2023 Women’s World Cup: A Guide to the Righteous Protests, Inter-Team Romances, and ‘Rebel 15’

The FIFA World Cup kicks off July 20, gifting us a month’s worth of jaw-dropping athletic achievements and a reason to meaningfully use the emoji for the first time in a long time.

2023 marks the biggest Women’s World Cup ever, literally and culturally. It’s being hosted by two countries (Australia and New Zealand) for the first time, has 32 teams competing across 10 stadiums, and organizers are aiming to double the 2019 Cup’s 1.2 billion viewership with a record audience of 2 billion.

But behind the scenes, there’s been fired coaches, failed mutinies, burgeoning love, lots of name calling, and—because we’re talking about women athletes—plenty of stories about teams fighting to get paid what they’re worth. Team USA is favored to win it all (knock on wood!), the Netherlands will be looking for revenge, and Canada’s Christine Sinclair could set a new international record.

We’ve assembled a handy primer on all this and more for your 2023 Women’s Cup literacy. Let’s Go! Kick! Kill!

There is a years-long history to this months-long story, but in September, 15 Spanish national players took themselves out of World Cup selection to protect their mental well-being against the head coach, Jorge Vilda, and the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RSFF). They were declared the “Rebel 15,” and the RSFF threatened them with five-year bans. (Among the issues surrounding Vilda were his management style, his experience and credentials, that he wasn’t training players properly, didn’t have a game plan, and that his hiring was simply a favor to someone higher up.)

“I inform you that the events that have occurred and the situation that has arisen in the Spanish national team, a situation of which you are aware, are having an important effect on my emotional state and by extension my health,” each player e-mailed the RSFF at the time. Unfortunately, the RSFF’s maddening response was to make the e-mails public (which the players were furious about) and, four hours after the fact, release a statement that the move was “unprecedented,” “unethical,” and that “this rebellion would simply be put down,” according to the Guardian.

Ten months later, and the RSFF has seemingly stuck to its word. While a few small changes were implemented, only three of the “Rebel 15" chose to return. Among the 12 who won’t be at the Cup are three of Spain’s (and the sport’s) top players—Patri Guijarro (considered one of the best midfielders in the world), Mapi Leon (considered one of the best defenders in the world), and Sandra Panos (considered one of the best goalkeepers in the world).

Ellie Carpenter (in the off-white dress) is a defender for Australia, and Danielle van de Donk (in the white dress) is a midfielder for the Netherlands—but the couple both play for the French club, Lyonnais, and have been dating for about two years. (Van de Donk previously dated U.K. player Beth Mead when they both played for Arsenal.) “She (Carpenter) is the most energetic person I know,” van de Donk recently told The Australian. “She is very, very positive, and off the pitch she just brings a different kind of energy to the room.” Cute!

The Netherlands are in Group E with the U.S.—along with Portugal, who could be a wildcard, and Vietnam, who could prove to be an underdog—so the chances of them eventually facing off with Australia is fairly likely. And while a game between these two lovebirds could be fun to watch, I’m really clearing my schedule for the Netherlands vs. USA on July 26 at 9 p.m. “They’re basically already congratulating us on finishing in second place,” van de Donk told FIFA.com of the U.S. team in 2019. “I love it. Let them say what they want to say.”

And speaking of trash talk...

Nothing pisses me off like losers who think women can’t, or worse, shouldn’t trash talk. I do not condone violence, but some flirty shit-talking makes it a better time for us all. And Daniela Caracas, a defender for Colombia, got half of that right, at least.

On Friday, Colombia and Ireland played a pre-Cup training game, known as a “friendly,” but it ended after 20 minutes because the Colombian team reportedly got too physical. Eek.

“The players, [for] the first time since I am coaching them, they feared for their bodies,” Vera Pauw, the Republic of Ireland’s head coach, told Sky Sports on Saturday. “I went to the coach of Colombia and I said: ‘I need help from you, we need to calm this down. We all want to go to the World Cup.’”

She added that she’d never experienced something like that “before in my 47 years being involved in football, not as a player, not as a coach.”

This all happened after a challenge led to Ireland’s midfielder, Denise O’Sullivan, getting rushed to the hospital with a potential shin injury. (So far, she’s reported to be OK.) Afterward, Colombia center-half Daniela Caracas told reporters of the Ireland team, “They are just girls, one little foul and they started complaining,” outside Meakin Park (Ireland’s training base in Australia). “Honestly, let them eat shit.”

