When Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law on June 23, 1972, he wasn’t thinking about the future FIFA Women’s World Cups he was helping to advance (including the 2023 edition, kicking off this week in Australia and New Zealand). There are two reasons.
The first is that, at the time, hardly anyone gave any thought to how a law granting equality of educational opportunities between the genders would affect sport. No one then imagined that the public would come to associate Title IX primarily with collegiate sports; and certainly no one could have foreseen that the law’s revolutionary impact on women’s sport would be felt globally.