Author: RJ Allen

Manchester United Sign Euro 2017 Winner Jackie Groenen

Posted on by RJ Allen

Manchester United have signed Dutch defender and Euro 2017-winning midfielder Jackier Groenen to their team as the first foreign player in the team’s history. The move comes after a successful campaign that saw United promoted from the FA Women’s Championship to the Super League for the 2019-20 season.

Groenen represents the most high-profile signing in the team’s history and their first foreign player. To this point the team has been comprised of English and Scottish players, mostly from the team’s academy. The move represents a real intent by Manchester United to boost their efforts in promoting the women’s game and giving the team the best chance of competing with the likes of current champions Arsenal.

The 24-year-old midfielder has spent the last four years with FFC Frankfurt in Germany where she made 79 appearances and scored 13 goals. She has also become a consistent face in the national team and will be featured in the Dutch World Cup team that begins play in France in less than two weeks. 

This move, coupled with a growing interest from major teams like Real Madrid to join the women’s game, shows a continued increase in investment by European teams. For many years the NWSL was considered one of the better places for women to ply their craft but now it appears that Europe is catching up at an amazing pace. Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool are fielding teams in England with Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and others doing the same in Spain. 

Groenen joining the English Super League means that access to the top players in Europe will not be as easy as it used to be. The options are growing for players and with the money of major teams behind them, we may be entering a Golden Age for the women’s game in Europe.

Champagne Problems: How the USWNT Having Too Much Talent Creates Odd Issues

Posted on by RJ Allen

In no sane world should Crystal Dunn be an outside back on the national team. In no world that makes sense should Sam Mewis sit healthy on the bench, or Casey Short and McCall Zerboni sit at home.

And yet this is the world we live in.

The USWNT has the deepest pool in the world. Forwards as far as the eye can see, midfielders that have the power to link play and to dominate, defenders who can make talented players look silly when they try to attack, and goalkeepers who can make jaw dropping saves.

But for all that depth, there are still some problems. In some cases, the problems come from the depth. I want to focus on three. First, the depth isn’t evenly distributed so we end up with some sections a mile deep while others aren’t much more than a puddle. Second, selection decisions aren’t correctly weighting the value players can bring. Third, the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) doesn’t incentivize bringing in some of the best talent.

Deep Waters with Shallow Sections

As Charles Olney often points out on Twitter, the USWNT has more options in each position than can really be comprehended. In some positions, like goalkeeper, you could swap out the current bunch for an entirely new set without anything more than a slight – if that – dip in quality.

But those players don’t get called in, and it’s a problem. A champagne problem, sure, but still a problem.

When you have 30 attackers that could be called into camp, there’s no realistic way to actually do it. Fans can all make the case for their favorite, but at some point the coach does have to draw a line in the sand and pick from the group assembled. We might quibble with the choices but we all know there are roster limits and nowhere close to everyone can go.

We can all debate if Ohai or Huerta or Lynn Williams should be moved from the “possible but probably not” pool to the “yeah there is a real chance here” pool. But I don’t think anyone would argue that Alex Morgan or Christen Press or Megan Rapinoe should be downgraded, and that’s what’s really causing the blockage. 

Meanwhile, as we all go round in circles on this point, on the other side of the pitch, real honest to goodness defenders seem to be harder and harder to come by. And so you end up with Crystal Dunn at fullback, because you want to get as much champagne as possible.

The Overvaluation of Attacking Talent

Which leads to the second issue. Jill Ellis favors a system where the outside backs are really wingers and one center back really is a defensive midfielder. In that context, it makes sense to play Crystal Dunn as a left back and wait for her to work some magic, while sacrificing some of the lock down defense a Casey Short would bring.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Crystal Dunn shouldn’t be on this roster. She should be. But as an attacking player able to bring creativity, pace and a drive to make the best plays possible – hey it sounds like the Crystal Dunn of the North Carolina Courage – without having to give up a certain level of defense.

Ellis wants the best pure talent on the pitch and she will put square pegs into role holes if it means she can get another attacker out there. She’s not the first to make that kind of choice, but it means there is some disjointness of play and a sameness of mindset from players all over the pitch.

A team with outside backs that do move forward but always have one foot firmly planted in the defense would be a significance difference from the USWNT of today. A team that valued developing defenders and not conversions for the sake of putting more attacking minded players on the field would be a shift in the way that the US prepares for the future. Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but it definitely affects how the US plays, and how others teams respond.

Soccer matches are won by players scoring goals and they are lost by the other team doing the same. With their over-reliance on the attack, the US have tipped their hand. They very well may win a World Cup doing it, but it does give a much stronger road map to how top teams can beat them.

