The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  Sundhage called to tell Markgraf that her contract wasn’t going to be renewed. Markgraf had just given birth to twins three weeks earlier, and Sundhage didn’t think the defender would be able to return to form after that. The best Sundhage could offer her was a “floater” contract—a small stipend instead of a salary, which was usually reserved for newer players trying to break into the team. It was a huge drop-off from the Tier 1 contract Markgraf had been on.

  Markgraf knew that players like Amy LePeilbet and Rachel Buehler were playing well and she’d have a tough time earning her centerback spot back. Christie Pearce was pregnant at the time, but she had returned from having children to being a starter before, so the competition for a spot figured to get even harder for Markgraf when Pearce returned.

  But being cut solely because she had given birth? That sounded like pregnancy discrimination to Markgraf. So, she called up John Langel.

  “There was a back-and-forth for four to six weeks about whether it was okay for them to cut me,” Markgraf says. “I had the chance to sue them if I wanted, but I was like, I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else again.”

  The issue had never come up before. Markgraf had her first child in 2006 and rejoined the team afterward under Greg Ryan. When Joy Fawcett, Carla Overbeck, and Christie Pearce had children, they were never cut from the team and always had the chance to fight to win their spots back, too. Markgraf wondered if the fact that she had twins was the reason it was treated differently—no player had ever done that. To Langel, it seemed the difference was that players were now paid guaranteed year-round salaries.

  Langel thought Markgraf could win if she were willing to file a claim. But Markgraf didn’t want to turn it into an ordeal—she just wanted to prove she could win her spot back.

  “I thought Kate had a clear case for pregnancy discrimination and she decided not to bring the case,” Langel says. “She decided to suck it up and earn a spot on the team, which she did.”

  Once Markgraf worked her way back into the team and proved she could do it, she happily walked away from the game.

  “I played well, and Pia was like, I’m going to offer you a contract, and I said, No, I’m retiring,” Markgraf remembers. She finished her career at 201 caps for the national team.

  Because of the dispute, however, the national team’s contract with U.S. Soccer started to contain a new clause going forward—it was nicknamed “The Markgraf Rule.” It guaranteed that if a player left the team for pregnancy, once she was fit enough to return, she would be put back on the same contract and continue to be called up for at least three months—enough time to try to prove she still deserved her spot.

  That rule went on to benefit a number of players over the years. Amy Rodriguez has been perhaps the best example. She gave birth in 2013, and through repeated call-ups after she recovered, she discovered arguably the best form of her career. She led her club team to two National Women’s Soccer League championships and helped the U.S. win a World Cup. Shannon Boxx is another player who earned her spot back after giving birth and won a World Cup.

  But by 2009, all anyone knew was that a woman should never be kicked off the team for having a child again. Little by little, even if it didn’t happen in the public, acrimonious ways of the past, the national team was continuing to stand up for itself.

  CHAPTER 13

  “You Wouldn’t Be on the Field If It Was Up to Me”

  By the time the national team won gold at the 2008 Olympics, plans for a new women’s soccer league were already afoot.

  After the WUSA folded, club owners like John Hendricks and players like Julie Foudy formed the WUSA Reorganization Committee in hopes of reviving the league. The group was led by Tonya Antonucci, a businesswoman who played soccer while attending Stanford.

  It would take years to come together, but the group would eventually put together a new league: Women’s Professional Soccer, or WPS.

  The plan was to learn from the mistakes of the WUSA and take a more conservative approach. Player salaries would average around just $32,000, well below the WUSA averages, which hit a high of $46,000. The stadiums would be smaller to reflect lower expectations for ticket sales.

  The league also scrapped the single-entity model of the WUSA. In that league, one team’s loss was everyone’s loss. But in WPS, an individual team’s struggles wouldn’t burden other teams. No longer could one bad apple spoil the bunch.

