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Women’s World Cup Preview: Can USWNT finally bring soccer love to America

By Jeff Weisinger

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The United States want to be a part of soccer culture, and the USWNT team could help get everyone in the club with a win on Sunday.

For the first time in 16 years, the United States Women’s National team will play in one of America’s biggest soccer matches to date. At the same time the USWNT will get the revenge they have been seeking for the last four years.

When the USWNT takes on Japan in Sunday’s Women’s World Cup Final, they’ll have the chance to finish what the men’s side started in last year’s World Cup in Brazil: help the United States become the soccer nation that it’s now suddenly trying to become.

Despite Brandi Chastain’s game-winning penalty kick for the USWNT in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final in front of over 90,000 at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles, California, soccer still refused to really take off in America until last year.

To many, soccer is just now ‘finally arriving’ in America. Major League Soccer started the first year of a $90 million TV deal with ESPN, Fox Sports and UniMas for national broadcast rights, the National Women’s Soccer League is slowly growing its notoriety and for the first time ever, 12 women’s national teams will be featured in the new FIFA 16 video game.

Because of this, a win by the USWNT on Sunday could fully welcome the sport to the country that has all but mostly ignored it for decades.

For those who have said that nobody cares about women’s soccer, the numbers say otherwise. There was a reported 8.4 million viewers who watched the USWNT beat No. 1 Germany in the semifinal last Tuesday, bringing the tournament average for all of the games up to 1.3 million, a 45-percent increase from the 899,000 on ESPN and ESPN2 in 2011.

“If you compared it to the last Women’s World Cup in 2011, going into that tournament, the team was largely unknown and then the Brazil game happened with Abby [Wambach’s] late goal and that changed everything – that one goal – in terms of attention around the team,” former USWNT star Julie Foudy said in an interview with Forbes.

There are, of course, several reasons for the increased numbers this year, besides demand for the sport.

For starters, having the tournament on a major broadcast network has helped a lot, opening the way for more people to watch the games as compared to a cable-only network. Secondly, this year’s Women’s World Cup is time zone friendly to American’s watching the matches, allowing for Fox to schedule the U.S. games in the evening.

“The time zones make a sizable impact,” Mike Mulvihill, Fox’s senior vice president for programming and research, said to the New York Times.

For more proof of the growth in popularity of the sport, tickets for the USWNT’s post-Women’s World Cup friendly against Costa Rica on Aug. 19 at Finley Stadium in Chattanooga, Tenn. sold out on just the first day.

The sellout also marks the fourth-ever sellout at Finley Stadium. The sellout is the second of two matches the American women will play against Costa Rica. They will play their first match on Aug. 16 at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.  More than 23,000 tickets have been sold for the Aug. 16 match in Pittsburgh.

On the pitch itself and outside of what the match represents in regards of the sport’s popularity in America, the United States’ final against Japan will be the most important match for the USWNT since the 1999 final – the same one that the USWNT won on American soil. The only World Cup title that either the men’s or women’s side won on American soil.

Sunday’s final is the third straight time that two major women’s soccer powers meet in the final of a major tournament. Japan beat the U.S. on penalties in the 2011 Women’s World Cup final, then the U.S. beat Japan in the 2012 Olympic gold-medal game 2-1.

Coming off a thrilling win over Germany, the USWNT has all of the momentum going into Sunday’s final. However, a lot of that sounds all too familiar. The USWNT was the favorite in 2011’s World Cup Final as well, but Japan still won in penalties despite the U.S. leading on two separate occasions.

The USWNT backline is much better than they were four years ago, allowing just one goal in the six games played in the tournament while not conceding a goal in 513 consecutive minutes, the second-longest in tournament history. The USWNT can set the single-tournament record if they can shut out Japan for 28 minutes on Sunday. Germany still holds the overall scoreless record at 679 minutes from 2003-11.

The USWNT has also done a better job in ball control as well overall in the tournament, limiting the time that the U.S. spent in their defensive third of the pitch. The question now is if they can score and finish chances.

Japan, on the other hand, will once again look to give the U.S. problems throughout the game due to their style of play. Japan is one of the most technical teams in this year’s tournament, recording the highest pass completion (79.7 percent) of any team in the Women’s World Cup. The U.S. lost to Japan in the 2011 final and against France in February 2015, both times failing to defeat a possession-style of attack.

Going into last year’s World Cup in Brazil, along with the current MLS season and this year’s Women’s World Cup, the United States has shown a desire to become like the other soccer nations in the world.

If the USWNT win on Sunday, it could prove to be a closing argument on the debate over whether America is finally a soccer nation or just casual observers who become interested when it’s convenient.

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