Dancing with the Ones that Brought You

The USWNT doesn’t like turn over. Historically. Currently. Maybe forever more.

Stability is important. Having players with 100 caps, 200 caps, shows that those players have found a way to stick around and be useful through different coaches and teams up and downs.

It also shows that the US roster is not turning over. Since 2012, eleven players have hit 100 caps. Since 2015 eight have. Seven of those players are on the current USWNT World Cup roster.

There often looks to be a disconnect between form and player selection. Alex Morgan or Christen Press or Julie Ertz could be downright terrible for their NWSL teams and get call ups roster after roster while the Ohais or the Lynn Williams or the Lauren Barnes of the league barely get a chance when they are called up, and even a tiny dip in form apparently knocks them out forever.

Ellis seems unbothered by the ideas she is comparing players with no international experience to players who have appeared on the field for the team 50, 100 or even 200 times. If they are not up to the same level at first blush they are cast aside. Or if you’re Sofia Huerta you are jerked around – including having your federation changed – and then cut.

With the contract system that the USWNT operates under, bringing in new players while having to pay the players already under contract could be seen by the powers that be as a waste of time and money. Why pay Aubrey Bledsoe and test her out when you already have goalkeepers on the payroll?

The USWNT may have the deepest roster in history. They may have the best collection of 23 players you could ask heading into a major competition.

In 2019 they may be enough. But will the lasting damage of inadequate planning and managing of that pool be a major stumbling block in 2020 or 2023? Only time will tell.

Book Review: The Making of the Women’s World Cup

Posted on by RJ Allen

In The Making of the Women’s World Cup: Defining Stories from a Sport’s Coming of Age, Kieran Theivam and Jeff Kassouf take us on a journey across seven tournaments, spanning almost three decades, and deliver well on the promise of the title. These are indeed some of the defining stories of the event, which collectively come together to construct a broader picture of the women’s game as a whole.

Each chapter focuses on a specific country, and generally centers on the specific tournament that defines that group. That means that each of the winners gets a chapter, but also allows for a few other interesting stories that don’t necessarily result in lifting the trophy at the end. For example, we get to follow the Australian teenagers as they work their way into a team on the margins of the event, and see them build up toward becoming one of the rising superpowers in the game. There is a similar chapter that focuses on England’s transition from a fringe player to a serious contender. 

This decision to tell narrower and more specific stories is very helpful, since it reduces the size and scope of the event, and allows emotion and experience to shine through. As Theivam and Kassouf present things, you get a clear sense of how the tournament progressed through the eyes of those actually participating. That doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we might want to know about the event, but it provides focus and clarity that might get lost in an effort to be more comprehensive. The story of how Silvia Neid or Kelly Smith or Julie Foudy reacted in a particular moment is bolstered if you’ve had a chance to dig into their story in some detail.

This combines with the other nice feature of the book: its ability to balance between straightforward reporting on the action (who scored the goals, who made the saves, how the individual games ebbed and flowed) and broader discussion of the social and cultural experience. The ability to draw on extensive interviews of the subjects themselves helps enormously here. You don’t just get a sense of what happened but also what it meant, and how people felt.

I do have two minor areas where I was left wanting a little more. The first is in the editing. This definitely reads like a book that needed to come out quickly to hit a deadline. It’s by no means a huge problem. The writing is fine; it just could have been tightened up a bit with another round of edits.

The second is more thematic. For completely understandable reasons, this is primarily a book about the big western countries (the US gets four chapters, England two, with just one for Brazil, Germany, Australia, and Japan, and none for any other nation). To be fair, those are generally the countries who have played the biggest role in the tournament, and you couldn’t reasonably tell ‘the defining stories of a sport’s coming of age’ without them. The US, after all, has won three World Cups and has come agonizingly close to another. It’s also the biggest media market and a two-time host of the event. And if you wanted to pick the single moment where the sport ‘came of age,’ the two most compelling answers might be the final matches of 1999 and 2015.

Still, there are plenty of important stories that don’t come from these few nations. It would be wonderful to dig into the experience of the great Chinese team of the 90s, the Norwegian winners from 1995, not to mention countries like Costa Rica, Nigeria, Colombia, etc. The World Cup, after all, isn’t purely an event for the winners. It takes an entire field of competition to produce the final result, and there are fascinating stories all along the way—many from players who had to sacrifice far more to bring themselves to this place.

This isn’t a critique of the book, which understandably had to make choices about where to devote its attention, and presumably was dependent on what kinds of interviews were available to fill in the gaps. It’s more just a recognition that there are still a lot of interesting stories still to be told in this area. All of which might be fertile ground for a follow-up, if the authors were so inclined.

