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Was that a nightmare? Did we really lose?” Abby Wambach said to her teammates as she awoke on the flight home from this summer’s World Cup in Germany. Twice the U.S. women’s soccer team had come close to winning the championship match against Japan. Wambach had made what seemed like the decisive goal in overtime, only to see the Japanese even the score and then prevail in a penalty-kick shootout. The American players were gutted. But theirs was an unexpected defeat with surprising consequences.
“We knew our playing resonated,” Wambach says. “But we didn’t know how it would translate into dollars and cents.” Dan Levy, an agent with Wasserman Media Group who represents Wambach, was on the plane, too, doing some translating. His e-mail traffic had already tripled with requests for appearances by Wambach, who’s been a professional soccer player for nine years and is among the privileged few whose sponsorship deals afford them a comfortable living.
Over the next several weeks, Wambach and the team’s goalkeeper, Hope Solo, would become the most recognizable female soccer players since Mia Hamm. They appeared on the Today show, the Late Show with David Letterman, and, in Solo’s case, Dancing With the Stars. Bank of America signed them up as spokespeople for the Chicago Marathon. Yet most others on the team remain anonymous—a reminder that for American soccer players public exposure is usually ephemeral. “It would have been amazing if this team won,” says Hamm, who led the U.S. team to a World Cup championship in 1999. “So many more players would have been included in the celebration.”
Women’s soccer has mass appeal: The U.S.-Japan match was watched by 13.5 million Americans, more than any U.S. men’s match during the 2010 World Cup. Yet it is far from a lucrative profession. The Women’s Professional Soccer league (WPS) is still struggling to find a broader audience and range of corporate sponsors. None of its six teams is profitable; in the men’s league, as many as half of the 18 teams may be in the black. The average salary for a female player is $25,000.
For Wambach and her teammates, scoring new endorsement money depends almost entirely on how the national team performs on the sport’s two big stages: the World Cup and the Olympics. The 2012 Games will provide the U.S. women with another chance at victory and the spoils that come with it. Coming in second probably won’t be good enough next time.
Wambach is the team’s leading scorer, tallest player (5’11”), and most outsize personality. “There’s a joke—well, it’s true. The girls on the national team gave me a T-shirt that said, ‘Help I’m Talking and I Can’t Shut Up,’” she says. Wambach’s experience makes her more aware than some of her younger teammates about the fleeting nature of success. “We’re getting a really solid taste of what fame is,” Wambach says. “But we didn’t win. There’s humility that goes along with that. It’s almost existential.” It’s also generally calculable: “Losing probably cost Wambach a couple of million dollars’ worth of additional deals,” says Bob Dorfman, a sports marketing expert at Baker Street Advertising in San Francisco. “She does have the potential to transcend the sport. The Olympics are coming up. That could be the team’s redemption.”
On a mid-September day, the U.S. players visit Portland, Ore., for an exhibition match against the Canadian national team and a goodwill visit to Nike, its main sponsor. Nike’s deal with the U.S. men’s and women’s teams is worth about $15 million a year, according to IEG Sponsorships. A 20-foot-long poster of Wambach hugging two teammates hangs on the outside wall of Nike’s Lance Armstrong gym. Wambach herself emerges from a limo-bus in her sweats, backpack slung over her shoulder, and is taken inside the Tiger Woods building for a lunch of steak, rice, and grilled vegetables. “This is good to see,” says Wambach. “I need to know they care and are putting hard work in. Because so am I.”
