The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  Cindy Parlow Cone, a former national team player who played in both the 1999 and 2003 World Cups, was the coach of the Thorns. Rachel Buehler, a national team defender for the Thorns, looked at her coach and said: “This is like a World Cup!” As Parlow Cone told reporters later, she agreed: “That’s what it felt like. It felt like that atmosphere we had at the World Cup and the Olympics.”

  Something special had clearly been born in Portland that day—and it was only the beginning.

  The worst-case scenario Merritt Paulson set for his new women’s team was around 2,000 paying fans per game. The best-case scenario was about 8,000. Their average attendance in 2013 ended up being 13,320. It went on to grow every season, and in 2017, the average attendance was almost 18,000—a staggering number, especially because it was larger than the average turnout for some MLS teams that had been around for decades.

  The Thorns were profitable immediately—a first in women’s club soccer in the United States. Gulati, seeing the success of the Thorns, asked Paulson if he’d be open to a profit-sharing arrangement with the rest of the league. Paulson initially scoffed at the idea.

  “Should we be throwing safety nets to people who should be doing better on their own?” Paulson asked him. In the spirit of growing the league, however, Paulson eventually agreed to set aside $150,000 to be distributed to the rest of the teams in the league.

  But as much as the Thorns’ sustained and growing success offered hope for the future of the league, it also created a new dynamic that hadn’t existed to such an extreme extent in the previous leagues: On one end sat the Thorns, with plenty of resources and the ambitions to match, but on the other end were independent owners who couldn’t come close.

  “It was apparent to me that the failures of past efforts were more complicated than a simple product issue,” Paulson says. “These weren’t operators who were dealing with a lot of resources—they didn’t have the facilities. There’s also a lot of blocking and tackling that’s sports business 101 that a lot of them weren’t doing.”

  When Jeff Plush became the NWSL commissioner in 2015, one of the first things he noticed was that divide. There was a sharp contrast between the owners who had been part of failed women’s pro leagues and the owners who hadn’t.

  “The thing I wasn’t as prepared for but learned quickly was that there are scars from the previous two leagues and the people involved in those leagues,” Plush says. “They were scared of the future a little bit. Getting people to align on an ambitious vision and knowing it’s going to take some time was difficult.”

  A large part of Plush’s job involved fielding multiple daily phone calls from owners around the NWSL about various issues. When it came to the divide between ambitious owners and cautious owners, he admits he “spent a lot of time trying to navigate that.”

  “Initially the league and the other owners were really grateful we stepped up and that the Thorns had changed the outlook of the entire NWSL,” Paulson says. “There weren’t the constant questions about the viability of the league. There was a certain appreciation for that, but there was probably a bit of jealousy as well.”

  Paulson, the most vocal and ambitious owner of the bunch, quickly took on a leadership role of his own making and started recruiting other MLS teams to join the NWSL. First was the Houston Dynamo, who founded the Dash and joined as an expansion team in 2014. Then Orlando City founded the Pride, another expansion team, which joined in 2016. As more MLS teams entered the league, the dynamic began shifting in the NWSL boardroom.

  Small independent owners had trouble keeping up and started to fall by the wayside. The Western New York Flash were sold to North Carolina FC, a lower-division men’s team, and the Flash relocated to Raleigh as the North Carolina Courage. FC Kansas City, after an ownership change, was taken over by the NWSL for failing to meet minimum standards and acquired by Real Salt Lake, who reestablished the team as the Utah Royals.

  The surest sign of that ongoing shift arrived when the Boston Breakers, the longest-running women’s soccer club in the United States, folded in 2018. The last remaining team from the WUSA was gone.

  Owners around the NWSL who decline to speak on the record say Boston had continually missed payments and relied on the rest of the teams to make up for their budget shortfalls. But there was a concern among the league’s other owners about the optics of losing a team so early into the league’s history. By the NWSL’s sixth season in 2018, the increasingly MLS-heavy board of NWSL owners decided the league could afford the hit of losing the Breakers after efforts failed to convince Robert Kraft of the New England Revolution to take over the team.

  “It’s painful to know that some of the people that have been the fiercest, longest-term proponents of women’s soccer can’t afford to be part of this anymore,” says Arnim Whisler, owner of the Chicago Red Stars. “They’re getting crowded out and pushed out. That’s hard to watch.”

  But for the players of the national team, who committed to the NWSL and may have given up lucrative options at powerhouse clubs in Europe, minimum standards were increasingly becoming an issue.

  Sky Blue FC didn’t have on-site showers in their locker rooms, lacked an equipment manager, and parked a camping trailer at their practice field to provide bathrooms. FC Kansas City played on carpetlike turf at a high school field their first year. The Washington Spirit didn’t have a dedicated training room—instead it was just a section cordoned off with curtains in a big multisport area at the Maryland SoccerPlex where there were vending machines and volleyball courts.

  For Ali Krieger, who played at the Washington Spirit until 2017, her job as an allocated player extended well beyond simply playing soccer. She ended up having to confront the team’s front office to ensure flights didn’t have multiple stops or weird hours that would hurt the team’s performance for away games. She had to make sure the hotels were clean and in good locations. Small things, like what kind of meals would be provided or whether the players had raincoats, also became concerns she took on.