Ultimately, this isn’t an encyclopedic study of every twist and turn, though it does offer a nice bit of that as well. But if you’re excited for this summer’s tournament, and want to get some perspective on what it all means, you won’t find a better resource than this book.

FC Barcelona Pushing for Women’s Clasico with Madrid Inclusion

Posted on by RJ Allen

FC Barcelona, known for their dominance in Spanish football, are pushing for rivals Real Madrid to field a women’s team in an effort to use El Clasico to boost the women’s game overall. The move is quite savy and could be just the push it needs for the Spanish giants to engulf yet another area of football.

FC Barcelona Femini finished in second place in last seasons Primera Division, one point under Atletico Madrid. Still, the Catalan side is in the final of the Women’s UEFA Champions League, hoping to bring home the top prize for the first time in their history. 

“I think it would be really good for women’s football,” said team vice-president Jordi Mestre to ESPN. “It would add the competitiveness of the Clasico. There are already a lot of Primera Division sides with a women’s team. A Clasico would surely generate a lot more interest as well”

This past season the Primera Division Femenina de Futbol celebrated their 30th campaign with Athletic Bilbao being the most successful club with five titles. Barcelona have four with their last title coming in 2015.

Much like the men’s first division, regional rivalries prove to be the most impactful. No fixture produces more tension in Spanish football than Real Madrid vs. Barcelona and to extend it to the women’s game seems like a natural progression necessary to push the league to a higher standard. 

“I think for women’s football it would be a huge attraction. But each club has their own projects and their own strategy. If Real Madrid don’t have a women’s team at the moment, I suppose it’s because they don’t consider it an interesting project.” Jordi Mestre added.

The league has produced several standouts heading to the World Cup in Spain including forwards Esther Gonzalez and Olga Garcia. 

Route Two Soccer: Chicago Teach a Course on How to Beat North Carolina

Posted on by RJ Allen

The Chicago Red Stars showed this weekend how North Carolina can be defeated. Other teams may try to emulate them…at their own risk.

The North Carolina Courage lost this weekend, for the first time in almost a year. And that’s not even the strange thing. The strange thing is: it didn’t even end up being all that close. The Chicago Red Stars certainly didn’t dominate the game, but neither did they look especially threatened. And their final margin of 3-1 could just as easily have been bigger—with Chicago having been denied a fairly clear penalty when Sam Kerr was pulled down in the box in the first half.

So what happened? Did Chicago reveal a secret flaw that may now be exploited by others? Is North Carolina taking a bigger hit than expected from the loss of their national team players? Or was this just a one-off game, and everything will return to normal soon?

The answer isn’t completely clear at this point, but likely is a combination of all three. Certainly, the Courage backline has looked far more rickety with the absence of Abby Dahlkemper, and those issues will only magnify now that Abby Erceg is off to join New Zealand. Last week’s replacement center back, Kayleigh Kurtz, struggled badly trying to contain Imani Dorsey of Sky Blue. This week’s fill-in, Cari Roccaro, faced similar issues with the multi-pronged Chicago attack.

With both Roccaro and Kurtz having issues with speed, and neither distinguishing themselves in one-on-one defending either, Carolina was always going to look more exposed. However, it would be unfair to level all (or even most) of the blame on those two players. The hallmark of the Courage’s resilient defense has always rested higher up the pitch, where aggressive pressing disrupts the opponent and kills attacks before they can even begin. And that’s where the team really struggled against Chicago. Time and again, the Red Stars midfield pierced the Carolina press, with smooth passing, clever dribbling, and intelligent runs. Particularly at fault here was Denise O’Sullivan, who was exposed repeatedly in the holding midfield role, and looked much more like the version of O’Sullivan we saw back with the Houston Dash in early 2017, and much less like the more dynamic player we’ve grown accustomed to with North Carolina. McCall Zerboni also had an uncharacteristically quiet game, finding it difficult to disrupt play, and also struggling a bit in possession.

Even further up the pitch, Kristen Hamilton one of her weaker games in recent memory, while Julia Spetsmark looked lively on occasion, but wasn’t able to exploit the wide channels nearly as much as the departed Jess McDonald.

Put it all together, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble. When multiple players have games on the lower side of their ability, and you’re playing a strong team, results will sometimes tip away from you. And Chicago was uniquely well-suited to seize the opportunity that was provided. They possess one of the strongest midfields in the league under any circumstance—and that advantage has only magnified with the removal of the World Cup-bound. Vanessa DiBernardo and Dani Colaprico are two of the best passers in the American player pool. Support those two with Nikki Stanton in behind to clean up any messes, and give them the chance to play off Yuki Nagasato and Sam Kerr dropping in from forward positions, as well as Michele Vasconcelos’s speculative runs down the wing, and you have a recipe for unlocking the oppressive North Carolina press.

