Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. reacts after missing a penalty during the penalty shootout.HANNAH MCKAY/Reuters
All residents of this country receive a few basic amenities.
Among the best of them – easy access to nature, neighbours who don’t want you dead and a feeling of smug satisfaction whenever the United States loses at something it thought it would win.
Could all 40 million of us have crammed into the same bar on Sunday morning to watch USA-Sweden, you’d have felt it. That sense that, just this once, international justice had been done.
The U.S. women’s soccer team didn’t only lose a game. It lost a lot more than that, and in the most painful way possible.
As is often the case with schadenfreude, the Americans’ disappointment and our delight in it reflects back on us. The United States lost, but Canada lost with it.
It was that sort of game, if you know what I mean. The United States was so far and away the better team over 120 goalless minutes that if soccer were decided by judges rather than goals, they would’ve stopped it on the mercy rule.
The game’s best player, Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic, spent most of the match in mid-air, horizontal to the ground, knocking away another no-hoper.
Still, it got to penalties. All-timers Megan Rapinoe and Kelley O’Hara – two of the loudest ‘don’t worry, we got this’ American voices all tournament long – flubbed their shots.
American goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher got both hands on the goal that won it for Sweden. The rule for goalies – if you can touch it, you should save it. The shot deflected up in the air and looped over her. Naeher swatted it away, but not before the ball had crossed the line by about the width of a fingernail. A video replay decided it. Sweden won the shootout 5-4.
It’s the first time the United States has been knocked out of a Women’s World Cup before the semi-finals.
In the immediate aftermath, the Americans were working hard to kid themselves.
“We showed that American mentality again,” Naeher said.
Not really. It was a garden-variety failure of nerve. They blew it.
And they didn’t just a blow a match. They surrendered control of the game.
For as long as anyone can remember, women’s soccer has been an economics lesson as much as a sport. Countries that have an abundance of money to spread around on their hobbies have utterly dominated it.
The United States, Germany, Canada, Japan, Norway – those five countries have won every Women’s World Cup and Olympic gold. This has always been the house league of the G7 & Friends.
Whenever anyone complained about that, you got the same answer from the perpetual winners: ‘Nobody wants to grow the game as much as we do’. But in the way of these things, talking was often a substitute for doing.
Matters began to change when the women’s soccer boom made it to Europe. Unlike North America, they had the infrastructure, know-how and ready-made fan base to build the game quickly. Crucially, the European outlook on sports isn’t as parochial as our own.
These clubs weren’t building teams to help their own national teams – the rallying cry of all North American soccer leagues.
They were building teams to help Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain. They were in this to make a buck. Super-clubs did for free what underfunded national federations could not afford – turn talented possibilities from all over the world into finished products.
This is why the established powers spend so much time these days complaining about money. It was their major advantage and they’ve lost it. You’re seeing the results.
The final domino had to be the United States. Despite its run of dominance, it was never a Brazil. The Americans didn’t make the game beautiful.
What they had was a towering self-belief passed from generation to generation. They rarely lost because it didn’t occur to them it was possible.
Such was that belief that the United States missed a few things. It didn’t notice that its domestic league had been lapped by Europe’s top outfits. It didn’t bother the Americans that few of their players featured in anyone’s list of the world’s best soccer players. Why worry? They had their history to fall back on.
This time, history didn’t catch them.
And it’s not as though the United States just lost to some burgeoning powerhouse. Sweden is in the same boat the U.S. is – buttressed for ages by government cash and now scrambling to maintain a dwindling advantage.
What struck you most from the teams that should-have-but-didn’t in Australia was the arrogance. The United States, Germany, Canada – it didn’t seem to occur to them that they wouldn’t just sashay into the quarters at least. It might get hard then, but they talked as though they were owed at least that much. After all, they built this game.
All three brought along a gang of veteran passengers from back in the glory days. Whenever things got tough, the youngsters were jettisoned in favour of these old fighters.
It sometimes worked against the minnows, but not against the hard outs. The only way a Rapinoe or a Christine Sinclair was going to win big games single-handedly in this tournament was if you’d run them through a time machine first. Even then, probably not. Everybody’s got better since their heyday.
There are a bunch of lessons here for all the former champions. Stop saying things like “teams are catching up” – Sinclair’s line after Canada was wiped out by Australia. That’s the wrong tense. They’ve caught up. Anyone standing around hoping for a reset to factory settings is in the process of getting left behind. Canada is a main offender.
Stop talking as though domestic leagues will save you. They won’t. If you want to be the world’s best, you have to practise with the world’s best every day. That means going to Europe. Canada has a few players over there, but too few play regularly.
Stop taking anything for granted. North America and northern Europe sat atop women’s soccer for 25 years because they were only really playing each other. It was a phony dominance.
For the first time in Australia, they found themselves playing the whole world at a World Cup. It’s not so easy when everyone else thinks they have as much right to win as you do.