U.S. players’ public sniping sets back soccer
Recently retired U.S. women’s national team star Abby Wambach was arrested for driving a vehicle under the influence of intoxicants in Oregon last weekend. She apologized publicly, explaining she drove home after a dinner with friends, and took responsibility for her actions.
Some U.S. men’s national team players took the news as an opportunity to make jokes on Twitter about it. Alejandro Bedoya tweeted: “must’ve been a foreign American player’s fault.....” Jozy Altidore replied to Bedoya’s tweet with: “should’ve used one of the team’s vans. Lol”
Bedoya’s comment refers to an interview Wambach gave shortly after her retirement in which she said that a problem with men’s national team coach Jurgen Klinsmann is that he “brought in these foreign guys, it’s just not something that I believe in.”
Altidore’s comments are a reference to the night goalkeeper Hope Solo’s husband, Jerramy Stevens, was arrested for DUI while driving one of the U.S. women’s team’s vans.
This is one of those special situations in which everyone involved is behaving pretty poorly.
Wambach should not have gotten behind the wheel if she’d been drinking. Plain and simple. It’s just a horrible thing to do, and it puts other people at risk.
Likewise, Wambach’s comments criticizing Klinsmann for bringing “foreign” players into the U.S. men’s team was off-base and dumb. It was a misguided attempt at launching her career as a tough-talking analyst by deriding foreignborn Americans. Many of these players were born abroad because one of their parents was serving in the U.S. military and stationed overseas.
Bedoya had every right to be upset about her comments on behalf of his foreign-born teammates. (Bedoya’s father is Colombian, but he was born in New Jersey and raised in Florida.) But this wasn’t the time for him to comment.
Wambach made a mistake, owned up to it and apologized. Taking a shot at her publicly when she’s down isn’t the way to go.
There’s also no defense or plausible explanation for Altidore’s tweet.
This is all counterproductive as well. As the women’s team fights for equal pay and both groups work to build soccer in this country, the last thing they need is to fire shots at each other. Former U.S. star Landon Donovan exemplified this last week when he said men bring in more income and should be paid more. It angered players on the women’s team, as it should have, and he apologized.
It also distracted fans from the real issues at hand.
Women’s players are underpaid, and FIFA’s treatment of female players has been deplorable. Former president Sepp Blatter made it clear he viewed the women’s game as nothing more than a sideshow, from the time he suggested that women wear shorter shorts to the time he had no idea who Marta, perhaps the best female player ever, was at a FIFA awards ceremony. Blatter was the shining example, but FIFA has made it clear that, top to bottom, it has little respect for the women’s game.
At the same time, the men’s national team is clawing to gain respect. You could argue that both teams are underpaid for the value they bring to U.S. Soccer, and if these players ever want to launch soccer into the realm of the NBA and NFL, the men will need the women’s team — three-time World Cup winners and by far the more successful of the two — to do so.
Fighting with each other accomplishes nothing. It distracts from the central problems at hand. The men’s and women’s national teams should be working together to grow soccer in this country. Tearing each other down does nothing.