The USWNT enter the World Cup loved, despised and still influential

A seven-a-side match featuring a collection of retired Wrexham pros and guests against a team of mostly retired US women’s players isn’t particularly newsworthy. But when the score wound up 12-0 in favor of the men, the knives were out.

Some outlets, notably Fox News, either ignorantly or deliberately misidentified the American players as “the US women’s team”. Some played up Heather O’Reilly’s playful callout of Wrexham’s celebrity owner Ryan Reynolds as a hysterical, delusional fit. From newsrooms to their parents’ basements, men rejoiced at the supposed humbling of women who dared to demand a place in the sports marketplace.

Why? Simple sexism surely explains some of it, but the mainstream and social media harrumphing also brings up an inconvenient truth – as we head into the World Cup, a lot of people in the US are waiting for the women to fall flat on their faces, the result of years of political protests, questionable sportsmanship, and an “equal pay” war in which truth was the first casualty and money to develop the next generation of players was the last.

But despite that pushback among sections of America, US women’s soccer players have never been this popular for this many years. The 1991 and 1999 Women’s World Cup champions could be outspoken as well, playing hardball in labor negotiations that paved the way for their successors to make a living in the sport. But women’s soccer struggled in the US after the WUSA, at the time America’s only women’s professional league in the sport, collapsed in 2003.

That 1999 team made ads like the classic “I will have two fillings,” a tribute to their team-first attitude. This time around, marketing has kicked off with an ad in which the US women sneer and scoff at the very