US womens national team loses to 15 year old boys

[annaMckin23]

I was surprised to see this but talking to some friends, this kind of stuff happens all the time with the national team losing to boys teams. Do you think this undermines women getting equal pay in sports? Im thinking regardless of boys beating professional women, women should get paid equally.

www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/

www.dailywire.com/news/6072/australias-national-womens-soccer-team-lose-7-0-amanda-prestigiacomo#

Not in the least surprising. Back when I used to play women's Sunday league football, I remember the England women's team taking on a men's non-league team who'd had a good run in the FA cup (3rd round giant killer type thing) and losing. Why does this surprise you? Men are bigger, faster and stronger. (And in the case of football, socialised to take part more or less from when they can walk, whereas girls who want to play football have to be lucky enough to be born into supportive families, and born with a certain type of fuck-you attitude to social pressure which is still strongly against women's participation - meaning that men's teams just have a far bigger pool of talent to choose from).

The equal pay thing is a red-herring. The point of the rules of competitive sport and the league structures that go with it is to ensure a fair contest, because wildly uneven contests make for matches that are no fun to play in and no fun to watch (and it's the watching that's big business). Once you've ensured a fair contest, via sex segregation, weight divisions, age divisions, some sort of league structure rather than totally "open" competitions, there's no reason why the ensuing matches shouldn't be equally enjoyable to watch. (I'm not a tennis fan, but I'm told that a lot of tennis fans prefer watching women's tennis because the men's game has become a kind of crash-bang-wallop-over-in-a-second matter of strength of service whereas the women's game still has skillful rallies.)

The place where it should matter, where we should all be saying "dammit, the emperor has no clothes on", is the area of MTT competitors in women's sport - Fallon Fox, the enormously tall fifty something bloke in women's college basketball in the US, the recent Australian "world record breaking" weight lifter in the women's classes, the mountain biker who doesn't even "present as a woman" during his day job, the Saudi "women's" football team with 8 MTT members - people should be looking at these MTT and saying "that's just blatant cheating" rather than applauding their bravery.

I think there's potentially a difference between sports that have more emphasis on ball or other skills, and endurance sports that have a primary focus on strength and fitness, where muscle mass will be a bigger factor.

I know a bit about rowing, and that's a sport where high-level female athletes would expect to be beaten by high-level junior boys - probably not by 15yo, but certainly by a top team of schoolboy 18yo for eg. It's just about sheer power - 18yo male rowers will generally be 6'3" or above and 90+kg, whereas elite women athletes will probably have a median height of about 5'10" at 75kg. They're just outpowered on every level.

It's less clear to me that the same would be true of ball sports - yes for rugby which is primarily about strength, but I don't know enough about football to assess the relative significance of power vs skill. But it must be a factor in eg. long-distance kicks, and also speed of running, so I don't know. But I'd have thought if they were beaten by 15yo boys, then that might suggest that the standard of the national team was not that high, Id' have expected it to be closer than that.

Yes, rowing is another sport I've done to a reasonably high level, and though I was technically good (thought about trialling for the lightweight squad at my university), nothing was ever going to compensate for the fact that I'm 5'3". Not just strength but length of levers (arms and legs) matters massively in rowing. That's why lightweight rowers aren't built like me, short and muscular, they're typically built like fell runners, tall and lean. Height trumps muscle bulk (all other things being equal).

I think with football, it's a mix of physical issues and socialisation - pretty much all boys are forced to play football at school, at least 50% will be doing so voluntarily (and in a lot of instances obsessively), whereas the number of girls taking part will be about 1%, and this huge difference in the pools of talent to choose from takes initial physiologically based differences and amplifies them massively.

But height matters in a lot of sports as well as sheer testosterone-based strength. One of the reasons women's football matches are often so high-scoring is that the goals are simply too big for a female keeper to cover them adequately (height doesn't matter for most outfield positions barring the centre halves - Lionel Messi and Fran Kirby would be good examples of brilliant but small midfielders). Basketball is another obvious one. I read a stat somewhere to the effect that in the US, if you are more than 7' tall, the odds become 50-50 that you're a professional basket ball player. Now given that in the population at large, there's no way 50% of people are physiologically suitable for elite sports in general, this rather suggests that being tall is such a massive advantage in basketball that it outweighs almost all other considerations.

I don't think it undermines equal pay for sports women; they're still at the top of their field, albeit a different field to sports men. I do think it's an argument against trans women being allowed to compete against biological women though.

Re. the football and socialisation thing, it's also interesting if you know the history of women's football. 100 years ago, when the men were away fighting in the trenches, women's football was massive - it replaced men's 1st division (as then was, i.e. premiership) football as the spectator sport of choice. This continued even after the war, when the men had come home, and culminated in a match in the early twenties between Dick Kerr Ladies and Everton Ladies at Goodison Park which drew a crowd of 60,000 (for comparison, a women's match these days is big if it gets 2000, massive if it gets over 3000, men's matches, due to all seater stadiums, are typically round the 45,000 mark).

What was the FA's response to this massive upsurge in interest in the women's game? They banned women from playing on FA affiliated grounds for the next 50 years, and even back when I was playing 15, 20 years ago, it was still officially against FA rules for men to compete against women (a rule more honoured in the breach admittedly).

The equal pay thing isn't a red herring. If our top women's footballers were paid at rates similar to their male counterparts, they wouldn't have to take second jobs just to survive - but because they so, that will take energy away from training, which isn't as well sponsored and supported as for the men. Plus they probably haven't played as many hours as men over a lifetime - I was involved with very little football as a child, being a girl, and very rarely played, but boys were playing it every breaktime, as well as in PE. That all has a cumulative effect.

Obviously physical differences would still play a part, but top women athletes often don't get as much support financially or in time and effort, so it's harder for them to reach the top of their capabilities, and I think this is probably more true in traditionally male sports.

Oh my God M0stly I did not know that. I'm properly shocked
It's really important to keep women in their place isn't it

Once women support top level women's football as fanatically as men support men's football in general, the sponsorship interest & money will follow, and our top women players will firmly be on the way to being as well paid as the top men.

The women's US soccer team is the best women's soccer team in the world

Interestingly, the league rules for my son's soccer team (which I presume is similar across the US) is that girls can choose to play on an all-girls team or a mixed team up until they are 12/13, but then can only play on an all-girls team

I think you have to question the glee to which some sources report cases like this. It's essentially just trying to reinforce the lie that men are inherently better.

Feminism isn't about saying that men and women are the same, so proving that does not undermine the campaign for equality. Which is a good thing because men could never compete in the gestation olympics.

There are times when I think certain sports, like basketball, are so dominated by extremely tall people that they should have height divisions in the same way that boxing has weight divisions and the Paralympics has classifications. This would improve participation across the board. Why shouldn't women's football have slightly smaller goals to match their bodily proportions, or rugby have different divisions based on pack weight?