The 2015 Women's World Cup, held in the Great White North (aka Canada) has just come to an end!
1) The Big Game
AS we all know by now, yesterday's championship game with USA vs Japan was a rematch of the 2011 championship! Whereas Japan won in 2011, this time USA won without showing mercy. 3 goals in the first 16 minutes? So much for the nonsense about "soccer being boring"! Japan tried to catch up, but it wasn't enough this time! The USA team partied like it's 1999 all over again!
2) Grass & Turf
This year, the games were played on turf instead of grass! That has gotten a lot of controversy, with people saying "it's not fair men play on grass, women play on turf" and "playing on turf will cause a lot of injuries."
But there were no mass levels on injuries on turf this year!
But if the players still prefer to play on grass, then let them play on grass!
3) People are Watching
As usual the trolls came out with the attitude of "ha,ha nobody watches the woman play" But the trolls are not deterred by ................ The Facts!
http://time.com/3946656/womens-world-cup-breaks-ratings-record/
The United States’ Women’s World Cup win on Sunday broke a ratings record, garnering more viewers than any other soccer match in television history, according to broadcaster Fox Sports.
“It is the highest metered market rating ever for a soccer game in the U.S. on a single network,” Fox Sports wrote in an official announcement of the ratings triumph.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/06/420514899/what-people-are-saying-about-the-u-s-women-s-world-cup-win
Citing Nielsen, Telemundo says that its Spanish-language U.S. broadcast of Sunday's final "delivered 1.27 million total viewers... becoming the most watched game of a FIFA Women's World Cup in U.S. Spanish-language TV."(skipped paragraphs)
While some 17 million American viewers tuned in to the 7 p.m. ET start of Sunday's game, that number quickly grew to 21.86 million an hour later — and reached 22.86 million at 8:30 p.m. ET, according to preliminary data from industry website TV Media Insights.
Those figures are comparable to the 2014 World Series' Game 7, which attracted 23.5 million viewers — far more than any other game of the 2014 series.
(and even more)
The final drew "a prodigious 15.2/27 metered market household rating/share" from 7-9 p.m. ET, Fox says, citing data from the Nielsen ratings service. The network adds that the audience "peaked at 18.3/31 from 8:45-9:00 p.m. ET," as more Americans tuned in to watch the celebrations in Vancouver.
As a comparison, consider that the Golden State Warriors' recent title-clinching Game 6 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals earned a 15.9 overnight rating. That figure was hailed as a Game 6 record for ABC in a Finals series that drew the highest average numbers since the Michael Jordan era.
So in other words, women's soccer championship game gets nearly as much ratings as the championship games of traditional male American sports!
Super Bowl still dominates the ratings, but let's face it, most of us watch the Super Bowl for the ads and the halftime show!
and some more commentary.
From The Nation's Dave Zirin (note the sarcastic article title)
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-im-done-defending-womens-sports/
Every damn Women’s World Cup, every NCAA women’s finals, every Olympics, women’s sports again go on a media trial that would make the old judges of Salem blush. This last e-mail was merely the latest. I have done too many radio shows in the past week where the question was not about the chances of the US Women’s national team or which teams could potentially topple them. They were about why “no one cares,” or whether women’s sports are as good as men’s sports. It’s tired.It’s also way behind where people actually are. Absolutely, it is great to see Seth Myers and Amy Poehler take up the fight, and it is always fun to see the look on someone’s face when you tell them that John Wooden in his last years preferred women’s NCAA basketball to the men’s game. But it’s also increasingly irrelevant. While I’m being asked why “no one cares,” the Women’s World Cup is getting ratings that would make the NBA or Major League Baseball weep with joy. While ESPN Radio self-parody Colin Cowherd says that men are stronger and better athletes and we appreciate greatness in America and that’s why men’s sports is more fun to watch, his radio contract appears in peril because fewer and fewer people care what he has to say. While academic reports are issued that show only 2 percent of SportsCenter’s coverageis devoted to women’s sports, which is discussed there by anchors with the joy and flair of kids forced to “eat their vegetables,” more and more people are choosing to get their news from different sources if the current ones don’t meet their needs.
Though to be fair Colin Cowherd did say good things about the Women's World Cup championship game in this morning's show, and basically implied that the anti-soccer trolls are out of touch with modern times!
listen at
http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=13208354&s=espn
4) Global Disparities
Another article from The Nation's Dave Zirin
http://www.thenation.com/article/african-artistry-and-anger-at-the-womens-world-cup/
What we can see is that, to an even greater degree than the men’s game, there are profound inequities in development and attention between regions of the globe: North America, Japan, China, and Europe flourish, while countries in Africa and Latin America suffer. They suffer from FIFA neglect and conscious disinterest amidst their own country’s soccer leadership, some of which only recently have taken the first halting steps toward taking the women’s game seriously. Yet the Women’s World Cup has revealed something else as well: the heroic ability and drive from the teams on the African continent to achieve in spite of the obstacles laid out in front of them. They may have been knocked out, but their progress has been profound and in many respects is the story of this tournament.
and
FIFA’s continuous smorgasbord of corruption and scandal can exhaust even the most ardent soccer enthusiast, which is why the women’s game and this World Cup are refreshing reminders of what is still a wonderful and unmarred game. In order to nurture the players and continue to grow the sport, we need to make sure that the investment is real and the progress continues. The beautiful game deserves more. In the words of the lion-hearted Clementine Toure, “I want to make an appeal to not only our federation, but to all of Africa, that women’s football has arrived. We believe in our women. We have a good team. Today the Ivory Coast showed it deserves a place in the World Cup. But we also deserved to be better prepared. We didn’t deserve to be humiliated.” The Ivory Coast, and all of the women’s teams in the Global South deserve not humiliation but resources. This World Cup has shown that if the economic playing field could be leveled, the actual playing field could delight and thrill the world to an even greater degree than it has already done.
