Nadia Nadim did not know soccer was for her until she was about 12. This was after her father was executed by the Taliban, after she and her mother and her sisters fled their native Afghanistan, after the trip through the dark in the smuggler’s truck.
“I got really passionate about it when we lived in this refugee camp in Denmark,” Nadim said after a practice last week, recounting her path to international and professional soccer as matter-of-factly as a young American might discuss her high school team. “There was this soccer club beside us. We had Danish lessons from 9 to 1 and then all this time off.”
She added: “That was the first time I saw girls and ladies playing soccer. And I was like: ‘Wow, you can also do that.’”
Nadim’s introduction to the game and the opportunities it would present her was just beginning. She went on to play for Denmark’s national team and last summer joined Sky Blue FC in the US National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), where she became an instant sensation by scoring seven goals in six games.
Now, in a year when a Women’s World Cup is set to bring renewed attention to the three-year-old NWSL, Nadim and others could be central to its appeal.
It is a challenging task, but also a vital one: The league, which opened its regular season on Friday, has chosen to play through the World Cup, meaning many of its biggest names will miss a large chunk of the season.
“This has never been my focus area,” Nadim, 27, said of being a headliner. “I just like to play. But having that role, as an ambassador of women’s soccer, I never thought of it, but I like that idea. I’m all right with it.”
Sixteen years after Brandi Chastain’s iconic goal celebration capped a World Cup victory for the US — a seminal moment for women’s sports in the nation — that Nadim’s story and her face remain unfamiliar to most US soccer fans is emblematic of the way that professional women’s soccer has yet to break through in the sports marketplace.
Two previous leagues have folded, complicating the current league’s task, and despite employing most of the US national team and a handful of top international players, the NWSL saw only two of its nine teams average more than 4,000 fans a game last season, though the average of 13,362 in Portland offered a window into what is possible.
Still, pros at the bottom of the league’s pay scale make a little more than US$1,000 a month for a six-month season and salaries top out at US$37,800, though top players also receive paychecks from their national federations.
This is the reality of the league’s current economics — a short-term price with designs on long-term viability — and the players say they understand it.
“I don’t think our league, as a brand, is out there for everybody to understand and to know,” said Sky Blue midfielder Katy Freels, Nadim’s roommate. “So I think the World Cup, getting that exposure, you see so many promotional videos and commercials. When they show the games, they’ll say: ‘Christie Rampone, who plays for Sky Blue FC ...’ Even those little things will increase the awareness for everything within the US.”
For that reason, players like Freels, 25, and her teammate Lindsi Cutshall, 24, are making enormous sacrifices to help the league remain viable. Post-soccer careers are delayed, family decisions altered. Freels, for example, said she put off law school again to return this season.
In essence, a generation of young girls who came of age watching that 1999 team are now in the professional soccer workforce, giving up a living wage now to grow the league, they hope, and pass on a viable opportunity to the next generation.
“Just like any business, at the start, you have to cut costs somewhere,” Cutshall said. “It’s going to take time.”
However, the financial realities of the league can only change with more fans passing through the turnstiles, or if it can find a source of revenue to supplement the subsidies it receives from US Soccer and the Canadian and Mexican soccer federations.
The NWSL Web site contains virtually no paid advertising, and the league will once again broadcast a majority of its games not on TV, but on a YouTube channel to an audience that includes Nadim’s suddenly soccer-crazed mother in Denmark.
NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush described a league-wide television deal as imminent, but he acknowledged that making the NWSL not just the league of choice for the best soccer players in the world, but a career destination, would be a reasonable measure of long-term success.
In a telephone interview on Monday, Plush talked about funneling any new money back into the player pool, but also of the league’s hope to create coaching and front-office jobs that would let players carve out a career in the game.
“I’d love for these players, when their playing days are over, [to] see that there’s other opportunities for them,” Plush said.
More goals this year might mean more fans at Sky Blue’s home games. They might help the league capitalize on its moment in the sun this summer, and establish a firmer foothold for the next generation of players.
“I don’t like the idea that it hasn’t happened yet, so it can’t happen,” Nadim said. “Things happen all the time that never happened before. I mean, look at me. Who would ever have guessed I’d be on the Danish national team? I was born and grew up in a country where girls weren’t allowed to go to school.”
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