Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation wants you to know, however, that he’s quite mad about this oft-repeated outcome of a men’s national team disappointing our nation in a sport most Americans care about only once every four years, if at all. And he wants you to blame … Title IX. 

In his telling, the men’s national team is perpetually mediocre at soccer because the United States has spent too many resources making the women’s national team far too good at the sport, unfairly disadvantaging the development of men’s soccer in the process.

You won’t hear serious soccer commentators or sports journalists offer similar explanations. That’s because Yenor’s argument is nothing more than an empty blame game. Paul Cassell, in a response piece with Volokh Conspiracy, already detailed at length how little Yenor seems to understand the world of elite soccer development. But Yenor gets a lot more wrong than Cassell could possibly cover, including, at times, just basic facts about collegiate and professional sports.

Yenor at one point accuses the University of Nebraska of rostering “fifty female basketball players” last season to fulfill Title IX gender equity requirements. He reaches this conclusion by mischaracterizing data from the Education Department’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis or “EADA” portal.

The portal does, in fact, record 50 “participants” in Nebraska women’s basketball, but EADA “participants” include a far broader category of individuals than just “rostered” athletes, which is why schools often report “participant” numbers that greatly exceed NCAA roster caps. Worse, Yenor apparently missed the section of Nebraska’s EADA page clearly explaining that 35 of the 50 women’s basketball “participants” were male practice squad players. Far from surreptitiously “padding the rosters” of its women’s teams, Nebraska quite literally told the Education Department that it used nonrostered male athletes during practices to simulate higher levels of competition against taller, stronger, faster opponents.

At another point, Yenor praises what he calls the elite talent development pipeline of men’s college basketball. He’s seemingly unaware that to the extent elite high school basketball players in the U.S. participate in college programs, it’s rarely for more than the “one-and-done” season forced upon them by the NBA’s draft eligibility requirements.

Beyond Yenor’s failure to grasp specific key details in the data is his failure to grasp the bigger picture of soccer history. The idea that the U.S. women’s national soccer team achieved sustained international dominance at the expense of the men’s soccer development is insultingly unmoored from reality. Even taking Yenor’s claim at face value that Title IX stunted the growth of men’s college soccer, the rest of his narrative quickly falls apart.

The U.S. men’s national soccer team was established in 1916 and enjoyed nearly seven decades of gender-exclusive resource allocation and talent development. It nonetheless spent the entire seven decades mired in mediocrity. The women’s national team was established in 1985, but, for the next 25 years, suffered from a type of funding and resource disparity that would eclipse any alleged “advantages” Title IX bestowed on women’s soccer at the collegiate level.

The women nevertheless began winning immediately and consistently, in stark contrast to the men. The U.S. Soccer Federation, for example, gave $10,000 bonuses to every member of the men’s national team for simply qualifying for the 1990 World Cup. The team subsequently failed to advance to the knockout stage after losing all three of its group stage matches by a combined score of 8-2. The next year, the USSF rewarded players who made the 1991 women’s World Cup roster with two free T-shirts. The women eventually received a $500 bonus, but only after they went 6-0-0 and won the whole tournament.

To be clear, Title IX played a role in turning the U.S. into a global superpower for women’s soccer. It just didn’t work quite the way Yenor believes it did — namely, it did not come at the expense of men’s soccer development. Title IX transformed women’s soccer because of two societal conditions that Title IX didn’t create, but simply inherited: American girls don’t play American football, and women’s soccer had an international power vacuum.

According to youth sports participation data, soccer has, for several decades, been one of the most popular sports for both boys and girls between ages 6 and 13. However, once boys reach high school and are widely introduced to organized 11-man tackle football, the sport vies for their affections with all the gravitational pull of a black hole. America’s male high school athletes suddenly self-select into high school football at nearly twice the rate they choose to participate in any other sport.

The participation gap only widens at the collegiate level. The U.S.’s female high school athletes, meanwhile, experience no equivalent phenomenon. Even if they wanted to play tackle football, social sensitivities rarely permit it. Soccer still competes for their affections with other sports, but no apex predator devours the time and energy of female athletes in the way football devours boys.

Title IX demanded more equitable numbers of male and female athletes within a collegiate athletics system where football and its massive rosters of 100-plus athletes reign supreme. But women don’t play football. They do play soccer. And because soccer teams also feature some of the largest rosters within “traditional” women’s sports, the addition of women’s soccer programs proved to be a rather obvious method for colleges to gain ground on Title IX requirements. As the number of women’s college soccer teams increased, elite female high school athletes increasingly funneled themselves into the sport. And women’s college soccer, in turn, almost certainly benefited from increasingly better competition.

This all explains the comparative popularity of college soccer for women in this country, but not why U.S. women’s soccer so quickly dominated the global stage. That required a second condition, which Title IX neither created for women nor could its absence replicate for men: an international power vacuum.

Paul Cassell correctly explained how, today, even in the U.S., truly elite soccer development overwhelmingly occurs within the context of youth academies run by professional soccer teams. But this is a comparatively recent phenomenon for women’s soccer, in large part because women’s professional soccer is itself an incredibly recent phenomenon. By merely establishing and sustaining competitive women’s soccer, even at an amateur level of college athletics, Title IX accidentally created the world’s first, and, until quite recently, best, developmental soccer league for women.

To the limited extent women’s professional leagues existed outside of the U.S. prior to the last 15 years, they paled in comparison to the level of competition within the NCAA. Men’s college soccer programs, meanwhile, could never come close to developing talent on par with well-established professional men’s soccer leagues in Europe or South America.

ANDREW TATE IS A MAN’S FEMINIST

It also helped that the earliest iterations of the U.S. women’s national team won in ways that were not just inspirational, but transformative for the future of women’s soccer in this country. In 1999, an entire generation of American girls, starving for female athletes it could aspire to emulate, watched Brandi Chastain stand calmly before a sold-out 91,000-person Rose Bowl crowd and expertly slot a World Cup-winning penalty kick past the Chinese goalkeeper, then slide to her knees with her white jersey in hand while unleashing a victory roar that still echoes deep within their souls. And every few years since, the U.S. women’s national soccer team has gifted the nation’s young girls similarly iconic moments of U.S. soccer glory. It’s a recurring gift of incalculable value, but one that the men’s team has proven incapable of manufacturing for young boys.

Title IX was a necessary, but hardly sufficient, condition for the U.S. women’s national team to achieve four decades of international soccer dominance. But the growth of women’s soccer in the U.S. didn’t relegate the men to perpetual soccer mediocrity. For American men’s soccer to develop in a similar fashion, the nation needs fewer men playing football, not fewer women playing fútbol.

Amy Swearer is a senior legal fellow in the Meese Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom. She played college soccer at the University of Nebraska.