Both federations released a statement, with Ireland saying that the decision to end the game happened because it “became overly physical,” while Colombia respected the decision but said the friendly was “framed within the rules of the game, healthy competition and fair play.” Only Ireland, Colombia, and God will ever know what really happened on the field in Brisbane that Friday.

Here’s a mutiny success story: In February, Wendie Renard, the 32-year-old captain of France’s team—who’s considered to be one of the top defenders in women’s soccer—said she wouldn’t play in this year’s World Cup as long as Corinne Diacre was the coach, in order to “preserve my mental health.”

“I love France more than anything, I am not perfect, far from it, but I can no longer support the current system, which is far from the requirements of the highest level,” Renard wrote on social media. “My face may hide the pain but my heart is suffering... and I don’t want to suffer anymore.” That same day, two other players, Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani, said they’d be stepping back as well.

Two weeks later, Diacre was fired. The French Football Federation stated that “the malfunctions observed seem, in this context, irreversible” and that management’s divide with players had “reached the point of no return.”

Diacre said she was the victim of “slander” and “untruths” and that she’d been made “the subject of a smear campaign that is astonishing in its violence and dishonesty.” But the controversies surrounding her leadership go back years; her bad blood with Renard, specifically, stretches back to 2017. After Diacre was named head coach, she removed Renard as captain, stating that she played better for her club team, Lyon, than the national team.

Diacre was replaced by Herve Renard—the former Saudi head coach—in March. The team faces off with Jamaica (we’ll get to their story later) on July 23.

The idea that women’s sports just aren’t as exciting to watch as men’s sports is a lame, stale excuse long made by idiots and sexists. Luckily, that attitude has started to shift over the past few years—especially after Orange, a French telecom company, put a giant dent in it with a stereotype-smashing commercial aired in June that’s since gone viral. “Only les Bleus can give us these emotions,” the commercial reads after a 45-ish second montage of screaming fans and incredible goals from France’s best male players. “But that’s not them you’ve just seen.” The montage then rewinds to reveal that the male players were all deepfakes; they’d just imposed the men’s faces onto the bodies of the women who were actually performing the thrilling, game-winning plays. Magnifique!

Here’s another great story of shitty federations being shitty to their star athletes (and their coach, and their assistant coach): Ahead of the Super Falcons’ departure to Australia, the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) reportedly canceled the team’s World Cup bonuses after FIFA announced they’d be awarding at least $30,000 to every team member appearing in the tournament.

An anonymous source told The Punch, a Nigerian newspaper, that the team met and all agreed on potentially sitting out the first game in protest. “At the last World Cup, the same thing happened and we were shortchanged, we won’t allow this to happen any longer,” the source said. “They dare not treat the [Nigerian men’s team] like this. Is it because we are women? We must put a stop to this this time around.”

But according to Nigeria’s captain, Onome Ebb, this potential boycott isn’t true. “Honestly, I have no idea where that is coming from,” she said in a video on the team’s Twitter account. (Which, of course, is not where she’d admit that they had talked about it and were planning a boycott.)

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s coach, Randy Waldrum, is also at war with the NFF for similar issues. In the past month, he’s gone on two sports podcasts to say that the federation owes him 14 months of salary, has been ignoring his requests for what the team needs, and that some team members haven’t been paid for two years. In response, the NFF called him an “incompetent loudmouth,” a “Mr. Blabbermouth,” and the “worst coach.” Then the NFF banned Waldrum’s assistant coach, Lauren Gregg, from traveling to the Cup because Waldrum wouldn’t replace any of his current goalkeepers with one they suggested.

“I’ve worked with federations all over the world,” Gregg told The Athletic, “and I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

Nigeria is scheduled to face off against Canada on Thursday, which feels somewhat appropriate seeing how Canada right now is... (next slide)

Canada’s women’s team, which won the gold at the 2020 Olympics, have been fighting with the Canada Soccer Association (CSA) for equal pay since their last collective bargaining agreement expired in 2021. The team threatened to strike before the SheBelieves Cup in February, but CSA threatened to take legal action, so they played under protest while wearing purple shirts before each game that read, “Enough is Enough.” (They should have protested the name of that Cup, as well.)

The team is demanding equal pay, claiming they’ve yet to be paid for 2022, and saying funding cuts hurt their 2023 Cup preparations. They also called out the organization for spending $11 million on the men’s team in 2021, while only spending $5.1 million on the women’s team. Similar to the U.S. team’s fight, Canada’s women’s team has qualified for seven of the eight women’s Cups and two Olympics, while the men’s team qualified for their first World Cup since 1987 in 2022.

