Pass the Ball!

 

MUSINGS ON WOMEN’S PROFESSIONAL SOCCER FROM SOMEONE WITH ABSOLUTELY NO CREDENTIALS ON THE SUBJECT

According to recent CBC news reports, women’s soccer will have a professional league by 2025. I guess that men’s professional sport as it now exists in basketball, hockey, baseball and soccer will be model for the new entity. Basically, that means that franchises will be owned (like your local Subway) and will operate inside a league structure that regulates team operations. The franchises will employ, trade, waiver and terminate players on a pseudo-free-market basis as regards pay and “working conditions.” Revenue will be primarily based on public fanaticism’s (fan’s) willingness to pay to watch the soccer competitions among franchises, and to purchase heavily-marked-up fan merchandise. Citizens of much, of little or no interest in women’s soccer will contribute tax dollars in order to enable construction of venues for the sport.

The key ingredient determining the success of the envisioned league is whether enough people will pay to watch women compete on the soccer field. Gender equality is certainly at play here and it seems obvious that there exists in Canada a cultural conviction that combat-style sports is men’s work, like truck driving and bridge engineering used to be.

Accepting for a moment that sports has a valuable role to play in a culture—supported by pointing out fitness, eye/hand coordination, harmless diversions for youth, etc. factors—it still follows that sitting on a hard seat in a stadium watching other people stay fit doesn’t necessarily provide the same benefits. Still, it’s a free country; there’s no law that says we can’t throw up a fence around a soccer field and offer people the right to come in and watch us “do sports” for a price. Heaven knows that staging an exhibition of taking off one’s clothes for pay, no less, has put more than a few coeds through college.

I know it exists, but I’d need to have explained how, for instance, a Canadian Women’s National Soccer Team winning gold in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics turns into a national achievement, a source of national pride when comparatively few of us armchair TV watchers had even the slightest hand in making that possible. Some would argue that such achievements and the presence of professional sports in a culture is encouragement to amateur sports, hence to sportsmanship and physical activity in the population. If that’s true, then I bow to the women who are elated over the possibility of living a life that is, well, soccer.

I watched a high-level women’s hockey game once and found it at least as entertaining as a tangle between the Canadiens and the Leafs. In fact, it resembled NHL hockey closely except with less aggressive contact. (The group hug around the scorer after a goal seems to have become a team-sport staple wherever such games are played.)

Someone (perhaps I) once said that in this age of the instant, the convenient, the technical and mechanical advances, life is becoming a quest to conquer boredom. Whether this involves endlessly watching sports, copious reading, traveling, crafts and hobbies, playing chess in sidewalk cafes, a new avocation, whatever, is a matter of individual preference. For one of these strategies, professional women’s soccer offers an expanded choice, and after 2025, a career option for remarkably athletic girls.