Decolonization and the Women’s World Cup

August 5, 2023
By: Dave Zirin

For those interested in the intersection of international sports and global politics, the Women’s World Cup is offering a buffet of matches in the upcoming knockout round of 16; matches that are shot through with history, oppression, and resistance. Three different European countries will be playing against their former colonies, places where self-determination was won through struggle and delivered in blood; three different countries in the Global South, where the legacy of colonization still rings in people’s ears, whether through underdevelopment or a people still recalling and mourning those who died for national liberation. Nigeria will play England. South Africa will take on the Netherlands and Morocco will have the chance to oust France. If there is an athletic theme in this World Cup thus far it is that the world is catching up to the mighty United States, let alone Europe, and upsets could be in the offing. Nigeria is here after beating host country Australia for example, a result little predicted outside of Lagos. And Jamaica, a team that needed a Go-Fund me page to even get to Australia upset the great Marta and Brazil.

As the New York Times wrote, “That unpredictability, that sense of old hierarchies and longstanding orders being overturned on a daily basis, has illuminated the World Cup, of course. After 48 games — three quarters of the tournament — half of the teams have been sent home, and yet it feels as if the field of potential winners is broader than it was even two weeks ago.”

That so many of these Round of 16 matches have political stakes is a sign of the health of the women’s game as much as the raised parity of play. Men’s international contests have almost always lived in a world where sports become politics by other means. The return of South Africa to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 as a multi-racial team, was about a lot more than who was going to win the gold. The 1982 Men’s World Cup match between England and Argentina, set against the backdrop of the Falklands War, were watched with a nationalist passion in their respective countries that went well beyond the match itself. To see the politics sharpen in the women’s game as well, is a move beyond what we have seen in recent Cups: the United States displaying the world’s best soccer program, due to a decades head start on development because of the legacy of Title IX. Now the US women, who scrapped into the round of 16 following a 0-0 tie against Portugal, are one team of many, attempting to fend off competitors and ignore the psychological weight of having a figurative target on their backs.

The politics of these contests also do not neatly line up inside national lines. England, France, and the Netherlands have many children and grandchildren of their former colonial subjects living within their borders. At bars, restaurants and gathering points in Nottingham or les banlieues of Paris, it will be raucous and even radical. Also, never forget that others in Europe will want to see their country humbled both for the good of the game and because of a fan’s own sympathy with the formerly colonized. 

It will make for great theater. But we must never forget that sports as “war by other means” usually means that wars were already tried. And the decolonization struggles by Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco, came at the cost of millions of lives. In Nigeria, decolonization from England was followed by a brutal civil war. South Africa needed a revolution to oust the apartheid power of the Dutch. And France’s occupation of Morocco was marked by a series of Moroccan uprisings over the course of decades put down brutally by the French government. This isn’t just history to these countries. As Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Expect the past to bubble to the surface and expect the level of emotion to be simply off the page.