“Pay equity is actually just a little piece of the puzzle,” captain Christine Sinclair testified against the CSA in March. “It’s about equal treatment. It’s about equal opportunities, equal resources, and honestly, until that happens, we’re going to be at a stalemate.”

As of Wednesday, Canada’s team still hadn’t reached an agreement. Also, Sinclair could very well break her own record during the Cup—she currently holds the international goalscoring record (of women and men) with 190 goals in 322 games. Even if she doesn’t break it, no one else is even close.

Apart from the failed mutinies and pay disputes, one of the bigger bummers of this year’s Cup is the sheer number of top players who are out on injury.

The U.S. has five players out: Catarina Macario, Becky Sauerbrunn, Sam Mewis, Christen Press, and Mallory Swanson, Macario and Press both with ACL injuries. Janine Beckie, a forward on Canada’s team who helped lead the country to their first Olympic gold in 2020, tore her ACL in March. Three of France’s players are out, two with ACL injuries. Netherlands’ all-time leading scorer, Vivianne Miedema, is out with a torn ACL. In May, Katie Rood of New Zealand wrote that she’s “joined the ever-growing ACL club” on Instagram. Hazel Nali, Zambia’s starting goalkeeper, is out after suffering an ACL tear. Three of England’s players, Beth Mead, Fran Kirby, and captain Leah Williamson, are also out—Mead and Williamson with, you guessed it, ACL injuries.

The list goes on, and I am really sensing a disturbing pattern here.

Kristie Mewis (right) is a midfielder for the USA, while her girlfriend of two years, Sam Kerr, is a forward for Australia. Kerr—who won the ESPY for Best International Women’s Soccer Player in 2018, 2019, and 2022—previously dated another USA midfielder, Nikki Stanton...and they had yet to publicly declare their breakup when Mewis was photographed comforting Kerr on the field after Australia lost the Olympic bronze 4-3 to the U.S. in 2020. (The two had started their relationship through Instagram during quarantine.)

Mewis and Kerr have extensively documented their relationship ever since. (Stanton is now dating Megan Rapinoe’s twin sister, Rachael Rapinoe.) Australia’s ranked No.10 going into the Cup, while the U.S. is (obviously) ranked No.1, so the odds of an eventual matchup between the two are pretty high. Fun fact: Kerr’s middle name is May, and Mewis’ middle name is June. True love is beautiful and gross.

The Jamaica women’s team, known as the Reggae Girlz, has received so little assistance from their federation, the Jamaican Football Federation (JFF), that one of their moms had to set up a GoFundMe to help them get to Australia.

Midfielder Havana Solaun’s mom, Sandra Lee Phillips, set up the page in April to help the team pay for all the World Cup travel, food, training, and staff salaries—it’s raised nearly $50,000 by Wednesday. Another fundraiser site set up by the Reggae Girlz Foundation also raised over $45, 000.

In June, every player posted a shared statement on their social media channels, calling out the JFF for their lack of support. “On multiple occasions, we have sat down with the federation to respectfully express concerns resulting from subpar planning, transportation, accommodations, training conditions, compensation, communication, nutrition and accessibility to proper resources,” the statement read. “We have also showed up repeatedly without receiving contractually agreed upon compensation.”

The Jamaican team was disbanded in 2010 due to lack of funding but was restarted in 2014 thanks to Cedella Marley, Bob Marley’s daughter, who helped secure sponsorship deals. They qualified for the 2019 Cup but didn’t make it past the group stage—but they’re entering the 2023 Cup ranked No. 43 and their striker, Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, was ranked the 19th best player at the Cup by ESPN.

A bit of good news, kind of? Maybe? In January, The Athletic reported that Saudi Arabia’s official tourism board, Visit Saudi, was possibly going to sponsor this year’s Cup. But seeing how the Middle Eastern country has an atrocious human rights record and regularly imprisons women’s rights defenders there was immediate backlash. (Women’s soccer needs more money, Saudi has all the money, but is this really where we want the money to come from?)

But, FIFA’s president said in March that a contract never emerged. “I can clarify that there were discussions with Visit Saudi. At the end this discussion didn’t lead into a contract,” Gianni Infantino told the FIFA congress in Rwanda. “How do you say it? It was a storm in a water glass. A storm in a teacup.” A storm in a teacup wouldn’t sentence a woman to 34 years in prison for retweeting some activists, but OK.