  But before WPS launched, it was already up against some factors the league had no control over. One of them was the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Everyone ended up feeling the financial squeeze of the sputtering economy, from the kinds of investors the league would need to run the expensive franchises to average working Americans, whom the league needed to buy tickets and show up to games.

  Even the NFL, the powerhouse sports league in the U.S., laid off 150 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce, in response to the recession. The NBA cut 80 jobs. A new football league, the Arena Football League, suspended operations, citing the shrinking economy as part of the reason.

  “The idea of postponing was not even on the table,” Tonya Antonucci told reporters as the WPS launch neared. “Is this the right model? Yes. Are the conditions ideal? No.”

  The other problem WPS encountered was that the popularity of women’s soccer in the U.S. had been on a long backslide. The stars of the sport—most notably Mia Hamm—had retired. Consider this: A national poll in 2007 found that 48 percent of Americans knew who Hamm was, yet only 9 percent could identify Landon Donovan, the greatest male soccer star the U.S. had ever produced. Hamm’s retirement was a huge blow to the women’s game.

  The last time the national team had a culturally important moment—one that broke through the soccer bubble and into the mainstream—was still back in 1999. As big as that moment was, it couldn’t sustain the entire sport of women’s soccer for years. The American public had fallen out of touch with the sport and its players. The federation’s decision to “go dark” in 2005 couldn’t have helped.

  The national team returned from winning a gold medal in China to paltry crowds. On September 17, 2008, less than a month after the Olympic final, just 4,227 fans showed up to Giants Stadium to see the 2008 gold medalists. That was about 5 percent of the crowd that showed up to the same stadium for the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Weeks later, the team played in front of just 3,387 people at the University of Richmond Stadium in Virginia, which could’ve fit a crowd more than double that size. If the national team couldn’t draw large crowds, how could club teams?

  WPS may have learned lessons from the WUSA about how to approach ticket sales, but there was little the league could do about a lack of enthusiasm for women’s soccer at the time. When the inaugural match of WPS rolled around on March 29, 2008, the enthusiasm gap was evident—the announced crowd of 14,832 was less than half of what the WUSA’s opening match drew. By the end of WPS’s first season, the trend continued and the average attendance across the league was just 4,684, half the average attendance in the first year of the WUSA.

  There was no Mia vs. Brandi matchup to promote, but there was at least one very big star: Marta, the Brazilian who had just won her third straight FIFA World Player of the Year award.

  “When we got a new league, WPS, you had international players wanting to come over to play, and that was when Marta came over,” says Shannon Boxx. “Overall, you were seeing that the women’s game was improving, and you started seeing so many countries starting to get better.”

  The league unquestionably helped its players develop. That’s because, like the WUSA, the new league sought to attract the best talent in the world. Marta’s addition to the Los Angeles Sol especially was seen as a way to bolster the WPS’s goal of being the best women’s league in the world, but her salary would later be revealed to be a staggering $500,000 per year.

  The Sol were owned by Anschutz Entertainment Group—Philip Anschutz’s company that invested so much in MLS clubs—so if
any team could afford to pay a high price for Marta, it was the Sol. But the club lost about $2 million within its first season, despite leading the league in attendance and winning the championship.

  Again, as was the case in the WUSA, it wasn’t so much the spending that was the problem—it was the lack of revenue.

  As Arnim Whisler, the owner of the Chicago Red Stars, puts it now: “You can’t cost-save your way to success. You couldn’t cut enough costs to keep every WPS team going. That’s because it starts with: What are your league standards?”

  Operating a team in a league that sought to be the best in the world was going to cost a certain amount. Unless the league was willing to sacrifice its quality, cost cutting could only do so much. Thus, the Sol ownership group didn’t see a path to profitability. When a buyer for the Sol couldn’t be found, the team folded after just one season.

  At the time, it was shocking. In retrospect, it was an early warning. Across the league, teams were finding that neither investors nor fans were showing up in the numbers they had hoped.

