The first goal of the 2023 Women’s World Cup was scored by a Tennessee Volunteer on a cross from a Colorado College Tiger. But Hannah Wilkinson, the scorer, and Jacqui Hand, the playmaker, are not Americans representing the United States Women’s National Team. They are Kiwis, and two of 13 New Zealand players with time spent developing in American college soccer programs.
Women’s college soccer in the U.S. is the most elite developmental league in the world. Without it, Jamaica (with 20 players with NCAA experience), the Philippines (17), and Canada (22), for example, would have had a much harder time sharpening the skills necessary to qualify for the World Cup. At the ongoing tournament, slightly more than 20 percent of all players (151 athletes) have played, currently play, or have committed to play American college soccer. Twenty-two of the 32 national teams have at least one collegiate player. And there’s exactly one reason this has happened: Title IX. While many Americans recognize the significance of Title IX (the U.S. civil rights law that mandates equal educational opportunity on the basis of gender) in creating and expanding sporting opportunities in schools, its global reach has an underappreciated legacy—and this year’s World Cup is perhaps the clearest manifestation of its influence.
America has always been an unlikely global epicenter for soccer-skill development. Throughout much of the 20th century, the U.S. was allergic to the global soccer craze, opting instead for its homegrown sports of American football, baseball, and basketball. But in most other nations, soccer quickly became the sport, shortly after its introduction becoming the leading athletic obsession of players, fans, and communities. It also became a project of producing a kind of manliness ideology—the sport through which men proved their masculinity—and the men in charge of the establishments overseeing soccer worked to push women out. In England, the Football Association banned women from soccer pitches for 50 years, from 1921 until 1971. Other countries’ federations soon followed. In Brazil, politicians even went a step further, criminalizing the act of women playing soccer.
But women continued to play, on the margins and at risk of provoking hostility and violence by those who felt threatened by the “transgressive act” of women playing a contact sport intended only for men. When women in Europe and Latin America defiantly began to organize and compete in their own World Cups in the early 1970s, American women were nowhere to be found. While U.S. love for the beautiful game paled in comparison to other countries, the American absence from those tournaments is glaring. Our neighbors to the south competed well in them and even hosted the second, in 1971. At that final, played in the historic Estadio Azteca, Denmark defeated Mexico 3–0 before a crowd of 110,000 fans, an attendance record for women’s soccer that stands to this day. But in all that time, there was no real lasting, well-resourced, high-level women’s league—anywhere.
Then came Title IX. When Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972, no one marked the occasion as the catalyst for launching the world’s best women’s soccer league. But no law has been more important to the global development of women’s soccer than Title IX because nothing like the U.S. college sports system had (or has) existed for as long as it has anywhere else in the world. Title IX not only more or less forced the creation of the first elite women’s soccer league when no women’s professional sports leagues existed anywhere else, but importantly, it also created a league with hundreds of teams. Although most leagues can support, at most, only a couple dozen or so squads, the NCAA’s size provides roster spots for exponentially more players. Immediately after Title IX was passed, school administrators dragged their feet. But soon enough, they got to work expanding sporting opportunities for women, and women’s soccer became a natural addition to the list of team offerings. With the grassroots popularity of girls soccer on the rise, colleges across the nation eagerly added a fall sport with a relatively sizable roster that made a good (partial) counterweight to the behemoth of college football (American football, that is).
On the global stage, the impact was nearly instant. The American women arrived late to the party, but their takeover was quick and decisive. The University of North Carolina Tar Heels women’s soccer program and Anson Dorrance, the team’s coach for 47 years, exemplify this transformation. Hired to coach the UNC men in 1977, Dorrance started the women’s team in 1979, handed off the men to an assistant coach, and won 16 of the first 21 college national championships. While the first women’s college soccer national championship was contested only in 1981, incredibly, just a decade later the USWNT (with a Tar Heel–heavy roster and Dorrance as its coach) won the first FIFA-recognized Women’s World Cup in China.
In the decades since Title IX passed, the professionalization of college football has transformed American college sports into a $20 billion industry and has created the world’s best under-23 elite sports infrastructure—not just for Americans, but for the world’s athletes. More than 20,000 international athletes come to American colleges every year to enjoy the best-in-world coaching, competition, and infrastructure, like state-of-the-art facilities and cutting-edge sports medicine and performance science. At the 2022 NCAA Division I women’s soccer national championships, for example, 236 international athletes from 35 nations participated.
College athletes also enjoy world-class university educations to boot. Although the global average salary for women’s soccer players is $14,000, the package of benefits for playing at an American college—like tuition; room and board; meals; performance bonuses; and crucially, the new moneymaking opportunities from name, image, and likeness rights—comes in at around a $100,000 value annually. When a young, talented soccer player in Nigeria (eight players with American college experience at the 2023 Women’s World Cup), or Ireland, Costa Rica, or Haiti (seven players each), surveys her options, playing for an American college team is a great one.
As we have seen in this World Cup with Canada—who has more players (22) with American college experience than America does (20)—the trend going forward will be that other national teams in countries that do not enjoy strong and substantially supportive domestic leagues will become increasingly dependent on American college soccer. Meanwhile, Americans will by contrast grow less dependent on the NCAA. The U.S. professional opportunities in the NWSL and soon-to-launch USL Super League are becoming more lucrative and, for the most-talented young American players, will soon be a better option than collegiate play. So the global need will go both ways: U.S. colleges will increasingly look abroad to fill their rosters with high-level talent.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino probably isn’t thinking at all about the importance of American college soccer to the world’s players in this Women’s World Cup. But if the U.S. and Mexico want to win their bid to co-host the 2027 edition, we must be sure to show the sport’s head honcho the global legacy of Title IX—and what equitable investment in the women’s game can look like.
