23 girls 4 cups?

Bokolis decided to wait until all the afterglow simmered down to talk some shit about the US Women's National Team running out winners of its fourth world championship.  Despite any efforts to sidestep the noise, I've had to endure the nonsense of those who think the women should be paid more than their male parallels, and of those who think they are being edgy in using '90s references to insinuate that each practice ends in a daisy chain.

Still others have thumbed their noses by bringing up that, a couple of years back, the side lost a scrimmage against a FC Dallas under-15* side by some distance.  This gets met with some broad straight out of Dave Lozo's GSF academy coming through with the they weren't really trying excuse, and allusions to insecure men who would dare bring this up, as if a victory against 15-year old American boys is supposed to be groundbreaking.

Aside- they call it under-15, but it should more properly called '15 and under.'

No, whether elite US women footballers win or lose a scrimmage against a u-15 side is not relevant.  Bokolis hasn't seen any footage, and I imagine it has been burned or locked away.  We don't know at what levels the sides were playing.  It is reasonable enough to speculate that they boys were going at 90%-100% and the women were going at 70%.

It is far more damning that they would have to go that far down the latrine to find a pace of play and level of athletes that suits their preparation.  You see, if playing full bore, this USWNT could probably hang with a u-17 side, or u-18 side taking pity on them.  They've already learned that they can't practice against a serviceable college side because the male players can't figure out the appropriate amount of pity to take.

A side of 15-year old boys going virtually full-bore provides the women with a tolerable amount of physicality and speed against which they can practice.

Of course, 15 year old American boys aren't well-drilled footballers.  They largely rely on their athleticism.  This, of course, does nothing to help the women become better footballers.

And, Bokolis' issue with the assessment of this squad was that, while they had, far and away, the best athletes, this world cup showed quite clearly that they did not have the best footballers.  Sweden, England and the Netherlands all had better footballers.

Hey, jerk- the US beat all those teams!

In all those cases, their superior athleticism won out.  Against England, they also flat-out got lucky- lucky that VAR caught the offside despite England again splitting the US centre-halves after having done so on their lone official goal, lucky that the England women made like the England men when it came to taking a penalty.

That said, they were never threatened.  Bokolis thought Alex Morgan stumbled onto brilliance with the tea-sipping display, but the raised pinky was bad form.

Sweden punted the group stage match, apparently trying to play possum in case of a possible meeting in the final.  The US clearly dictated the play, but had trouble producing any football capable of breaking down Sweden, and benefited from the dodgy new-age offside interpretations on the second goal.

By the time of the final, it should have been abundantly clear that the Netherlands had no shot of standing up to the superior US athleticism.  Nonetheless, it took a dodgy VAR penalty decision for a foul on Alex Morgan, who had been diving/embellishing all tournament, to break the ice.  Bokolis immediately dismissed this in real time, even as I quickly texted my group that, sooner or later, this diving dishrag was going to get one of these calls.  Sure enough, here came the prompt to re-referee the game.  I also told my friends that I would bet one of my testicles that Rapinoe was going to her right on the PK.  How the Dutch keeper didn't deduce the same is beyond me.

The second goal was legitimate, and took advantage of what should have been the glaring liability in the Dutch side, the centre-half wearing the number 3 jersey.  She was exposed in the Japan game, and this should've been known.  The US should've piled on about four more.

Bokolis must admit that I had no prior knowledge of the Dutch side, much less that they won the latest Euro.  I immediately noticed that they all played like they thought they were Dennis Bergkamp.  Of course, they bunkered up once the competition got better, which reinforced Bokolis perception that their best female athletes are still riding bicycles or speed skating, playing field hockey or whatever.

The Norwegians were better footballers, too.  But they didn't measure up athletically and weren't deep.  They had nothing left for England.  Bokolis will leave out Germany, as this was not even close to a proper German side.

