The State of Women’s Soccer

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The FIFA Women’s World Cup is underway in Australia and New Zealand. As well as featuring more teams than any previous Women’s World Cup tournament, it has broken records for the number of tickets sold — although organizers did have to give away tickets to some underattended matches in New Zealand.

There have also been some controversies, including confusion about the extent of the injury that kept the Australian star player Sam Kerr out of her team’s first three matches in the tournament, and a question to Ghizlane Chebbak, the captain of the Moroccan team, about her teammates’ sexual orientation that later prompted an apology from the reporter.

To make sense of it all, I talked to Tariq Panja, a sportswriter with The Times who has covered soccer for nearly two decades, and who has been reporting on the tournament from Sydney and Brisbane. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and space.

There are 32 teams this year at the Women’s World Cup, up from the previous 24, with eight of those being debutante teams. How has the expanded format affected the tournament?

In France, four years ago, we had a situation where the United States played Thailand and won 14-0, which is a score that is more akin to a sport like rugby. The fear was if you expand the field, you’re going to have more of these lopsided games with more of these teams that haven’t got the experience. But what we’ve seen is completely the opposite, barring a few scorelines.

We saw Haiti almost tie with the European champion, England. We saw Jamaica, which had never scored a point in a previous World Cup appearance, getting a creditable draw with France, one of the top sides in women’s football. And we had an incredible story out of New Zealand, which had only won its first game, in six attempts in previous World Cups, at the opening game against Norway, and was then humbled on home soil by the Philippines.