Zona de Azar USA – How Did the United States Become a Women’s Soccer Powerhouse?
USA – March 12, 2025 www.zonadeazar.com Just after International Women’s Day, I would like to bring up a topic that has always intrigued me and only started making sense when I came to the United States to pursue my master’s degree in sports management.
Why do the United States have such a successful history in women’s soccer while failing to be competitive in men’s soccer?
The answer to this question might help us understand the affirmative action policies implemented in Brazilian soccer over the past decades and identify measures that can be taken to improve women’s sports in Brazil.
To put things in perspective, the U.S. women’s national team is undoubtedly the most dominant in the world. At the Olympic Games, for example, they have won a total of five gold medals, one silver, and one bronze in eight editions, failing to reach the semifinals only once, in 2016, in Rio de Janeiro. Their dominance in World Cups is slightly lower but still impressive: the U.S. women’s team has won four titles, finished as runners-up once, and reached the semifinals in three other editions out of a total of nine World Cups played. Just like in the Olympics, they have never failed to reach at least the semifinals.
The men’s team, on the other hand, has historically been mediocre. After failing to qualify for nine consecutive editions of the world’s biggest sporting event between 1954 and 1986, the U.S. men’s team has played in eight of the last nine World Cups. In those nine editions, they reached the quarterfinals once (in 2002), were eliminated in the Round of 16 four times, and exited in the group stage three times. The dominance that the women display in global competitions is not seen among the men, not even within their own continent, where Mexico has nearly twice as many CONCACAF Gold Cup titles as the U.S.
Given this introduction, what explains this difference?
The best explanation for this discrepancy comes from a federal law signed in 1972 called Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in schools and other educational programs receiving federal funding. This law is quite broad, covering topics ranging from dress code policies to sexual harassment and violence, and it does not even mention the word “sports” in its original text. However, its biggest impact has been on school and university sports programs.
To understand how a law that doesn’t even mention “sports” completely changed the American sports landscape, one must recognize the importance of sports – and American football in particular – for U.S. high schools and universities.
The United States has eight stadiums with a capacity of over 100,000 seats, all of which are used for college football. Among the country’s twenty largest stadiums, seventeen belong to universities. My university’s stadium, for example, is the 20th largest in the U.S., bigger than any stadium in Brazil. Even more impressively, Michigan Stadium is the second-largest stadium in the world, with 107,601 seats, and has no trouble selling out for games.
Simply put, nothing draws more spectators to stadiums worldwide than college football. While the NFL sold 18.5 million tickets in 2022, college football attracted 42.3 million spectators. For comparison, the Premier League had “only” 14.7 million fans attending games last season.
How Title IX Shaped Women’s Soccer Success
Title IX requires universities to provide equal opportunities for men and women in multiple areas, with the U.S. Department of Education overseeing eleven compliance criteria related to sports. These include funding for sports facilities and housing, training and competition schedules, and, most importantly, athletic scholarships.
College athletes frequently receive scholarships to play for their universities, and the law mandates that the number of scholarships awarded by gender must match the percentage of male and female students. If a university’s student body is 55% female, then 55% of its sports scholarships must go to women. Since most universities have a majority of female students, they are required to offer more scholarships to women.
The issue for universities is that, as I mentioned earlier, their flagship sports program is football, which is played almost exclusively by men at a competitive level. Each college football team can currently offer 85 scholarships to its athletes, which typically requires an additional 100 scholarships for female athletes to maintain gender equity.
And that is precisely where we find the best explanation for why women’s soccer in the U.S. is far more competitive than men’s soccer.
To illustrate, let’s look at my university, Florida State University (FSU). Of 19 sports programs, only eight are for men. If we consider baseball and softball as different versions of the same sport – with baseball played by men and softball by women – the only sport played exclusively by men at FSU is football.
On the other hand, FSU has women-only teams in soccer, lacrosse, beach volleyball, and indoor volleyball. Even sports with both men’s and women’s teams tend to have much larger female rosters. The swimming team, for example, has 32 men and 45 women.
This gender imbalance in college sports is a key reason why women accounted for 70% of Team USA’s swimming medals at the last Olympics.
The Impact on Women’s Soccer
Looking specifically at soccer, the NCAA Division I women’s soccer league (the governing body for U.S. college sports) has 351 programs, while the men’s league has only 48. This means there are over seven times more women playing college soccer than men, which has major implications for the country’s overall talent development pipeline.
Since many families see sports as the best way to finance their children’s college education, girls are naturally encouraged to pursue sports like soccer, softball, and volleyball, while boys are more often steered toward American football.
Next Steps in the Discussion
Over the next two weeks, I will publish two more articles exploring this discussion further:
- How Brazilian regulations – and the CBF – can help boost women’s sports, just as Title IX enabled the growth of women’s sports in the U.S.
- How Brazil can leverage the existing U.S. university system to improve its international performance in various sports.
I already wrote an article on this topic last year, discussing Júlia Bergmann’s case at Georgia Tech, for example, but I plan to expand on this conversation in greater depth.
Editor: @_fonta
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