If there’s one big difference between the soccer landscape that will greet the players from this year’s Women’s World Cup upon their return home and the one from 12 years ago, it’s that a women’s professional league already is in place. Women’s Professional Soccer has anticipated and been prepared for an onslaught of attention all along.
At least, one would Hope Solo, er, hope so. America may have women’s soccer on the brain right now, but the track record is that it’s a very temporary condition.
“We knew one way or another that the world was going to see great soccer through the World Cup,” said Kristina Hentschel, WPS corporate development officer. “I think we couldn’t have scripted it better.”
It took two years for the Women’s United Soccer Association to launch after the 1999 Women’s World Cup and only another three for it to fold. WPS has had five teams shut their doors or move in its first two years of existence, but it has soldiered on in Year 3 with six teams, even staging games during the World Cup, expecting to capitalize the moment it ended.
After a record 13.5 million people watched Japan’s dramatic triumph over the United States in the final, more than 10,000 tickets have been sold for Abby Wambach’s return to her hometown of Rochester, N.Y., on Wednesday — where her team, magicJack, will face Alex Morgan, Marta and the Western New York Flash. But it’s the tickets sold for matches long after the league’s “See Extraordinary Heroes” campaign ends that matter more.
“If it’s 500 or 1,000 new fans, that would be a great,” Hentschel said. “We don’t think it’s going to be tens of thousands. That would be fantastic.”
A simple problem remains for top-level women’s soccer in the United States. While “Abby Wambach Day” in Rochester will be memorable, WPS is still a startup business, one that risks becoming a memory itself unless it can lock teams into a sustainable cost structure, size and business model, all of which have been elusive.
To characterize how hard that will be, it would be the opposite of a penalty kick, and the United States has learned those aren’t guaranteed either.
“We’ve been flooded with emails from people who weren’t soccer fans before now and maybe didn’t believe in women’s sports, and they’ve been converted,” Hentschel said. “We’ll see what that translates into, but our hope — and we have modest and realistic expectations — what we really want to see is that sustained interest.”
