| Victoria Jackson
With its inimitable gift for sizing up a moment through humor, The Onion reported today, “Nation Wakes Up From Strange Dream Where They Were Watching Soccer.”
But the good news for American fans who want the soccer party to continue is that they do not have to wait four years until the next World Cup. We’ve got to wait only 339 days for next summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil.
Despite the fact that the tournament is in Brazil, the women’s World Cup is as central to our Great Game Lab’s inquiry into how sport connects US to the world as the men’s World Cup played on North American soil or the 2028 LA Olympic and Paralympic Games are. And that’s because, in a sense, women’s global football, no matter where it’s played, is an American-inspired pursuit.
Our football ties with the world are a two-way street. This 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup showcased how men’s soccer is a consequential import that has made the United States more connected to the world. In our Great Game Cities project, fellows in five of the U.S. host cities made documentary films and podcast series showing how that place became more connected to the world thanks to the game of soccer.
In many ways, the flow reverses course with women’s soccer, an American export to the world. An exporter of principles of gender equity in national team play and of the business proposition that the women’s game is a lucrative one that fans want to watch (and also spend lots of money on). While some women outside the United States were playing soccer long before women inside the United States, already by the time of the first FIFA-sanctioned tournament in 1991, the United States Women’s National Team were champions and had, in our universities thanks to Title IX, the best-resourced and broadest-based development system for women’s soccer in the world.
U.S. women’s college soccer catapulted the United States to the top of the world’s soccer power rankings, seemingly overnight. Facing none of the “soccer is a men’s contact sport” cultural headwinds endured by women in most of the rest of the world, and thanks to big-time college sports’ growth into a multibillion-dollar industry by the 21st century, the U.S. college soccer system now sits alongside the world’s best domestic leagues in terms of elite support and compensation, though it looms much larger thanks to its scale and scope, with hundreds of elite teams. And many of the clubs in those other countries’ domestic leagues model their approach to gender equity on the United States’ civil rights law, Title IX, and the legal regulations spelling out the qualitative and quantitative experiences of equality of opportunity on the basis of sex that serve as a guide for front office personnel to put these principles into practice.
There are many compelling storylines as we head into the tenth edition of the FIFA women’s tournament. Brazil will be the first South American nation to host. Should the country’s superstar Marta decide to play, she will become the first non-goalkeeper player to participate in a seventh World Cup (joining Formiga, Brazil’s retired goalie). Spain just made history as the first nation in the world to become both men’s and women’s reigning World Cup champions simultaneously (the only other country to have won both tournaments at any point in time is Germany). And from a media rights perspective, the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 will be the first tournament to air exclusively on a streaming platform, with Netflix having earned both the English- and Spanish-language rights for the United States (and English- and French-language rights in Canada as well).
In a short amount of time, the world has caught up to the United States… precisely what members of the USWNT had long been hoping for and working toward. At next summer’s Women’s World Cup, much like this men’s tournament that had us all enraptured, we will see more competitive balance on the pitch than ever before. There will be a Cabo Verde who will steal out hearts and make us all Blue Sharks. There will be powerhouse teams that exit the tournament sooner than planned. But there will also be stories that differ and are distinctive to the women’s game: diaspora teams made up of hyphenated Americans, and rosters of other nations made up almost exclusively of players with U.S. college alma maters.
This 2026-27 academic year the Great Game Lab will be researching and highlighting Women’s World Cup stories that feature these dynamics, and we invite you to come along with us for the ride.