Infantino maintained he didn’t see a problem with taking the sponsorship money—especially since Saudi Arabia now has a women’s national team—and mentioned that no one seems to be bothered by the $1.5 billion in trade between Saudi and Australia every year, which, you know what, fair point. But, at least for now, the tourism board of a country known for blatant sportswashing is not directly sponsoring a women’s international sporting event.

Similar to Nigeria, England’s team won’t be receiving bonuses now that FIFA is giving performance bonuses to every player. But on Tuesday, the Lionesses said they’re pausing their discussions with the Football Association (FA) to solely focus their attention on the Cup and are “disappointed that a resolution has still not been achieved.”

In the past, the Cup bonuses that players received were part of the overall money the national federations got from FIFA—so now that FIFA is giving money directly to the players, the FA said they shouldn’t have to give them additional bonuses. (During talks, there was reportedly acknowledgment that this strategy could use some tweaking, according to the Guardian.) But FA’s decision is at odds with other top-ranked teams’ federations, like the U.S. and Canada, who said players will still get bonuses on top of the FIFA money.

“We view the successful conclusion of these discussions, through player input and a transparent long‑term plan, as key for the growth of women’s football in England,” the player’s statement read.

Denmark’s captain, Pernille Harder (left), and Swedish defender Magdalena Eriksson have been together for nearly 10 years—and have a combined 300 million (approximately) titles, trophies, and goals between them. Both played for Chelsea in England, but those contracts ran up in June and they’ve both since joined Bayern Munich in Germany.

Pernille was ranked the best female soccer player in the world for the second time—dethroning Sam Kerr—by the Guardian in 2020. That same year, she broke the record for the most expensive female soccer player after she got traded to Chelsea. (The record was then broken by Keira Walsh in 2022). Meanwhile, Eriksson is continuously ranked as one of the best defenders in Europe.

In 2019, the couple went viral at the World Cup when Eriksson went over to the stands to kiss Harder after Sweden defeated Canada. Even though the two had already been out and dating for years, the photo of them was held up as an emblem of LGBTQ hope and pride. “I think that’s when I felt the demand for role models in that way, because of how big it was and how many people wrote to me on Instagram saying they looked up to us and how much we’d helped them,” Eriksson told the Guardian at the time. “That’s when I understood that we’re really powerful together. Before, we hadn’t really seen ourselves as that.”

Denmark is in Group D with China, England, and Haiti, facing off with China on Saturday, while Sweden is in Group G with South Africa, Italy, and Argentina, with Sweden playing South Africa on Sunday—Group D is pretty strong, with England expected to place first, while Sweden is expected to place first in Group G. The chances for a matchup between these two legends is not super high.

If you haven’t put it together by now, one of the general sentiments going into the 2023 Women’s World Cup is that many of these football federations suck and female soccer players are working their asses off, not just to win, but to also simply get fucking paid.

Australia’s national team, the Matildas, for their part, are using their position as co-host of this year’s Cup to keep a spotlight on pay disparities within the sport—which was a huge headline during the 2019 World Cup when the U.S. was in the throes of their own equal pay fight. (Which, of course, they won...and officially signed the historic bargaining agreement in September.)

On Monday, the Matildas released a video calling out FIFA for the women’s prize still being lower than the men’s while noting how many of the teams competing have been “denied the basic right to organize and collectively bargain.” The Matildas went on strike in 2015 and achieved the same prize money minimums for tournaments as the men’s team in 2019. In 2013, they successfully bargained to not have to do their own laundry.

Currently, the total prize for the Women’s World Cup is $110 million—about 300% higher than the 2019 Cup prize. But it still deeply pales in comparison to the $440 million prize awarded to the winners (Argentina) of the men’s 2022 World Cup. (FIFA also didn’t award prize money to women until 2007, even though the first women’s Cup was held in 1991, nearly a decade after the men’s Cup first started coming with prize money.) And while we’re on the topic of the U.S. women’s team making history...

Can they become the first team (men or women) to win three back-to-back-to-back World Cups? Only three other teams have won back-to-back: Italy’s men’s team in 1934 and 1938; Brazil’s men’s team in 1958 and 1962; and Germany’s women’s team in 2003 and 2007. And while other teams have three Cups, no one’s ever won three times in a row. (Plus a handful of their top players out are on injury, the majority of the roster is young and has never played in a World Cup before, and there are a ton of international teams catching up to them in skill in power.)

The answer is yes, yes they can. ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ They kick off the Cup against Vietnam on Friday at 9 p.m. ET.