  “The end of WPS was easily predicted by almost the third or fourth game in the inaugural season, when it was clear we didn’t have a path to get things right side up,” Whisler says. “The first few games after a year of announcements and planning and trying to build excitement in the market should be your strongest, so if you couldn’t even hit your goal in the hysteria of a new team launch, you weren’t going to find it midseason.”

  The loss of the Sol had a chilling effect on potential investors and sponsors who didn’t want to board a sinking ship. The following season, the St. Louis Athletica became the next team to fold. After losing $1 million, the team’s overseas investors simply stopped funding the team and walked away. The WPS front office tried to take over the franchise but couldn’t afford the team’s debts.

  It was like a set of dominos. First it was the LA Sol. Then, the St. Louis Athletica. After that, FC Gold Pride. Then, the Chicago Red Stars opted to leave the league rather than choose between going bankrupt or dropping standards to a sub-par level. The Washington Freedom were evaluating an exit strategy, too.

  But the fate of those teams shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. Within the first year, board meetings with the league’s franchise owners were already contentious. Everyone was struggling but there was little agreement on how to proceed.

  At one point, Arnim Whisler proposed dramatically reducing the salary cap, which would cut player salaries, one of the only areas where the league could find significant savings. Another owner in the room was furious and shouted back at Whisler: “I am not going to be part of a glorified W-League! There’s no way that is going to happen!”

  After all, WPS was a Division I professional league, and it sought to be considered the best in the world. But Whisler knew the revenues weren’t there to match the costs. Some standards had to be downgraded—otherwise, revenues and expenditures would never line up.

  “I left that meeting wondering how much longer we had,” Whisler says.

  * * *

  Becky Sauerbrunn remembers the moment she really broke into the national team. Or at least the moment she had the chance to try.

  She played every minute of every game with the Washington Freedom in 2010 and was quickly developing a reputation as one of the league’s top centerbacks. A University of Virginia graduate, Sauerbrunn wasn’t the fastest or strongest defender, but she seemed to read the game a step ahead of players around her. That had always been apparent to reporters who interviewed her, too—when they asked questions, she spoke too rapidly for them to keep up with writing down quotes.

  The Freedom were knocked out of the semifinals in a brutal extra-time loss to the Philadelphia Independence. A few days later, she was about to step into a movie theater with her boyfriend to see the Ben Affleck film The Town when she noticed a missed call from a California area code on her cell phone. It was a voicemail from Cheryl Bailey, the national team’s general manager. She told Sauerbrunn to call her back because Pia Sundhage wanted to speak with her.

  A callback couldn’t wait, so there was Sauerbrunn, outside the theater, quickly making a round of calls to find out what Sundhage wanted.

  “Hi, Becky. Joanna Lohman has picked up an injury and she’s not coming to camp anymore,” Sundhage told her. “Would you like to come as an alternate? We can fly you out tomorrow.”

  Sauerbrunn, who had been trying to figure out where she’d play soccer in the WPS offseason, didn’t hesitate. She left the movie theater immediately to go pack—she could see the movie another time.

  While WPS was going through its share of struggles behind the scenes, everything between the lines on the field—the actual soccer—was going well. New national team stars were emerging.

  In the days of WUSA, it was players like Shannon Boxx and Angela Hucles who probably would’ve quit soccer and never made it onto the national team radar without a league. In WPS, it was a player like Becky Sauerbrunn, who had come up through the youth national team ranks but needed a league like WPS to prove she could cut it at the highest level.

  “It was instrumental for me to be able to prove myself against the best players, day in and day out,” Sauerbrunn says. “I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten that shot if it wasn’t for the league.”

  The roster that Sauerbrunn ended up making in 2010 was a very important one, but a seemingly routine one. The national team had to go to Cancun, Mexico, in November 2010 to qualify for the 2011 World Cup, a step that was more a technicality than anything. The national team had not only qualified for every Women’s World Cup but had made it to at least the semifinal every time.

