Football is Female
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They should just have separate all girls teams like we do in Australia
I… Wouldn’t poke that bear, if I were you…
Beside the response I suspect you will get (here), the history of women’s “football” in the US is… Weird, as another Aussie…
So, while I agree with you (though we’re beginning to see a bit of a merger, here, too - see the case of the woman in country SANFL, and mixed gender relays and teams in a whole bunch of “individual” sports), this just doesn’t seem to… Fly, with Americans, and with some of their sports…
It’s a rather jarring thing, but I genuinely see that as a bit of a… “Cultural difference”, let’s say, between our country and theirs, at the moment…
But that’s just my ten cents.
Basketball seems segregated enough
It is (at the elite level). Swimming, aths, diving, equestrian, dressage, (track and road) cycling, sailing (as of 2024) and obviously motor sport are all sort of… On the verge of merging, not in the sense of “men and women compete against each other directly, individually” (for half of those they do), but in the sense that… Well it’s sort of like the girl in this Gridiron team - it’s one team, with both men and women in it…
But at the amateur/rural level? Mixed teams are pretty ubiquitous in all non-contact sports, and that woman in the SANFL was a test case where I suspect we will eventually see women “making up the numbers” in some positions in local, rural teams, at least in Aussie Rules…
As long as they can actually play ok, don’t get injured too easily, and don’t play the sex card/try to sue the league if and when they do, I am unironically ok with that…
I’ve played water polo (contact), netball (yeah yeah), basketball, friggin touch rugby and ultimate frisbee with women as an adult. Amateur, obviously. It was really no biggy. We were just happy to have a full team!!
Women’s sports in the US are viewed with a contempt, at least on the internet, that they simply are not, in Australia…
I’m just not sure you would “get it”, unless you’ve lived here, or NZ, or a few other places (Brazil, Spain, Japan)…
It’s just… A whole other world, over here, in that regard.
We have full female leagues over here, for all our major sports, and, for the most part, they’re actually pretty decent.
We’re sort of… About a decade “ahead” of the US, in this regard (soccer and basketball are somewhat different, but even here, they’re just… Seen a bit differently).
I’m not necessarily saying that’s a “good” thing, but it is really, really noticeable, as an Aussie…
Not just the US. Though I would not call it contempt, just disinterest. The media keeps shoving it down our throats, but really, no one cares. Not even women want to watch women play football (soccer) rather than men, as folks who lose to 15-year-old boys 7-0 aren't very entertaining to watch.
Unless they play against 15-year-old boys. I mean, through no fault of their own, of course. There's just biological differences.
I think the difference is that in the US our mens leagues, at least in everything but soccer or like Sumo, are like literally the best in the world. Mens vs woman’s basketball here is a ridiculous comparison here whereas the gulf between the quality of the Australian National basketball league and the girls Aussie league probably isn’t as vast. If both options have a like veneer of amateurism then it’s easier to interchange imo, and less offensive when the local activist sports writers try to gaslight us into seeing them similarly.