Spain were not better footballers but, thanks to their tactics, the US did nothing from open play.  They won two penalties, one on an excellent embellishment by the only proper footballer on the US (Tobin Heath), and a dodgy one on what was a straight-up dive, and a bad one at that.

Perhaps it wasn't surprising that their best performance was against France, who had the most similar squad makeup, enabling the US women to press their athletic superiority against a side who weren't necessarily better footballers and worse yet, were set up to rely on their athleticism to bully lesser sides.

Since Bokolis always says that Ligue 1 is MLS, but faster, I got a kick out of the females being similar.  France had two singularly unique players in winger Kadidiatou Diani and the giant centre-half Wendie Renard, players for whom the rest of the world had no answer.  To boot, the side was stocked with players from Olympique Lyonnais, which has won the women's Champions League four years running.

Like the Norwegians, the birds from Lyon also figured out that they might not be as good without Ada Hegerberg.  They tried to match the US athleticism, and they failed, big-time.

The new-age nonsense worked against the US in this game, as they had their third goal taken away because the VAR machine said a heel was in an offside position.  Get the fuck out of here!

Nonetheless, the US outplayed the French, and only conceded because the player wearing the number three jersey (Mewis) played the whole French team onside by dropping too early on the free kick.  The analysts neglected to bring up what was in their face, instead blaming it on Horan, who was apparently marking Renard but, like the rest of the team, trying to play the French offside.

To boot, those analysts didn't figure out to give Crystal Dunn credit for the job she did on Diani until after the match, by which time the whole world had already weighed in.  They hadn't done it at halftime, when Dunn had already plugged what, going into the match, seemed like the biggest liability.  It was all the more amazing because Dunn, playing out of position at left back, had shown herself (in prior matches) to be a naive defender, allowing herself to be pulled out of position in search of something to do.  Diani certainly had a few tricks up her sleeve to wrong-foot Dunn, Dunn's fight allowed her speed to hang with Diani.

The French were neutralized, and there was maybe one other person in the world who could have done that job as well as Dunn.  But the Velvet Mafia didn't want her on the squad because she wasn't feeling the rainbow, so Dunn got the chance, and gets all the plaudits.

Bokolis had a chuckle because her teammates seemed to refuse to pass Dunn the ball.  I wondered whether they didn't trust her, or they didn't want to give her too much to do.  Subsequent games suggested it was the latter.  But, hey, at least they let her play.

Bokolis would now give individual assessments of each player...would- but I don't want to break any ground.

You know the rest, lift the cup, parade in NYC, Rapinoe drops a few f-bombs while demanding equal pay (if not more) based on wild distortions of reality, a bunch of them dressed up like porn whores at the ESPYs- what's that?  It's their prerogative? Sure it is, just as it is Bokolis' to say they dressed up like porn whores- and now they'll go back to playing in front of 6,000 at their league matches while the rest of the world forgets about them until the next cycle.

No one can say this in the face of their distortions because they'll just shout it down as insecure men and patriarchal hate and all this other nonsense.  Bokolis will give them more credit than they deserve by calling it an attack of cognitive dissonance rather than than their own attempt to counter bullying with bullying.

You see, ladies, you can't get paid like the men because, while the footballing world is going to be locked in to every qualifier for ever major nation (and most middling and minor nations), the world is set to pick your plight back up in June 2023.  What's your next trick?

Cup runneth...dry?

So, it's the birds' turn to play football.  Said slightly more properly, it's the turn of the women to be in the bright lights for playing football.  The Women's World Cup is upon us.

Like the hockey women, the female footballers are whingeing about not being paid like the men for what they perceive to be the same work.  While Bokolis' cock-jerk reaction is to guffaw and to tell them to get paid like men, go earn like the men, I grudgingly admit that the issue might be a little more nuanced than that.

But, Bokolis will say that equal pay for equal work is bullshit.  Negotiations are all about leverage, which is a catchphrase that really means a side's ability to bully.  When you don't own the factors of production, your ability to bully is limited.

