Just saw that mixed doubles is a huge draw at Wimbledon, so why not have this in soccer? As someone who played coed (just so everyone understands - 6 men, 6 women and a keeper) with high level men and women (college thru former pro), its highly entertaining and women can easily hold their own? That, with the fact that women’s soccer is very popular overseas… Now, I fully understand no high caliber player in either mens or womens would participate, but I could see some fringe professionals want to be a part of this…. I would think coed teams representing countries would be a fun draw…Am I wrong here?
Tennis isn’t a contact sport. I can’t imagine very many male players want to be known as the guy who broke a woman’s ankle making a poorly-timed tackle.
In coed rec soccer, no one is going full-force into tackles. It's generally understood that the ball is to be played mostly on the ground and there isn't a whole lot of heading. This remains true even with high level players, because no one wants to get injured in a rec game.
I played 5 a side in a coed game. I was in goal. The opposition coach pinned a female player to our defender leaving their more talented players lots of space. I told him to kick her, pinch her, push her but he refused because she was a woman. I even offered to switch positions and I'd kick her but he refused. This is why.
lol. You clearly haven’t played against high caliber women then. Am 100% certain a D1 level girl would smoke you.
Again, a D1 level woman can handle their own against men. I’ve seen it over and over. I’m not suggesting an English Premier League leg breaker would be participating in this….. Let’s take our blinders off for a moment and realize high level men and women can absolutely hold their own. Is there the potential for a woman or man to get injured, sure…. But that’s the reality of any sport. Very few professional athletes go out with the intent to end a career of someone else. These types of arguments are just stupid. Sure, a woman could get a bloody nose, so could a guy from an elbow…. Big deal.
I would bet there’s a lot of cities where this would generate more revenue than some mens teams or teams like the WNBA……..
Erm, I'm not arguing with that. Your mum could probably smoke me but I'm not a professional soccer player. But just look at the difference in physicality.
I have. Have you played a competitive game with said women? Because the exact same players play very differently depending on what kind of game they're playing in. I actually played D3 men's college soccer with a female teammate for two years. (The school now has a women's team, but didn't 20 years ago. Because our student population was almost two-thirds male at the time, we had no women's team and women could try out for the men's team.) Our one female player was high school all-state in Washington and passed up multiple scholarship offers from top-25 D1 schools. She started only one game in the two years I overlapped with her. She was probably our most technically skilled player, and definitely our best free kick and corner kick taker, but was also the slowest runner on the team, got pushed off the ball easily, and could only play a #10 role with minimal defensive responsibilities. She was only effective when we had our two most athletic defensive midfielders on the field with her. We saw this both in games and in daily training. All of us on the intercollegiate team also played in the intramural league, which was coed. The same female player who was barely competitive with the intercollegiate team was one of the two or three best players in intramurals. But the intramural league, like every coed league I've ever played in, banned slide tackling. And even among elite players, there's a certain understanding of how you play in rec leagues aside from the no-slide-tackling rule: you don't kick people, you don't try too hard to push people off the ball, you don't go into contested headers, and you mostly pass the ball on the ground which limits the number of 50-50 duels that take place. They scrimmage MLS academy teams quite regularly. They're typically on par with academy U-15 or U-16 teams, though they've had some big losses to teams even at those age levels. The USWNT players tend to be more skilled, so can score some goals, but they already struggle with the physicality of U-15 boys and always get scored on.
Again, just look at the physical difference between professional male players and professional female players in the video above. That's 3 guys running rings around the team that finished 4th in WSL2 last season.
These discussions of whether women could compete successfully against men never seem to occur in sports in which performances are measured against objective standards like minutes, seconds, feet and inches, sports like track & field, swimming and speed skating. In track, the current world records in most events are at the level that the men's world records were between 80 and 100 years ago. People in those sports don't bother with such discussions, because they can see on the stopwatch how pointless they are. All this doesn't mean that women's performances are any less worthwhile than the men's. It means that men are bigger, not they they are worthier. But that size difference does affect the score.