear manufacturer Nike in Australia. The possibility of her signing was a driving force in the decision by Optus Sport, the Australian broadcaster, to acquire the rights to the Women’s Super League in England. Chelsea’s board was told not to consider the idea that Kerr was expensive, but to see her signing as a bargain.“If there is an icon of this World Cup, it’s her,” one media executive said of Kerr, adding, “In terms of universal respect, I can’t think of anyone who is on a par with her.”William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis summer has borne that out. Kerr is the undisputed star, the main event, the central character of not only the biggest Women’s World Cup in history, but a World Cup that Australia desperately hopes to win on home soil.Her image has been plastered across the country. She is front and center in all of the tournament’s marketing campaigns. She has been depicted, alongside Princess Leia and John Lennon, in a mural in the hip Sydney suburb of Marrickville, and she is on the cover of an updated edition of the FIFA video game. She has published an autobiography. She is, as her former teammate Kate Gill put it, the “poster person for the team.”Seemingly every major news outlet has carried an account of her upbringing in Fremantle, just outside Perth, in Western Australia, detailing her family’s rich sporting background — both her father and brother played Australian Rules Football professionally — and her rise to prominence in a sport that she and her family initially “hated.”“She is everywhere here,” said Jon Marquard, the television and media executive who pieced together that Optus deal. “If there is an icon of this World Cup, it’s her. The position she is in is actually a pretty unusual thing. In terms of universal respect, I can’t think of anyone who is on a par with her.”Her sporting peers in Australia, instead, skew toward the historical, those whose legacies have been burnished just a little by time: the runner Cathy Freeman, the swimmer Ian Thorpe, the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. Her current peers, even in the traditional national sports cricket, both codes of rugby and the A.F.L., do not compare.Kerr, carrying her nation’s flag, leading an Australian delegation into Westminster Abbey during the coronation ceremony for King Charles III in London in May. King Cheung/Associated PressIn a nation as consumed by sports as Australia — “sport to many Australians is life, and the rest a shadow,” as the essayist and thinker Donald Horne put it in 1964 — that is a considerable honor. Marquard puts that broad popularity down not only to Kerr’s achievements, particularly outside Australia, but to her nature.“We have historically had a bit of tall poppy syndrome,” he said, referring to a situation where a person’s success causes them to be resented or criticized. “There is a cultural ethos in Australia generally of not getting above yourself. Anyone who does tends not to be seen as authentic, and that is central to the culture.“You can respect what someone like Nick Kyrgios has done, but he can be quite divisive. Whereas Sam has none of that hubris. She’s seen as genuine. The whole team is, really: You see them spending ages chatting with fans after games. Even with all of the demands on her, Sam has stayed quite grounded. It’s quite remarkable.”Steph Catley, a defender for Australia, put it rather more succinctly in comments to The Sydney Morning Herald. “She’s out there,” she said. “She’s very just like: ‘Blah. I’m Sam. This is me.’ She’s still like that.”That means, rather than being intimidated by her status — and the expectation now heaped on her shoulders — Kerr seems not only to welcome it, but to encourage it. She has spoken, semi-regularly, of her hopes for this tournament and what it will provide her — and provide women’s soccer in Australia — with what she terms a “Cathy Freeman moment,” a reference to the runner’s iconic victory in the 400 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.Kerr with fans after an exhibition victory against France last week in Melbourne.Mackenzie Sweetnam/Getty ImagesGuiding Australia to a World Cup win in the same stadium, Kerr has suggested, would have much the same impact on a subsequent generation of Australians.“If the pressure’s not there, it probably means it’s not that big of a game to be honest,” she said this month. “Pressure is a privilege, and I love pressure. I love being in a moment where one or two moments can change the path of your career, really, and I think this World Cup is one of those moments.”By the time Kerr allowed herself to think about her exact role at Westminster Abbey in May, she admitted that she did get just a little nervous. All she had to do was walk a few paces in front of the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, but she had to do it with the Australian flag on her shoulder and the eyes of the world upon her.That was the first coronation she attended this year. Her hope is that there will be another, and one in which she will have a significantly more prominent role. The difference is that this time she is not nervous at all. More