Bokolis will now dismiss the merits of their case.  I actually did some poking around on this.

The USWNT claims that because they do better than the men do in international competition, that entitles them to draw at least as much water as the men.  More accurately, they do comparatively better than the men.

This is because the US women have a relatively higher-level of athlete in their talent pool and because the US women had a head start on most of the world, certainly the nations that would be considered top among the men (Germany, England, France, Spain, Italy).  Germany caught up; France caught up; England and Spain are catching up; Italy haven't yet reconciled that women are allowed to be something other than mothers or whores, and the Dutch women seem to be committed elsewhere.  Others will eventually catch up, and the rankings of the US men and women will converge.

If the best male athletes in the US focused on (soccer) football, even with a lack of quality coaching, we would pound the rest of the world back into the dark ages, crushed as they would be that we took their sport away from them.  Ironically, that would do more for the women's game than anything the USWNT have ever done.

They do not do better than the men, as they do not play the same competition; they play against a talent pool that isn't as developed, or as deep.  Would you like us to take off the governor and put you in against men?  After enough ass-whuppings, at some point, evolution will smile on women and they'll be the physical equals of men.  Society would have broken down by then, and we'd probably have had an ice age or two, affording women even more chance to better their place in its reconstruction.  But that also presumes that women would have evolved to be the hunting equals of men- and equally adept at avoiding being the hunted- which is how we got the drop on them in the first place.

Before that, if we dropped the current USWNT into the fourth tier of English (Men's) Football- League Two- for a full season, they would most likely get relegated. Bokolis is told the league average wages (using 2017-18 figures, employ an inflation multiplier accordingly) is about 1000GBP/week, or 46000GBP ($60k USD, rounding up) per full season. Once they were relegated to the Conference National League, which straddles the line between full-time and semi-pro, wages figure to drop by 25%-35%. $40k-$45k/yr seem fair for you ladies?  Because, you would very likely be relegated from there, as well.  Bokolis is pretty sure that players in the 6th-tier of English football get paid more from their day jobs than from football.

On the basis of percentage of revenue generation, the failed leagues demonstrate that the women cannot draw anywhere near the men.  This is even the case in the US, where the WUSA, WPS, W-league, WPSL Elite have folded and the NWSL is still trying to gain traction.  All this, while MLS chugs along just fine, despite those guys being just a little better than Bokolis was.  At least in the US, the women's clubs function independently of the men's.  In Europe, the women's teams are typically arms of a larger (men's) club.

Sure, as revenue earners, the USWNT compares far better in relation to its male counterpart than does the rest of the world.  In the US, 'soccer' is perceived as the girls sport- that is, it is the sport females are best equipped to play.  Said another way, it is the sport we'd most prefer our girls to play.  You've got seventh-generation American fathers, who wouldn't be caught dead watching soccer, mindlessly putting their daughters into soccer because it seems like the thing to so.  This has been going on for a couple of generations and, as a consumer group, American women- despite what they tell you- have a standard of living suitable to support their national team.

"Girl Power" and all that notwithstanding, women in the rest of the world still prefer men's football to women's football.

As such, taken in total, the men's world cup cycle generates 40x-50x the revenue that the women's world cup cycle generates.  Said another way, for every billion that the men's game generates, the women's game generates $20-$25 million.  Nonetheless, the WC prize pool for women is already at a greater payout rate than for the men. This is actually understandable, as there are far greater carrying costs associated with the men, who are far more greatly valued assets.  If Sheikh Mansour puts in a bid for Alex Morgan- well, you've heard what happens on those yachts- whatever he pays is barely going to eat into what City will get by selling Leroy Sané back to a German side.

The players suffer further humiliation by having the lords of the game- and a few other chauvinists-  suggest that they'd be more of a draw if they played in revealing, form-fitting and otherwise more suggestive outfits.  Does it need to be said that this could also be harmful, even dangerous?  The fucked up thing is, as it is a weighing machine in the short term, these fuckers would be right in the short run.