  The qualifying tournament for the region that includes North America, known as CONCACAF, got off to a rip-roaring start in Mexico. The U.S. bulldozed their way past Haiti, 5–0, and then followed up with a 9–0 dismantling of Guatemala. By the time they beat Costa Rica, 4–0, in the next game, it looked like the Americans’ momentum would carry them straight to the final.

  Heading into the semifinal versus Mexico, the Americans felt confident. In 25 prior meetings with Mexico, the U.S. had never lost, and they had conceded just nine goals.

  But on November 5, 2010, it took only two minutes for a surprise twist. Lydia Rangel headed a ball into the path of Maribel Domínguez, who toe-poked the ball on the bounce past goalkeeper Nicole Barnhart, the backup behind Hope Solo, who was recovering from shoulder surgery. The U.S. was already down, 1–0, and the game had just started.

  The Americans quickly fought back. In the 25th minute, a U.S. corner kick fell into the box, and Carli Lloyd turned her hips and fired, slotting the ball perfectly inside the opposite post of where goalkeeper Erika Venegas stood. The score was even at 1–1.

  But only two minutes after that, it was a shocker again. A long, somewhat desperate cross floated into the USA’s box, and Verónica Pérez got her head to the ball, knocking it past Barnhart. The Americans, down 2–1, were at risk of being knocked out of the qualifying tournament.

  In the 93rd minute, with the whistle about to blow at any moment, Amy Rodriguez chipped a ball over Venegas, and the American players threw their arms in the air in celebration. They had equalized and taken back control of their qualification campaign—or so they thought until they saw the fourth official with her flag up. Offside.

  Seconds later, the match was over. The U.S. lost.

  The players didn’t immediately understand what it meant, but Sundhage did. With the loss, the U.S. couldn’t automatically qualify for the 2011 Women’s World Cup anymore. Now, they had to take a detour and try to qualify via playoff, something they had never needed to do before.

  “I remember the referee blew the whistle and I knew we had to go through a playoff to qualify,” Pia Sundhage says. “That was crazy. I looked around and it seemed like no one understood what happened—nobody. I looked at players and coaches and it was just an unusual situation.”

  It was certainly uncharted territory for the national team. If
they could beat Costa Rica in the next match and finish third overall in the qualifying tournament, they would be eligible for a playoff against Italy, a home-and-away two-leg series that would decide who advanced to the World Cup.

  Now the Americans were at risk of not even qualifying for a tournament that they were the favorites to win. Suddenly, the media that hadn’t paid attention to Women’s World Cup qualifying became interested.

  “The irony of the whole thing is that when the U.S. men win, they get the coverage, but when the U.S. women lose, we get the coverage,” striker Abby Wambach said.

  The U.S. went on to dominate Costa Rica, and with third place secured, an unforeseen trip was set for Italy. No one expected to have to pack up and play an extra two games, but now a spot in the 2011 World Cup would go to either the USA or Italy.

  Sundhage admits everyone—the players and herself included—took it for granted that the U.S. would find the goals they needed to beat Mexico and earn one of the automatic qualifying spots.

  “Everybody was thinking, Shoot, we can’t go for vacation now,” she says. “Everybody planned vacations. So they had to tell their boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands that they had to change plans because we had to go to Italy.”

  When the national team got to Italy, a slog awaited them. Stadio Euganeo in Padua, near Venice, had a damp, heavy field, and Italian fans disrupted the match by lighting firecrackers in the stands. The circumstances weren’t going to make it easy.

  The Americans were able to control possession and get into dangerous positions but struggled with the final ball in front of goal. The clock ticked past the 90th-minute mark and well into stoppage time and neither side had scored a goal. The Americans didn’t want to return to the U.S. with a 0–0 draw—that would leave them no margin for error.

  As the clock entered the 94th minute and the waning seconds ticked by, Abby Wambach flicked a long ball from Carli Lloyd into the path of Alex Morgan, a second-half substitute. Morgan ran onto the ball, settled it, and slotted it past the Italian goalkeeper in the dying seconds of the match.