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      Auckland Shooting: 2 Killed in New Zealand as World Cup Is Set to Kick Off

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      There were also multiple injuries, the police said, and the gunman was also killed. The shooting was not far from where Norway’s national team is staying for the Women’s World Cup.At least two people were killed and several others injured after a gunman stormed a building under construction with a shotgun in the New Zealand city of Auckland early Thursday, hours before the first soccer match of the Women’s World Cup was scheduled to begin nearby.The gunman was also killed, the police said in a post on Twitter.The New Zealand Police began receiving reports of a person firing a gun inside the construction site about 7:20 a.m. local time, a police spokeswoman, Anna Thompson, said in an email.Passers-by and commuters heard the volley of gunshots during rush hour. Armed police officers and vehicles swarmed the area, and the authorities shut down parts of the city.The episode occurred as teams from New Zealand and Norway were set to play at Eden Park Stadium, about three miles from the site of the shooting. Several World Cup teams and many fans are staying in Auckland’s central business district, and the shooting occurred very close to Team Norway’s hotel and near a fan festival set up for the tournament.The United States team, which will play its first game here against Vietnam in two days, is also staying in the area.“Regarding the incident in downtown Auckland, all of our USWNT players and staff are accounted for and safe,” U.S. Soccer said in a statement, referring to the acronym for United States Women’s National Team. “Our security team is in communication with local authorities and we are proceeding with our daily schedule.”The shooting took place in a busy downtown area crowded with office buildings and hotels across the street from a ferry terminal on the city’s waterfront.The police said an armed man had entered the high-rise building — which is under construction and was occupied by dozens of construction workers, on lower Queen Street — and went floor by floor while shooting.New Zealand’s prime minister, Chris Hipkins, said at a news conference that the shooter was armed with a pump-action shotgun and that it appears that the gunman acted alone.Within minutes, hundreds of police officers carrying automatic weapons descended on the site, warning people to take cover and ushering them out of the area. Streets were closed in a two-block area, and a police helicopter hovered overhead. Officers pursued the gunman to the upper floors, and once there, an exchange of gunfire — audible on the street below the tower — ensured.“Upon reaching the upper levels of the building, the male has contained himself within the elevator shaft and our staff have attempted to engage with him,” the police said. “Further shots were fired from the male and he was located deceased a short time later.”Mr. Hipkins said the gunman had made his way toward the elevator, and that was where his body was later found. The gunman was not immediately identified.Construction workers, many of whom hid in the building during the shooting, were released hours later, and the police cleared the building.A motive for the shooting and other details were not immediately available.The mayor of Auckland, Wayne Brown, said in a post on Twitter: “This is a scary situation for Aucklanders on their Thursday morning commute to work. Please stay at home, avoid travel into the city centre.”Norway’s players were all in their hotel during the shooting; some were still asleep, but local news reports said a few had come down for breakfast in a dining room just off the ground floor lobby. As the police moved to close off access to the area around the shooting, security guards asked members of the Norway delegation to stay inside the hotel, according to the president of Norway’s soccer federation, Lise Klaveness.“Everything is calm in the Norwegian squad,” Halvor Lea, a spokesman for the Norway women’s team, said in a statement. “Preparations are going as normal.”In another statement, Maren Mjelde, the captain of the Norway team, said, many players most likely had woken up to the sound of a helicopter outside the window of their hotel and the emergency vehicles that had arrived out front.“We felt safe the whole time,” she said.In New Zealand, gun ownership is relatively low and gun violence is considered rare. But in 1997, six people were killed and four others injured in the North Island town of Raurimu. And in 1990, a gunman in the town of Aramoana killed 13 people and injured three others.Then, in March 2019, 51 people were killed in a mass shooting after a white supremacist opened fire on Muslims at prayer in two mosques in Christchurch.Days later, Jacinda Ardern, then prime minister, announced a temporary ban on most semiautomatic weapons, and a monthslong gun buyback and amnesty program began. Later that year, a sweeping nationwide ban on the weapons went into effect.Tariq Panja More