Sarah Harte: Pauw’s exit indicative of double standards in corridors of power
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There’s a certain irony that while once women’s soccer wouldn’t make the back page of a local paper, in fact, Pet’s Corner would have trumped it, these days it’s never out of the headlines. However, this has more to do with the male executives who run the game than the women who play it. This story has played out both in Spain and in Ireland.
Last Sunday, Luis Rubiales, the head of the Spanish Football Federation, finally announced his decision to resign. Earlier in the week, mid-fielder Jenni Hermoso had filed a criminal complaint against Rubiales for sexual assault relating to his forced kiss of her during the post-match World Cup celebrations.
A few days before that close ally of Rubiales and Spanish head coach Jorge Vilda was sacked. No reason was given for Jorge Vilda’s sacking, although it was parsed as the first of a series of measures to “renew” women’s football.
The reality is that although Jorge Vilda brought Spain to the World Cup where they won, he was a hugely divisive figure as head coach of the Spanish women’s team. In September 2022, 15 female players wrote to the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) refusing to play unless Vilda resigned, arguing that his coaching style was damaging their emotional and physical health.
Complaints included that Vilda prevented them from locking their hotel rooms and went through their bags. Twelve of these complainants missed the World Cup with only three making the squad. Vilda was backed by Luis Rubiales, the Spanish football chief.
Back home, the FAI recently controversially failed to renew the Irish football coach Vera Pauw’s contract. Until now there has been no formal statement from the FAI on why Vera Pauw was let go although tomorrow they are set to hold a press conference to respond to Vera Pauw’s claim that she was undermined in her role.
Various reasons have been kicked about for Pauw’s departure.
One was that she lost the dressing room. The strained relationship with captain Katie McCabe could clearly be seen if you watched the World Cup matches. The question is why Pauw lost the support of the players?
Pauw says that FAI executives undermined her in her coaching of the team, and effectively rendered her a lame duck. “In my opinion, no head coach in the world would accept the interference of the executives in technical football affairs,” she said.
She links the change in attitude from the FAI to an article published in in July concerning allegations made against Pauw when she was coach of the Houston Dash football team in 2018.
Pauw was named in a report from the US National Women’s Soccer League (NSWL) for attempting to “exert excessive control over [players]eating habits” and allegedly encouraging players to avoid fruit due to its sugar content, “with no apparent correlation to performance or health.”
Pauw has called the allegations “absolutely ridiculous and false.” Pauw reportedly said of the claims made against her: “There is no scale in my dressing room, there’s no fat percentages taken ... What is the standard? Can you not educate players in getting the best out of themselves with something that it technically just coaching?”
Pauw is a straight-talking woman. It’s not hard to imagine that she would be a tough taskmaster, or that she might disapprove of players she saw as unfit or overweight. Actually, it’s hard to imagine any coach not having a problem with this.
Pauw has complained of a double standard, saying that nobody would have complained if she had been a male coach. Considering that the NSWL report resulted in the banning of four male coaches earlier this year for systemic sexual misconduct, abuse of power, and racist remarks, she has a point.
The FAI’s decision to let Vera Pauw go has gone down badly with large swathes of both the public and supporters. Interestingly, many comments from men have been hugely supportive of Pauw, with the columnist Michael Kelly tweeting: “This tremendous woman is being treated appallingly ... if Vera was shown a fraction of the patience that the managers of the male soccer team are routinely shown, she’d be in the job for life.”
When Vera Pauw came out swinging, challenging the FAI’s decision to let her go, a former professional sportsman expressed the view to me that it might have been more prudent professionally for Pauw to have simply moved on and sought another job, to avoid getting the reputation of being a troublemaker.
He commented that high-profile sports coaches are like politicians, except in the rarest of circumstances, they leave their jobs on a low note no matter how brilliant they have been.
Maybe he has a point but it strongly feels like there is more to it than that. Was Pauw’s decision last year to bravely speak out about her rape by “a prominent football official” also in the mix of things that militated against her when the FAI turned against her? Was she labelled a trouble-making woman?
Pauw accused the Dutch Football Association of trying to keep her quiet by refusing to open a full investigation into the rape. She was also “sexually assaulted by two other men” who worked in Dutch football.
Although the FAI issued a statement supporting her you wonder how this decision to speak out sat with those within the male football fraternity given a strong view that politics and sport should never mix.
Last year, retired Australian soccer player Craig Foster slammed the lack of gender equality in soccer. He told magazine: “The game is very skilled at just providing small incremental growth for people and at externalising anyone who says anything challenging to the global governing body.”
It would be ironic if Pauw was penalised for her bravery given that FIFA, which oversees soccer globally, is moving to improve the image of the game. It’s a problem for FIFA that the wider public has twigged that football is overwhelmingly run by men and is beset by structural machismo and sexism. In context, female representation on the FIFA council is 18%.
Deeply entrenched misogynistic attitudes have allowed a culture to flourish in soccer within which Pauw and multiple players in the USA were sexually assaulted.
This culture has led to Luis Rubiales grabbing his crotch during the post-match celebrations and forcing a kiss on Jenni Hermoso. It’s what led to Spanish coach Jorge Vilda confidently clapping Luis Rubiales when at first he refused to resign.
In the end, the FAI meeting which decided on Pauw’s fate went on for a nine-hour marathon, surely indicating mixed views.
Vera Pauw brought Ireland’s women to their first World Cup with the team rising to their best World ranking in history. Stephen Kenny, manager of the men’s soccer team, has been treated with far more latitude with the male football team coming nowhere near those results.
It has been reported that Pauw’s exit will be the focus of tomorrow’s FAI press conference and not the less-than-stellar men’s team performance in the UEFA Euro 2024 qualifiers and Stephen Kenny’s role in the campaign.
For those of us who grew up in an era where girls sat inside sewing at school, looking out the window at boys who played football (yeah, really), Pauw and her players represented something liberating and thrilling. A new Ireland, where girls and women got to be who they wanted.
Regardless of what emerges tomorrow, we owe you a big thanks, Vera.