On display Friday night in Dallas:
- The sport of women’s soccer is really good right now
- There’s still plenty of room to grow it
FC Barcelona, winner of three of the last four UEFA Women’s Champions League competitions, visited Dallas Trinity FC for a friendly. The DTFC players relished the opportunity to take on one of the world’s top sides. Their captain, Amber Brooks, described it as “a once in a lifetime game, definitely a bucket list game.”
Besides the current team’s prowess on the pitch (they have also won Spain’s domestic women’s league in each of the last five seasons), the Barcelona brand carries a good deal of prestige because of the substantial achievements of its men’s side over the last 12+ decades. It carries one of the great traditions in the world’s most popular game. Along with its Spanish rival Real Madrid and some English, German, and Italian sides, Barça is what people think of when they think of club soccer at the highest level.
“It was an honor tonight to be on the field with some of their world-class players,” noted DTFC defender Hannah Davison. “It’s a childhood dream to be able to actually share a field with them.”
Continental Europe represents the heritage of the game generally. The United States can lay claim to having elevated women’s soccer specifically.
“They continue to grow the game, and their level is such a high level, and it gets better every year,” noted DTFC General Manager and Acting Head Coach Chris Petrucelli of his team’s world-class opponent. “It’s interesting, because if you go back in time, always the U.S. Women’s National Team was the team, right? And they grew the game as they went around the world and played in these different competitions.”
I’ve been working recently on a documentary about women’s soccer. It uses one of Petrucelli’s former coaching stops, the University of Texas at Austin program, as a window to understanding the history of the rise of soccer and women’s sports generally. One thing I learned from the research for it was how the 1990s explosion of soccer as a Division I sport at the university level helped create a well-trained player pool for the USWNT (as well for players from other countries) and helped lead to the squad’s unmatched record in Women’s World Cup and Olympic competitions.
“The U.S. college system has been a feeder for our national team, and has produced the best players in the world for numerous years,” noted Petrucelli. “The game globally would not be where it was without the US college system.”
The USA still carries a lot of mojo in the women’s soccer world (and elsewhere).
“It’s a new experience to for me, my first time in the US,” said Barça’s Norwegian midfielder Ingrid Engen. “It’s great vibes.”
She referred to the atmosphere around their preseason tour (they also played the NWSL’s Bay FC earlier in the week). She could just as easily have been referring to the climate for the women’s game created in the U.S. over the years.
Spain’s top women’s league has only been fully professional since the 2021-2022 season. The U.S. has created three such circuits since 2000. The WUSA and WPS failed, but the NWSL recently signed the biggest media rights deal ever for any women’s soccer league and the USL Super League just launched with Dallas Trinity FC as a member. The United States now has two pro women’s leagues with Division One (the highest international level) sanctioning. One can make the case that the U.S. continues to push the bar for women’s soccer. One can also make the case that now they’re not alone in the endeavor, joined as they are by the formidable likes of Barcelona.
“When I was growing up, I had (former USWNT stars) Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain to look up to. And now there’s two leagues professional in the U.S. Obviously, the European leagues are doing well, and there’s just more and more opportunity,” said Brooks, who had started her career in Germany at Bayern Munich in 2013 when full professionalization there was years away from even being seriously considered.
DTFC announced a crowd of 5,387 at the Cotton Bowl Stadium Friday. That number would fill most of the Estadi Johan Cruyff, the 6,000-seat venue where the Barça women play most of their home games. However, they also occasionally play in Spotify Camp Nou, the stadium used primarily for the men’s first team. In 2022, they set the world record for attendance at a women’s soccer match when they drew more than 90,000 to watch them play Wolfsburg there. Dallas’s Cotton Bowl, built for American football, can hold up to 92,000. One can look at such capacities and the ability to fill them at least occasionally as proof of concept and as something to which to aspire.
“The women’s game is growing rapidly, and they’re a big part of that. They (Barcelona) push the game forward. They’ve done a lot of work to get us to where we are,” said Davison, an Illinois native who played collegiately at Northwestern and professionally in the NWSL and Europe. “It’s amazing that they took this trip here to the States to be able to lend that legendary status that they have, and loan that to us to get fans out, get us interested, keep us growing.”
Dallas Trinity midfielder Gracie Brian, a North Texas native and a professional rookie out of TCU, took note of the state of her industry in the context of the historic friendly in which she participated.
“I think the growth of this sport is tremendous. I think it is a testament to women and our hard work and how we want to inspire and grow the sport.”
As a new squad with a few weeks of training and one regular season game playing against what many consider the best club team in the world, Brian and her teammates endured a 6-0 defeat Friday. The game didn’t count in the standings for either club. It did count, they believed, in the bigger picture.
“Just a fantastic opponent who played beautifully. They were a joy to watch,” said Petrucelli. “We competed hard. We gave it our best, but clearly they’re at a different level than we are. But I think overall, the city of Dallas won tonight. Dallas Trinity won tonight. Everybody won tonight.”
