John Riordan: US soccer teams show unity in a time of hurt 

Washington Spirit and NJ/NY Gotham FC players meet at midfield during the sixth minute in solidarity following allegations of abuse in the National Women’s Soccer League. Picture: Mitchell Leff

It had taken six years for Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly to make public the alleged abuse they suffered at the hands of their former professional soccer coach, Paul Riley.

So after six minutes of each of the three National Women’s Soccer League games slated to take place on Wednesday evening across the United States, the players and staff of all six teams gathered in a unified circle at the halfway line.

A full minute elapsed before action resumed.

This perfectly choreographed sequence of protests taking place within hours of each other in three very different cities — Cary, Philadelphia, and Portland — each involved professional women’s soccer clubs entrenched in headlines these past several weeks.

The scandal has been so deep for league officials and so unifying for the players that the weekend games were all postponed. This meant Wednesday was a highly anticipated opportunity for those players to send their strongest message.

In the earliest of that trio of regular season games, North Carolina Courage were taking part in their first game since last Thursday’s firing of their head coach, the aforementioned Riley, a Liverpool-born former collegiate and journeyman semi-professional player, who was named and shamed in an incredibly impactful piece of investigative journalism in The Athletic. Those damning allegations followed hot on the heels of the August exit of another male coach, Christy Holly, from North Carolina’s opponents Racing Louisville under a shroud of concern.

In Philly, the New York / New Jersey outfit Gotham FC were hosting the Washington Spirit in a game that was meant to be a final hometown appearance for the US Women’s National Team star Carli Lloyd who is in the midst of a farewell tour.

Instead, she was one of the loudest voices on the pitch leading her teammates and opponents to that planned play stoppage. It was all the more meaningful for the Spirit players whose former coach Richie Burke was handed a league ban last week after an investigation into allegations of his verbal and emotional abuse of players.

As the evening wore on, over on the opposite side of the nation, the Portland Thorns welcomed Houston Dash for the late kick-off. The hosts and current league leaders are particularly prominent in the current fallout seeing as they are a club formerly coached by Riley. More significant was that this was where the alleged abuse was reported to officials and where no investigation resulted. This was the crux of the most recent fallout and a watershed catalyst for the united stance witnessed this week. Even the referees joined in with that third and final protest.

Portland was also the third club to which Sinead Farrelly was signed by Riley. This was back In 2014.

“He really ingrained in my brain that I had a lot of potential, was one of the best players he’d ever seen — but I needed the right coach to get me to where I wanted to go,” Farrelly told The Athletic. “And that’s what he did, he took players and he made them great.”

The entire story which landed with a thud last Thursday is worth your time — it was reported meticulously by Meg Linehan with support from colleague Katie Strang who specialises in the intersection of sport and sexual abuse — but one of the many depressing episodes stands out for its brutally unfair power dynamic.

The first time Farrelly and Riley worked together was her rookie year at the now defunct club that drafted her, the Philadelphia Independence. She was called up to the US National Team in what should have been the greatest moment of her career up until that point and surely a signifier of bigger days ahead.

Instead, upon her return to the day job in Philly from that proud work trip, Riley told her she had been disloyal to her club teammates and to him. She deserved her national call-up, was his view, but only if he was coaching it. A couple of weeks later, when another call came in from the national set-up, she turned the chance down and consequently missed out on the World Cup squad which would go on to a runner-up finish in the 2011 edition.

On Wednesday, Riley responded by email to The Athletic about his reported conduct by saying that the majority of the allegations were “completely untrue.”

The National Women’s Soccer League is in its ninth year of activity and this is the third time a nationally affiliated professional body has been attempted. The NWSL has marketed itself well and has attracted some large sponsors on the back of the long running resurgence of the national team since that 2011 blip against Japan.

The 2015 and 2019 World Cup successes have elevated their stars and those same stars have simultaneously exhibited a stirring ability to capture the imagination of supporters with the sort of powerful branding that almost matches their athletic prowess. In our social media age where self-awareness is a virtue, their strong social conscience has helped the league develop in fascinating ways.

But that has rightly proven to be a double edged sword for league officials who have been forced to watch on as masterfully worded statements ricochet relentlessly over the course of a week of recrimination.

As Portland Thorns players prepared for that Wednesday night game, they successfully convinced their club to enact the administrative leave of their general manager Gavin Wilkinson, pending the completion of the independent investigation into why or how Riley was able to find another job after the 2015 complaint against him.

The ownership of the North Carolina Courage were forced to make their own statement, defending the due diligence they did on Riley when they purchased a previous version of the club in 2017, moving Western New York Flash down south for a rebrand. “When we learned of the horrific allegations in last week’s reporting,” the club went on to say, “we took those seriously and immediately terminated Mr Riley.”

The show of unity by the players is impressively thorough and not too dissimilar to the female professional basketballers of the WNBA whose 99% vaccination rate was cited in this column last week as standing in stark contrast to the rate of their male counterparts.

Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim appeared on the largest morning television shows in the country over the course of this week and national team icon Alex Morgan stepped in to offer the strongest endorsement of their bravery — not only appearing in solidarity alongside them but also producing evidence of her emails to league officials to investigate the actions of Riley.

That resulted in the fall of the highest league official, Lisa Baird, to whom that complaint was addressed.

It was a remarkable chain of events and proof that the players without power needed a coordinated demand for accountability with the strongest possible endorsements of their claims.

It must have been complicated and agonising to bring this to light. The vast majority of players are not well paid but are nonetheless desperate to maximise their athletic trajectories for as long as possible. Naturally, the players with the least notoriety have the most to lose. Linehan herself, in her follow-up coverage this week, spoke best to the fear involved in entrusting personal woes to her for publication.

And she also admitted to worries over the potential of a negative commercial impact to the league itself, a secondary concern but a concern regardless.

With CBS’s sporting arm broadcasting these games to the nation in a relatively new deal, the league’s burgeoning success is as precarious as it is positive. A “tremendous step forward”, Linehan said with her advocate hat on. She was wary of people like me being drawn to write about the scandal (although I’ve been at pains to focus on the solidarity which emerged).

“You need those chances and you need to be able to find those moments where the investment is going to be given,” she said. “Obviously a lot of people’s eyeballs are going to be on this sport at a very difficult time. But that doesn’t fundamentally mean that the players aren’t worth investing in or that the game is bad. There have been bad actors in the system. That doesn’t mean that investment shouldn’t still be happening.”

@JohnWRiordan