By Kevin Draper
One coach was notorious at the highest levels of women’s soccer for alternately berating his players and then quizzing them about their sex lives. Another called in a player to review game film and showed her pornography instead.
A third coach coerced multiple players into sexual relationships, behaviour that one top team found so disturbing that it fired him. But when he was hired by a rival team only a few months later, the original club, which had documented his behaviour in an internal investigation, said nothing. Instead, they publicly wished him well in his new post.
Those details and others fill a highly anticipated investigative report into abuse in women’s soccer that found sexual misconduct, verbal abuse and emotional abuse by coaches in the game’s top tier, the National Women’s Soccer League, and issued warning signs that girls face abuse in youth soccer as well.
The report was published Monday, a year after players outraged by what they saw as a culture of abuse in their sport demanded changes by refusing to take the field. It found that leaders of the NWSL and the US Soccer Federation — the governing body of the sport in America — as well as owners, executives and coaches at all levels failed to act on years of voluminous and persistent reports of abuse by coaches.
All were more concerned about being sued by coaches or about the teetering finances of women’s professional soccer than player welfare, according to the report, creating a system in which abusive and predatory coaches were able to move freely from team to team at the top level.
“Our investigation has revealed a league in which abuse and misconduct — verbal and emotional abuse and sexual misconduct — had become systemic, spanning multiple teams, coaches and victims,” Sally Q Yates, the lead investigator, wrote in the report’s executive summary. “Abuse in the NWSL is rooted in a deeper culture in women’s soccer, beginning in youth leagues, that normalises verbally abusive coaching and blurs boundaries between coaches and players.”
Players and officials from the NWSL’s Portland Thorns and Houston Dash pause for a minute of solidarity during a match last October.Credit:AP
Last year, US Soccer commissioned Yates, a former deputy attorney general, and the law firm King & Spalding to look into the sport after reports in The Athletic and The Washington Post detailed accusations of sexual and verbal abuse against NWSL coaches. After the news media reports, and after games were postponed as furious players protested publicly, NWSL executives resigned and were fired. Within weeks, half of the 10-team league’s coaches had been linked to allegations of abuse, and some of the world’s top players had recounted their own stories of mistreatment.
Cindy Parlow Cone, the US Soccer president and a former member of the national team, called the findings “heartbreaking and deeply troubling” in a statement. Cone said US Soccer was “fully committed to doing everything in its power to ensure that all players — at all levels — have a safe and respectful place to learn, grow and compete,” and said the federation would immediately implement a number of the report’s recommendations.
The report made a lengthy list of recommendations that it said should be adopted by US Soccer, and in some cases the NWSL, including making a public list of individuals suspended or barred by the governing body, meaningfully vetting coaches when licensing them, requiring investigations into accusations of abuse, making clear policies and rules around acceptable behaviour and conduct, and hiring player safety officers, among other requirements.
The report also raises the question whether some NWSL owners should be disciplined or forced to sell their teams, as it recommended the NWSL “determine whether disciplinary action is appropriate for any of these owners or team executives.”
Fans in the stand at the same NWSL match, which came after two players blew the whistle on years of alleged harassment.Credit:AP
Even with so much of the worst abuse publicly known, the Yates report is stunning in how meticulously it details how many powerful soccer officials were told about abuse and how little they did to investigate or stop it. Among those whose inaction is detailed are a former US Soccer president; the organisation’s former CEO and women’s national team coach; and the leadership of the Portland Thorns, one of the NWSL’s most popular and best-supported teams.
“Teams, the league and the federation not only repeatedly failed to respond appropriately when confronted with player reports and evidence of abuse, they also failed to institute basic measures to prevent and address it,” Yates wrote. She added that “abusive coaches moved from team to team, laundered by press releases thanking them for their service,” while those with knowledge of their misconduct stayed silent.
The report said the sport does little to train athletes and coaches about harassment, retaliation and fraternisation. It noted that “overwhelming” numbers of players, coaches and US Soccer staff members remarked that “women players are conditioned to accept and respond to abusive coaching behaviours as youth players.”
While the report details complaints made about several coaches, it focuses its narrative on three: Paul Riley, Rory Dames and Christy Holly. The accusations against Riley, who last coached the North Carolina Courage, and Dames, who coached the Chicago Red Stars, have been well documented in news media reports. The accusations against Holly, who was abruptly dismissed as coach of Racing Louisville FC last year with little explanation, have not been aired publicly before.
US Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone is a former member of the national team.Credit:AP
The New York Times sought interviews with Riley and Holly in the past year, but did not receive responses from them, and neither man immediately responded to requests for comment Monday. Dames did not immediately return a reporter’s call Monday.
In the cases of all three coaches, the report found, NWSL and US Soccer officials, as well as individual team owners and executives, were repeatedly made aware of complaints of inappropriate behaviour but largely did nothing to address them or prevent them from occurring elsewhere.
In addition to detailing the behaviour of several prominent coaches and the inaction of others, the report also took note of individuals and organisations who were not forthcoming or who actively tried to stymie the investigation — even as some publicly said they were cooperating.
Rectifying the problems identified in the report will be difficult. Soccer in the United States is run by a number of organisations — federations, professional leagues, youth clubs and state soccer organisations — that have overlapping authority, a tangled web that the report suggested may have played a role in reports of abusive behaviour going unheeded.
And the revelations may not be over. A separate joint investigation by the NWSL and its players’ association has not been completed, and the report also did not investigate youth soccer, even as it made clear that the investigators believe abuse is prevalent there as well.
“The roots of abuse in women’s soccer run deep and will not be eliminated through reform in the NWSL alone,” investigators wrote.