  “You’re just like, this isn’t my job and I’m having to speak up for things, and at this level, you shouldn’t have to—you should just show up for your job and focus on doing it well,” Krieger says. “When you leave a national team camp and come back to the NWSL, it’s like: Wow, we really need to do something here. Each year, you’re chipping away and chipping away.”

  Krieger’s experience wasn’t unique among national team players. Becky Sauerbrunn recalls that teams would travel without the league minimum of players. Hope Solo recalls a lack of medical equipment and trainers throughout the league. Ashlyn Harris recalls being given one Spirit training top for the whole season that she had to take home and wash every day.

  Across the NWSL, national team players had taken on the extra burden of pushing for better standards that would benefit every player in the league. It was a process that started when Sauerbrunn first got on the phone with the owners of FC Kansas City, and it continues to this day.

  “These are little things that we didn’t want teams to get away with, because it was affecting all the players,” Sauerbrunn says. “So we had to keep pushing the level of professionalism higher and higher.”

  * * *

  As time has gone on, the league has seemed to get stronger.

  In 2017, A&E Networks bought a 25 percent stake of the NWSL—a deal that sources say was worth eight figures—and started airing games live on Lifetime. It was a major step for the league—after all, in 2013, clubs had to contribute around $40,000 each to pay Fox Sports to air playoff games on the network’s soccer-focused cable channel. The influx of millions of dollars from A&E allowed the league to immediately double its minimum salary for non-allocated players from a paltry $7,200 to $15,000 per season.

  But the biggest changes in day-to-day standards for NWSL players have come as the league has welcomed more committed, experienced franchise owners who happen to be very wealthy. The blueprint that started in Portland was spreading, and fewer natio
nal team players were forced to speak up against poor treatment.

  When Orlando City looked at the NWSL, much of their guidance came from the Timbers organization and Merritt Paulson, who shared their financial figures. Orlando City president Phil Rawlins said the Pride would follow the Thorns model, which involved treating the women’s team like an important part of the overall organization—not a niche, ancillary product or an afterthought. The Pride were immediately profitable.

  For players like Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris, who moved from the Washington Spirit to the Orlando Pride, the difference in professionalism was huge. The addition of the Pride in 2015 forced the rest of the NWSL to be better.

  “They set a standard,” Krieger says. “They were like: Look everyone, this is what we’re providing, what are you providing? This is the way they should be treated. This is the way professional atmospheres should look. Here’s our model. You guys need to keep up or get out. That’s why it’s great if more clubs are resembling our model.”

  Adds Harris: “The professionalism is night and day. It’s run like a professional club should be run. They’re just as involved with the women’s team and the men’s team.”

  Not every MLS-backed team has managed to have the success of the Portland Thorns or the Orlando Pride. The Houston Dash, backed by the Dynamo, are not yet profitable after joining the league in 2013. They aren’t far off, but club president Chris Canetti admits they had hoped they would be there by now.

  “We thought the financial picture would be a little bit better than what it has been in our first few years of operation,” he says. “It’s been a little more challenging than what we thought when we put this together as a concept five years ago.”

  Still, the NWSL has continued to attract more MLS owners that have strengthened the league.

  When it became clear the league needed to oust the struggling FC Kansas City franchise in late 2017, it was Paulson who first called Dell Loy Hansen, the owner of Real Salt Lake in MLS and convinced him to take over the team. Within two weeks, Sauerbrunn, a player who constantly had to worry about whether FC Kansas City was providing a professional environment for her and her club teammates, was in Utah looking at blueprints for a new locker room.

  That locker room for the Utah Royals, RSL’s new women’s team, would be designed as the heart of the team’s operations—a place players could get medical treatment, lift weights, watch game film, and have meetings. At FC Kansas City, nothing close to that existed—the players shared their facilities with youth teams in the Kansas City community, and the trainers had to set up and break down their equipment every day.

  It may seem like a small thing, but it showed that Hansen was fully committed to following the model Paulson created: The Utah Royals and Real Salt Lake would be placed on equal footing.

  Now, clubs that can’t provide the same standards risk being left further behind. But at the same time, many of these clubs are run by the people who have supported women’s club soccer in the U.S. the longest. The NWSL, which is still young at just seven years, still needs to figure out what kind of league it’ll be in the long term. It is already the most competitive in the world and has expanded the national team player pool, but where does it go from here?

  “You don’t ever want to be the one holding the league back,” says Arnim Whisler, owner of the Chicago Red Stars. “You don’t want to be the one where players won’t play in that market because the facilities are bad or what have you. You can’t operate if you’re not able to be a core part of the league. That’s every year what we continue to look at.”

  The bigger question for the NWSL, however, may be who will continue to run the league.

  Sunil Gulati, the NWSL’s chief architect, left as U.S. Soccer president in 2018. U.S. Soccer’s current management agreement to operate the NWSL ends at the end of 2019. Such agreements have been set to expire and renewed several times already, but sources at the federation say the plan was never for U.S. Soccer to run the league forever. Eventually, they want the NWSL to put together a viable exit strategy so the management agreement can end.

