Familiar pattern seen as soccer scandal told
The story, by now, is infuriatingly familiar. Women report they have been harassed and abused by powerful men. Their complaints are brushed aside by an organization intent on protecting its image and bottom line — until the allegations become embarrassingly public. Then follow the requisite pronouncements about not tolerating abhorrent behavior and belated apologies to women who had been mistreated and ignored.
The latest entity following that sordid sequence playbook is the National Women’s Soccer League. What will it take for lessons to be learned and the script to be rewritten?
“I don’t know if I’ll ever play soccer again. It’s hard for me to get past and not associate soccer with this painful, traumatic experience,” said former Washington Spirit player Kaiya McCullough about coach Richie Burke’s alleged verbal and emotional abuse that caused her to leave the team.
As The Post’s Molly Hensley-Clancy was reporting McCullough’s story in August, the team announced Burke had stepped down from the head coaching job for “health concerns” and had been reassigned to the front office. On Sept. 28, the league announced he had been fired and prohibited from working in the league following a harassment investigation.
Spirit representatives are currently barred from participating in league governance for failures in handling the situation. On Tuesday, the team’s controlling owner, Steve Baldwin, resigned, as players had requested.
Two days after Burke’s departure, North Carolina Courage coach Paul Riley was fired after the Athletic reported allegations — which he denied — that he had coerced players into having sex with him, among other abuses. That makes four of the league’s 10 head coaches, forced from their jobs in recent months amid allegations of inappropriate or abusive behavior.
With criticism mounting that she had failed to adequately respond to reports of abuse, league commissioner Lisa Baird resigned and last weekend’s slate of games was canceled. The apparent complicity of a woman heading a league supposedly geared to empowering women makes the situation all the more confounding.
Plenty of troubling questions remain. Were warning signs — like previous complaints about Burke’s alleged emotional abuse and use of homophobic slurs — ignored? Was behavior by coaches tolerated because of winning records?
Investigations have been launched — by the soccer league, the U.S. Soccer Federation and FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. Let’s hope the investigations are not a way to delay and defuse the controversy but instead a search for answers that will hold people accountable and recommend changes to prevent future abuses.