Spot on, Y va. You can't undermine and underfund women's football for 100 years and then make fun of the lack of quality and competitiveness in the game. That's not how this works.
10-12 years ago Germany's men's team was down on its luck and Schweinsteiger and Ballack were the only decent talents they had managed to unearth this side of the 00s. Bundesliga was down the toilet basically. To turn it around they restructured the entire system and put Sammer in charge of creating an environment where young talented boys would thrive. The result a decade later is the World Cup trophy. Who has ever done anyting like that for women? Even the top-end talents lack the fundamental structures to become truly great, never mind the young hopeful teenage girls who love nothing more than to play football. We don't care about them because there isn't enough money in it, but of course there will never be enough money in it unless we start to care either.
Coming from a background in competitive swimming, which is possibly the most equal sport in the world, I've always been puzzled over the attitude towards female football players. Elite women don't swim as fast as elite men do, and that's not really the point either. I think our current incapacity as a society to measure greatness in more than one way is limiting us every bit as much as our incapacity to envision women as the equals of men without being identical to them.
