Portugal World Cup Quotes

I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.

The USA-Japan final was watched on television by a whopping 25.4 million Americans, smashing the TV record for the most-viewed soccer game by an American audience. Even more stunning, 43.2 million Americans watched at least part of the final. It beat every game of the NBA finals, happening around the same time, and beat the primetime average of the Sochi Olympics the year before. With 39 percent higher ratings, it destroyed a record set by the U.S. men’s team when it faced Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal during the 2014 World Cup group stage. The 1999 World Cup final, which had held the record for 15 years before that, had been watched by 17.8 million Americans. On social media, the moment was just as big. According to Face-book, 9 million people posted 20 million interactions to the platform about the final during the game. Tweets about the tournament had been seen 9 billion times across all of Twitter, with the final match earning the most engagements. Carli Lloyd’s half-field goal was the most-tweeted-about moment of the match. The national team’s victory touched millions of people—and that probably included plenty of little girls who had no clue who “the ’99ers” were and never saw Brandi Chastain twirl her shirt in the air. For the first time, millions of young girls saw the women of the national team as heroes.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar.

Ultimately, the strike never happened. Some players felt, after speaking with the team’s attorney, John Langel, that striking before the Algarve Cup didn’t offer enough leverage. They were better off going to Portugal and continuing negotiations there with striking as an option after the tournament, before the start of the NWSL. They believed the launch of the new league offered the urgency that could make a strike effective. For Solo, who pushed for the strike, it was frustrating to see her teammates back off so quickly. Even though the Algarve Cup was a relatively minor tournament, it was the biggest national team event on the calendar until the 2015 World Cup, two and a half years away. The advice of the team’s longtime attorney to forgo the pre–Algarve Cup strike amounted to taking the federation’s side, as far as Solo was concerned. By that point, she had already lost faith in Langel’s ability to fight for the team and months earlier had started, on her own, looking for someone else who could represent the team. “It was really empowering for us. We finally were taking a huge stance against U.S. Soccer—we said, We’re putting our foot down, we’re going on strike, we mean business,” Solo says. “Well, it took about one phone call from John Langel to scare us into backing down and not going on strike.