Throwin' In the Towel

The Women's United Soccer Association, America's first professional female soccer league, called it quits yesterday. Attendance had plummeted to from 8000 per game in the initial season to 6700 per game in the final season, television paid scant attention to it, and despite having everyone from Mia Hamm to Julie Foudy on their eight teams, the league simply couldn't get its mojo working. Apparently the league's biggest fans were girls too young to buy tickets and too busy playing soccer themselves to watch it on television.

Like most American adults, I'm guilty for not having paid attention to it myself. Heck, New York had a WUSA team, but I'll be darned if I could name it!

The absence of a professional soccer league for women (in this case, the United States was actually a leader!) here in America will make it even harder to build future national teams for the World Cup and the Olympics. Meanwhile, Major League Soccer, the men's league, while not exactly diverting attention from the NFL, is still chugging along.

So in the United States, where real men play football and where soccer is a "dame game," men's soccer is actually doing better than women's soccer. This is a sad time for women's sports in general.