An Empty Cup?

[October 8th, 2003] The Women's World Cup brought them out of the woodwork: Jews for Jesus, zaftig streakers, Chinese dragon dancers, Ghanaian drummers. Oh, and 27,000 partisans who packed PGE Park last for Sunday's titanic semifinal clash between Germany and the U.S.A.

The riveting, wrenching 3-0 defeat for the host nation (a 1-0 nailbiter until the final few minutes) was everything international sport is supposed to be. The city's publicly owned stadium became a cauldron of passion, and the world media came out in force to document the mayhem.

Where else could you find the Accra Daily Graphic sharing desk space with Hood River News? Or watch a throng of twentysomethings in designer jackets and futuristic sneakers filing Portland-dateline stories for the Shenzhen Economic Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Radio International? Or witness the Aussies jostling the Germans in the media zone underneath the stands, while Chinese TV beamed the scene to 1.2 billion potential viewers. (Hi, Mom!)

Despite the international great-occasion feel, however, the party in Portland failed to dispel clouds over women's soccer.

The 1999 World Cup was heralded as the sport's debutante ball, impetus for the world's first full-scale women's pro league. By this spring, when SARS-stricken China lost the Cup, the proven U.S. market was the only logical backup.

And the Americans came through. Organizers wisely limited the tournament to six cities, emphasizing intimate stadiums like PGE. Interest in the U.S. team spilled over to other games--Portland's two doubleheaders without the home team drew a combined 40,000 fans.

But the frenzy is finite. The Women's United Soccer Association, the best-attended women's league in the world by a considerable margin, collapsed just before the Cup. Families gladly pay hundreds to see U.S.A. vs. Germany. Convincing the same fans to shell out $20 a head, a dozen times a year, to catch the San Diego Spirit or the New York Power has proven a tougher proposition. Turning the WUSA's average crowd of about 6,700 into a workable business model was an even more elusive goal.

Tiffeny Milbrett, the Hillsboro-reared star of the U.S.A. team and the Power, paused after the Americans' heartrending loss to consider the quandary.

"It's what we've struggled with for the last three years," she told WW in the post-game media fray. "You like to think that anything like today's game--which was worthy of a World Cup final--creates awareness of the sport, and that's what we need."

But awareness doesn't pay the bills--and may, in any case, prove fleeting. After lucking into a second women's Cup, the U.S. is not likely to host again soon. China will probably claim '07, with a European nation, or perhaps Australia, a good bet for '11. Barring unforeseen viral complications, American fans could wait until the 2012 Olympics--which New York is gunning for--or beyond to see first-class women's soccer on home soil.

Some analysts think women's soccer's problems have less to do with gender than with market saturation--there are a lot of leagues in America, and only so many fan-hours to go around.

"The World Cup is an event-driven model: a three-week event with the best players in the world," says Paul Swangard of the University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. "That works more than a league that says, 'Spend five months developing an affinity for our startup teams, which are playing games that don't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.'" Swangard notes that almost all talk about reviving WUSA--and there's been a lot, though the Americans' failure to defend their Cup crown may monkeywrench plans--focuses on scaled-back, tour-based models, at least in the first season of rebirth.

In the meantime, will Americans tune in to tournaments on the other side of the world? If no league emerges to develop talent, can the next generation of U.S. players match the fame and skill of Milbrett or Mia Hamm? Or is defeat at brawny German hands a harbinger of decline? And if the American standard-bearers crumble, what happens to women's soccer around the world?

There's no denying the electricity of PGE's soccer celebration. What remains to be seen is whether it marked a sport's evolution or the last days of a brief golden age.