  The NWSL’s owners and representatives from A&E want the same thing. They have explored ways to take control from the federation, including meeting with executives from USL and MLS about absorbing the women’s league, per sources. For NWSL teams, it has become obvious that the federation prioritizes the national team over what’s best for the league. That has created conflicts, particularly when the federation pulls the league’s stars out of NWSL games for nonessential international friendly matches.

  What the NWSL would look like if U.S. Soccer didn’t run it is still unclear. Talks are preliminary enough that it appears, for now, that the federation will have to renew its management agreement into 2020.

  For its first several seasons, the focus for the league was merely on surviving and not turning into another WUSA or WPS. But now, with a more stable crop of ownership groups, the focus will begin shifting to a longer-term vision.

  CHAPTER 17

  “I Cannot Comment Further at This Time”

  Tom Sermanni wasn’t looking to leave his post as the head of the Australian women’s national team in 2012.

  The job was an ideal fit—he had full autonomy over the way he managed the team, and he found success folding young talent into the Australian player pool. Under Sermanni, the team flourished and broke into the top 10 of FIFA’s world rankings and stayed there.

  But when the U.S. hosted Australia for a pair of friendlies for Pia Sundhage’s final two games at the helm of the team, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati and secretary general Dan Flynn approached Sermanni. They wanted to speak to him informally about the job that was opening up with the U.S. national team.

  That’s not something any coach would say no to—the U.S. job was perhaps the most coveted in all of women’s soccer. So Sermanni met with the U.S. Soccer higher-ups a few times over the course of the two games, in Los Angeles and then in Denver. After the informal conversations, U.S. Soccer asked the Australian federation for permission to formally interview him for the job.

  “The first thing they said was that they wanted to win the World Cup,” Sermanni says of the interview process. “That was the blunt part of the discussion.”

  The part that wasn’t so blunt had to do with the style of play of the American team. As far as Sermanni could tell, U.S. Soccer liked the way he had continually regenerated the Australian team and integrated young players to build a fast, “positive” attacking style of play.

  The players in Australia also seemed to get on very well with Sermanni, and it was easy to see why. His laid-back attitude and penchant for one-liners delivered with a smile—complete with his salt-and-pepper hair and mustache—called to mind more a lovable father figure than a dictatorial coach.

  Sermanni isn’t Australian, as his thick Scottish accent gives away, but he finished his own playing career there and turned it into a coaching career, working his way up from coaching boys’ youth teams to the Australian women’s national team. Somewhere in between, he coached in the WUSA for the New York Power, where Shannon Boxx and Christie Pearce played.

  On October 31, 2012, U.S. Soccer announced that Tom Sermanni would take over as coach of the national team.

  “He has a tremendous passion for the game, knows the American players, understands our system and knows the process of preparing a team for a World Cup tournament,” said U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati.

  But the national team, which had gotten used to a certain style of leader, was in for an adjustment period. It didn’t take long for it to become clear how Sermanni was going to change things within the national team.

  * * *

  On February 13, 2013, Tom Sermanni named Sydney Leroux to the starting lineup for a friendly versus Scotland. Leroux had 29 caps and 15 goals with the national team already, so he didn’t think much of the decision. But Jill Ellis, his assistant coach, noticed something he hadn’t.

  “You’ve got to
say something to Syd,” Ellis told him.

  “What do you mean?” Sermanni replied.

  “Well, this is her first start,” said Ellis.

  Sermanni was confused for a moment. “Hasn’t she got 30 caps?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yeah, but she’s never started a game,” Ellis told him.

  Sermanni admits now he was “gobsmacked” when he realized Leroux had never started. She had set a national team record for the most goals scored by a substitute player, but Pia Sundhage never deviated from using her as an off-the-bench substitute.

  At first glance, Sermanni seemed a lot like Sundhage, who had one of the most successful runs of any head coach of the national team. Both were affable characters who were considered players’ coaches, and each managed to keep the mood light.

  But on the field, their styles were almost opposite. She was headstrong, where he was hands-off. She was rigid, where he was flexible. She clung to a core group of veterans, while he gave new players chances. She liked to use the same lineup over and over, and he was always tinkering.

  As the 2014 Algarve Cup arrived, Sermanni had given 12 players their first caps and fielded almost a new lineup every game. Sermanni suggested the player rotation would continue, even when the 2015 World Cup arrived the following year.

  “I don’t think this World Cup is going to be about a starting 11,” Sermanni said. “I think there’s been a notion in the U.S. that there is a starting 11, and I think we’re very much in a situation where it’s a squad game. So, the starting 11 is potentially going to vary even when we get to the World Cup.”

  If new players were getting minutes, that meant, in some cases, that veterans were not. Abby Wambach saw her playing time diminished in favor of the likes of Christen Press, who got her first cap under Sermanni, and Sydney Leroux. Wambach pushed Sermanni to consider a different attacking formation that would use more forwards, but he refused, she admitted to reporters.