The problem for everyone else in the league is: without players who can dictate play in such a cool and measured fashion, the potential to exploit a weakness in the Carolina armor may be more fanciful than realistic. For all that the Red Stars found an opportunity, it’s also important not to overstate the case. Chicago scored three goals from just three shots on goal. And two of those were fairly tame shots, too, which the keeper probably should have saved. Meanwhile, North Carolina amassed seven more shots than Chicago, two more shots on goal, more corners, more crosses, and more passes at a higher accuracy.

On another day, if this game was played out in the same way, you’d expect better performances from a few Courage players, a bit less luck for Chicago, and things could easily turn in the opposite direction. What’s more, a big part of the Chicago performance depended on Sam Kerr, who is sui generis, and has now left for her own World Cup preparations. You certainly can’t count on getting that kind of performance going forward.

So Chicago’s approach certainly could be replicated, but even for them it would hardly be a sure thing. And for everyone else, it would be even more of a risk. Because for all that there’s a potential weakness here, the past two years have shown just how devastating this Courage team can be when given the chance to attack an open opponent. If the lesson teams take from this game is that North Carolina is ripe for the picking, they run the risk of being carved to bits by a revitalized Courage press. It’s a gamble that some might take, but it’s a dangerous one.

As the saying goes, if you come at the devil you better not miss.

The Game Changers: Week Five

Posted on by RJ Allen

The Game Changers is a weekly series looking at the most important results of each week. Each section will look at one team and how its win, loss, or draw impacts the season.

Week Five marked the second week in the NWSL with no U.S. national team players, and the first week without the Canadians. The Utah Royals were dealt their first loss from the Houston Dash on Saturday, as were the North Carolina Courage. After last week, where a total of only two goals were scored, every team scored at least once this week. Here is a full breakdown of the scores:

Sky Blue vs. Washington Spirit (2-3)

Utah Royals vs. Houston Dash (1-2)

Orlando Pride vs. Portland Thorns (1-3)

Chicago Red Stars vs. North Carolina Courage (3-1)

Utah Royals drop points for the first time in 2019

The Utah Royals won their first three games in 2019, but dropped points at home against the Houston Dash. The Utah Royals haven’t dominated any of the games they have won, and this match against the Houston Dash opens the door for similar struggles to 2018. However, you could argue that the two goals from the Houston Dash– both from Rachel Daly– were spectacular. And they were the first two goals Utah conceded this season.

Does this game say more about the Houston Dash or the Utah Royals? It’s hard to say at this point. The Utah Royals may not be dominating their matches, but they have shown that they will be a good team in 2019. But will they be good enough to claim one of the four playoff spots? That’s the question.

Houston Dash defeats Utah Royals on the road

The Houston Dash earned another win this season, becoming the first team in 2019 to defeat the Utah Royals. They now sit in the No. 1 spot in the standings, with 10 points in 5 games. They have three wins this season, with just one loss and one draw. They haven’t always looked dominate and they will be losing a lot more players in the coming weeks, including their top goal-scorer Rachel Daly. But this game they managed to find success without their Canadian players, and against a team that has been unstoppable.

Like Utah, this game was significant for the Houston Dash when it comes to thinking about their chances at the playoffs. Houston is a strong team, possibly stronger than they were last season when they finished in the No. 6 slot, just five points the last playoff team. And while they are losing their national team players, they are also likely to become more settled as they become more familiar with the playing style of their first year head coach. This win for Houston was a good opportunity to show they have what it takes to go far in 2019. They did not disappoint.

North Carolina loses for the first time since mid-2018.

On Sunday, the North Carolina Courage earned their first loss since their 1-0 defeat against the Utah Royals on June 16th, 2018. In that game, Brittany Ratcliffe scored a screamer of a goal in stoppage time to earn the win for the Royals. But on Sunday, North Carolina was handed a 3-1 loss by the Chicago Red Stars at SeatGeek Stadium, their first multi-goal loss since May 2017. They were on the road, and without some key players. But this feels significant in breaking North Carolina’s armor.

Right now, the Courage sit in the No. 4 spot in the standings. They have a 2-1-2 record. The Courage will be one of the best teams in the league, if not the best, and will almost definitely make the playoffs. But this loss, plus their two draws so far this season, sends a message to other teams in the league that North Carolina might be more vulnerable than we thought.