Amazingly enough, Bokolis does not want this.  I like my sex with my sex, and my sports with my sports.  Some hornbag will make youtube videos cherry-picking the best-looking asses of female volleyball players in those shorts and get a bunch of people to look.  Still, I'd rather see the pros of the skin trade, swimsuit models and porn whores, in those outfits than athletes.  Seeing pics of Hope Solo's nasty looking growler- even though that was not meant for our consumption- was bad enough.  Seeing Megan Rapinoe in the swimsuit issue was a soul-scarrer of a train-wreck.  I'd much rather watch them play football than shake their asses.

Aside- ever since Bokolis let a female friend convince me that Alex Morgan was not that hot, I've never been able to judge the looks of any of them.  In fact, when I saw Julie (Johnston) Ertz WAGged out at Super Bowl 52, my first thought was alarm that she may have given up football.  Of course, she has been playing professionally the whole while, but I'd never know.

Besides- and, Bokolis will blow that fantasy right out of the water for you- for the most part, jocks, female and male, are weird.  But, hey, they've got to earn, so go on with your patronage.  I'll try to reel this back in, while also trying to forget about Rapinoe in a thong.

So, they don't measure up physically, and they don't earn like the men. To boot, as opposed to doing their own thing, they have submitted their game to the patriarchal FIFA's rule. Nonetheless, the women are effectively asking that the cash cow that is the men's game (further) subsidize the women's game by bringing pay in line with the men- in effect, to bump up the women just for the sake of doing it.

hmmmm....ok, Bokolis will bang it around.

Training should be funded as closely to equal as is feasible all the way up and down the age levels, and elite-level women should not have to train and play on crappy turf fields, which would be unconscionable in the men's game.

As far as being paid, the reality is women's football is currently a second class sport, and there is a certain amount of grinning and bearing it that female footballers will have to suffer from choosing a calling that doesn't fund itself.  If schoolteachers have to suffer and no one cares, no one is going to give a fuck about the lot in life of a female footballer.  That said, Bokolis thinks there is little to be gained by being ruthlessly pragmatic.  Continuing to treat them like second-class citizens could quite possibly damage revenue on the men's side by turning women off to the men's game.

The American women, in particular, attempt to invoke Title IX, intended for federally funded and/or educational institutions, and assert that it should apply in this case.  Bokolis scratches his head, as, not only does Title IX involve entities that are not intended to be profitable (which FIFA most certainly is not), Title IX is the main roadblock to ANY college athletes getting paid.

While the education aspect is certainly not applicable, Bokolis isn't sure that the "Federal financial assistance" aspect of Title IX is applicable here.  Even if it is, it probably wouldn't be much of a problem for USSF to forego any federal funding, thus being able to tell the women to go fuck themselves.  Even if they get some of what they want from their federation, while the USWNT would be improving its own situation, it would seem a bellwether, but none of this would necessarily apply to other nations.

FIFA takes a big chance by alienating the US Women.  FIFA has gained much from the US market, even as it has barely tapped the well.  It is not the wisest thing to do anything that could jeopardize that income stream.  Is FIFA going to come through for all federations?  The answer is, not until it figures out how to make itself look like a superhero for doing so.

As it is, Ada Hegerberg, a Norwegian considered the best female footballer, has declined to play in this World Cup.  Her reasons are not entirely clear, but it is evident that she is sick and tired of the way FIFA and the national federations treat the women's game.  Even if she is the best player, she is just one woman, and the competition will shrug it off.

If the USWNT, whether as champions or not, were to boycott the next World Cup (to take place, presumably, in Australia), it would make a dent.  If the US boycotts AND whoever wins this year (France?) boycotts the next WWC, then it would be a sham.  If you lose the American woman as a consumer, the women's game is in trouble, and it's going to do no favors to the men.

Y'all muthafuckas didn't think I was going to do predictions, did you?