Scandal in US women's soccer: Investigation confirms sexual harassment and “systematic” abuse of female players

The American Women’s Professional Soccer League is the scene of systematic abuse at all levels towards its players and its highest authorities have repeatedly ignored the accusations in this regard, points out a harsh report published this Monday.

The independent investigation of the law firm King & Spalding presents a panorama in which verbal and emotional abuse towards these athletes and inappropriate sexual behavior exceed the limits of “hard” training and are common from the lower categories to higher ones.

In the fences of 200 interviews with retired and active players, coaches, club owners or squad personnel revealed manipulative tactics that they were a matter more of abuse of power than improvement of the game and a worrying pattern of comments with sexual content, unwanted touching or coercive sexual relations.

The teams, the League and the Federation “not only failed systematically when responding appropriately when they were confronted with complaints from the players and signs of abuse, but also when establishing measures to prevent and deal with it”, emphasizes that document of 36 pages.

As a result of this lack of vigilance, the coaches responsible for these abuses moved from team to team without anyone stopping their contracts, bleach two for press releases in which the clubs thanked the services provided.

The report was commissioned by the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), which is criticized for its silence on the matter.

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) was created in 2012 and had its first games in the spring of 2013. The law firm acknowledges that verbal and emotional abuse and sexual misconduct were already a widespread problem in women’s football before it was founded.

However, this League, which replaced the so-called Women’s Professional Football (WPS), failed to correct the situation or establish firewalls.

The document focuses on three coaches -Paul Riley, Rory Dames and Christy Holly- to illustrate the seriousness of the phenomenon, but recalls that last season half of the ten teams in the League parted ways with their coaches after complaints from the players.

De Dames, for example, his players in the youth Eclipse Select Soccer Club remember that he called them “whores”, “retards” or “fat ass” and that “on multiple occasions he crossed the sexual intercourse line. Once at the Chicago Red Stars, within the League, he established a hostile environment with verbal abuse during games, the report says.

The investigation maintains that, “in In general”, the clubs, the NWSL and the USSF, above the safety and welfare of the players, seem to have prioritized the legal consequences of a possible litigation with the coaches and the bad press that could have attracted.

Normalizing as part of “hard training” certain sexist comments and verbal and emotional abuse, as well as intimate relationships between coaches and players, contributed to perpetuate these behaviors.

The eventual reprisals feared by the athletes were also against them: “As in any professional league, they simply wanted to play and maximize their chances of being called up for the national team.”