Why Aren’t Top 3 In Women’s World Cup Final? Maybe Economics

The Women’s World Cup winds up on Sunday, and it has not gone to chalk.

The United States, two-time defending world champion, is long gone. The Americans couldn’t score and got dumped in the round of 16 by Sweden. No. 2 Germany didn’t make it out of the group stage. And the Swedes, ranked third in the world, got relegated to the bronze medal game by a left-footed strike in the 89th minute of the semifinal from Spain’s Olga Carmona.

Now we have No. 4 England vs. sixth-ranked Spain in Sydney, each aiming to capture their first world title.

So what happened?

There are obvious sports explanations, of course. For example, the United States missed injured star forward Mallory Swanson, who had seven goals in six appearances for the USWNT this year, a lot more than casual fans might have expected.

But cut a little deeper and there might be another explanation, one that suggests the up-for-grabs tournament we’ve seen in Australia and New Zealand might be more common in years to come.

This week I spoke with Stefan Szymanski, the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, and co-author of “Soccernomics” with Simon Kuper, to get his take on the Women’s World Cup. As one might expect from the title of his book, Szymanski is an expert on the economics of sports – especially soccer.

Szymanski talked about the Women’s World Cup using a term he has used in his study of the men’s game and that term is convergence.

In layman’s terms, “convergence is the basic idea is that, the way technology works, and the way that economic competition works, is if you start out today with a bunch of countries or regions with different levels of economic development, over time what’s going to happen is the gap’s going to narrow,” Szymanski explained. “And that’s because even if the most productive country is growing, the least productive countries will grow faster, because there’ll be copying the things that the most productive country has already done. The most productive country doesn’t get to copy anybody.”

Because virtually all countries play men’s soccer, and have done so for many decades, Szymanski and his co-researchers have been able to study and document convergence in the men’s game. What that means is there are a group of nations that have a reasonable chance of winning the World Cup in any given quadrennial, and even the gap between those nations and non-winners is not massive (see Morocco, semifinals, 2022). I also would note that there hasn’t been a repeat winner for the men since Brazil in 1958 and ‘62.

On the women’s side, Szymanski cautions he hasn’t done a deep dive but has managed some preliminary research in recent weeks, and it’s important to note that women’s soccer was banned for large chunks of the 20th century in many soccer-playing nations. For example, in England, the Football Association banned the game for women for about 50 years, starting in 1921. So there’s less data.

Nonetheless, “I think what we’re seeing is a shift from the United States to Europe,” Szymanski said. And there may be the beginning of a two-tier convergence, where richer countries with greater rights for women are becoming more competitive while poorer nations with fewer rights for women continue to lag behind – perhaps an impetus to make change.

Having covered the group stage of this Women’s World Cup with my students in New Zealand, what’s clear to me is that the enormous boost that American women received from Title IX, which has made the U.S. colleges a hotbed of training for women’s players, is now fading away as Europe becomes devoted to women’s soccer.

As a journalist, I want to watch and report on the best competition possible – so this is a good thing. And as an American and fan of sports, I’m not sad about the end of U.S. dominance as other nations become stronger in soccer. On the contrary, any good competitor knows it’s most satisfying to beat a great opponent on their best day.