What if the people who are paid to care about women’s football cared even a tenth as much as its fans? What would that look like?
Another day, another SNAFU. Now in its third year, the pre-season Chaos Cup, formally known as the Challenge Cup, has reached the playoffs. OL Reign, under the returning management of the revered Laura Harvey, rose unbeaten to clinch the #1 seed in the Western division, with an unbeaten run against their three fellow West Coast teams. The division includes two new expansion teams, the San Diego Wave and Angel City FC, both of whom found themselves repeatedly up against a ferocious and stacked Seattle team with an axe to grind after missing out a place in the championship final last November. Nabbing the #1 seed parked them firmly in the semifinal, and earned them the right to host it on home ground. But nothing’s ever straightforward in the Chaos League, and a huge scheduling FUBAR on the part of the NWSL has left the Reign scratching around for a venue, because Lumen Field is not available.
There’s much at stake for the Reign. While this preseason tournament is not overly important in and of itself, there’s two points to absorb: the winners earn a chunk of change, which is not meaningless in underpaid women’s sports (many of these players have second jobs). And OL Reign moved to a new stadium this year. In the upgrade of all upgrades, made possible by their newish French owners, the Puget Sound team left behind their intimate, Tacoma-based Cheney Stadium, which seats 6,500 and doubles as a baseball field (with the unreliable playing surface that comes with such frequent changeovers), and are enjoying a triumphant homecoming at Seattle’s vast, downtown Lumen Field, home of the MLS’s Seattle Sounders and the NFL’s Seahawks. This is an enormous, well-equipped space to fill, and it will take the Lyon-owned team an unguessable number of seasons to grow their audience to something near filling Lumen’s 72,000 seats – hated neighbours the Portland Thorns lead the league in topping a typical 20k on a good day. A running start is essential for the Reign to build momentum, and a semifinal is exactly the sort of occasion to bring in curious new city folk, as well as fans from further afield.
Why can’t they use their own stadium? Because, despite citing “venue availability issues” it seems abundantly clear that the NWSL screwed up the scheduling. First: the regular season begins before the tournament ends, leaving little time between games of each type. If you’re going to overlap the two, a tournament could have been spread manageably throughout the year (like the FA Cup), not squished up against the face of the incoming season. To add weight to that point, pre-season training and the tournament itself – a veritable battle royale of over 100 yellow and red cards – have seen clubs rack up injuries, arguably in part thanks to the very tight schedule. It’s far from an ideal start to the season.