U.S. Soccer needs to start treating the USWNT like world class athletes

On its own, absent context, scheduling a match on an unplayable surface was a pretty big screw-up by U.S. Soccer. With the added context of players’ prior complaints and information that came out after the match’s cancellation, it’s clear that it’s part of a pattern of neglect. U.S. Soccer treats the USWNT players like money faucets that will never turn off, not human beings who have relevant, important concerns, and who deserve to be treated like world class athletes.

Former USWNT star and current ESPN analyst Julie Foudy chimed in with a revelation just after the game was canceled.

U.S. Soccer didn’t refute that. Laura Vecsey was on the scene in Honolulu for FOX Soccer and more or less got confirmation of Foudy’s information without getting confirmation. “U.S. Soccer spokesman Neil Buethe could not confirm whether the Aloha Stadium field had actually been vetted by anyone at U.S. Soccer,” reported Vecsey.

Between the PR disaster and the lost revenue that went along with canceling the match, U.S. Soccer knows that it has to change so this never happens again.

And despite their clear negligence in this case, U.S. Soccer does care if its players get hurt. Rapinoe going down with a torn ACL hurts the USWNT’s chances of winning an Olympic gold medal, which hurts U.S. Soccer’s chances of making a lot of money off the team in the near future, so it’s going to reduce the chances of that happening again.

This is the bare minimum, though. USSF doesn’t get brownie points for not wanting players to get torn ACLs or starting to inspect fields after one of their games gets called off because a field is unplayable. They should be doing much more for the USWNT players, who bring tens of millions of dollars more money into U.S. Soccer than any other women’s national team does for their federation.

In their statement on The Players’ Tribune, the USWNT players made it clear that this game’s cancelation was not about the lingering turf vs. grass issue in international soccer. It was just about a field that was a serious safety risk. But the turf problem persists, and it’s part of the broader issue surrounding this game.

World Cup Golden Ball winner Carli Lloyd made her feelings clear after Sunday’s announcement.

And they’re not done yet. During their next four games, the USWNT will only play once at a stadium that has a natural grass surface installed.

The team’s feelings on turf have been made very clear. Three of them even filed a gender discrimination lawsuit ahead of the 2015 World Cup. From said lawsuit:

“The players’ perceptions about the drawbacks and risks of elite soccer on artificial turf are also well-founded. Turf exposes players to injuries that do not exist on natural grass, such as skin lesions, abrasions and lacerations ... the most reliable scientific research indicates that there is a higher risk of serious injury to lower extremity joins on artificial turf than on natural grass. According to a 2013 article [in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopedic surgeons], ‘reliable biomechanical data suggest that both the torque and strain experienced by lower extremity joints generated by artificial surfaces may be more than those generated by natural grass fields.’”

That lawsuit was killed through stall tactics by FIFA’s lawyers and intimidation tactics by individual FAs, but it was very clearly one that had merit, and one that made players’ feelings on the issue well known.

So why, knowing all of this, did U.S. Soccer schedule a victory tour on artificial turf fields that they didn’t inspect? It’s reasonable to infer that they did it because they didn’t care what the players thought. They care enough about the players to take steps to improve conditions after a big revenue loss, a PR disaster and a serious injury, but not enough to listen to their players before those things happened.

The USWNT players give up chances to play club soccer overseas, fly discount airlines and stay in discount hotels to keep the National Women’s Soccer League’s costs down, leave their NWSL teams for international call-ups, do any media appearances, anywhere, at the drop of a hat, play on turf with minimal protest and take photos with fans for hours before and after games. They do all of this because they love their jobs, and their fans, and they want to make women’s soccer better for the next generation of players.

Checking fields is the absolute least U.S. Soccer can do for these players. They should be scheduling all of their home friendlies on grass and taking any other concerns the players have into account. U.S. Soccer needs to be treating the USWNT players like the extremely valuable people they are, not like robots who occasionally present PR problems.