Soccer coach fired after former players accuse him of sexual misconduct
Sinead Farrelly says her former professional soccer coach coerced her into having sex with him several times. Mana Shim says she was sexually harassed by the same man. Shim’s allegations contributed to his firing as the head coach of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns in 2015.
But Paul Riley was quickly hired by another franchise months later. The Thorns say they shared their investigation of Riley with the league office, and the Western New York Flash say they were aware of the investigation when they hired him. The Flash relocated and became the North Carolina Courage; he had been the franchise’s coach since 2016.
Riley was fired hours after their stories became public on Thursday.
The allegations against Riley, extensively reported in The Athletic, are just the most serious in a long line of recent stories of abuse in American professional women’s soccer. Several coaches and executives have been fired in the last year over reports of harassment and bullying, and one owner sold his team after a series of racist comments.
“Systemic abuse plaguing the NWSL must not be ignored,” the NWSL players’ union said in a statement Thursday. The union demanded an independent investigation into Riley, including how he was hired after the Thorns shared their findings of how Shim was treated.
For her part, Shim says she badgered several NWSL commissioners, including the current one, to investigate Riley but was stonewalled. After Alex Morgan, one of the most famous women’s players on the planet, successfully pressured the league into adopting an anti-harassment policy earlier this year, Shim and Farrelly asked league boss Lisa Baird to discuss their stories. They were repeatedly told that the investigation was closed.
Farrelly’s story is disturbing. She told The Athletic that Riley coerced her into sex starting when she was a 21-year-old player in 2011, in a pattern that repeated itself across several franchises that acquired her after hiring Riley as coach. When Farrelly and Shim were teammates under Riley in Portland, they say the coach pressured them into kissing each other by saying the team would get out of a brutal drill the next day if they did. Farrelly and Shim both say Riley sent them inappropriate, unwanted photos of him in his underwear; Shim said he asked her to his hotel room to watch film and answered the door in his underwear.
“I felt claimed,” Farrelly said of the first time she was pressured into sex with Riley, which came at the beginning of her career in the women’s league that folded before the NWSL launched in 2012. “I felt under his control.”
“That moment changed my whole life,” she said. “As a person and as a player, I was never the same.” Riley successfully convinced her to skip a national team camp. Eventually, under the weight of Riley’s abuse, she collapsed on the field during a game in 2014.
“Mana and Sinead, we support you and are in your corner. I am sickened and have too many thoughts to share at this moment. Bottom line: protect your players,” Morgan wrote in a tweet at the NWSL on Thursday morning.
Morgan is a key figure in the story, helping Shim bring her story to management in Portland and demanding an anti-harassment policy from a league that formerly lacked one.
“To everyone in a position of power who let this happen, heard it & dismissed it, signed off on this monster moving to another team w/zero repercussions, F--K YOU,” Megan Rapinoe wrote Thursday. “You’re all monsters,& can ALL hand your resignations in immediately.”
Farrelly, Shim and other anonymous women who played for Riley said he ran a domineering, hard-partying culture that included both “inappropriate remarks about their weight and sexual orientation” and heavy drinking with players after games.
“There’s this sense that he wants to control your life outside of the stadium as well, whether that’s what you’re eating or who you’re seeing,” an anonymous player told The Athletic.
Riley completely denied all of it in a statement to The Athletic. “I have never had sex with, or made sexual advances towards these players,” he claimed. “I do not take them out drinking,” he said. “There’s a chance I’ve said something along the way that offended someone ... I do not belittle my players, comment on their weight, or discuss their personal relationships.”
Riley, 58 and from England, played college soccer at Adelphi University on Long Island and began his coaching career in New York. He won two NWSL titles and coach of the year awards with the Courage.
The union said that the league’s fundamental indifference to player safety is what has allowed Riley and other abusers to thrive. “The very lack of basic and fundamental protections that ensure dignity at work are part of what has led to stories like those that have come out this season,” the players said in a statement Thursday morning. “NWSL and its Clubs must act swiftly to implement changes that would protect current and future players. The opportunity to do this is right now in our first contract negotiation.”