The winning left-footed strike, the team gleefully piling on top of one another after 13 gruelling minutes of extra time – a million moments could have immortalised Spain’s historic Women’s World Cup win. Instead, their victory has been distilled into one grim image: Spanish Football Federation boss Luis Rubiales forcing an unwanted kiss on player Jenni Hermoso in a scandal that has all but brushed their success from the public domain.
For 10 days, Rubiales’s various denials of wrongdoing and refusals to step down – in spite of a preliminary sexual assault investigation, FIFA urging him to relinquish his role and suspending him for 90 days – have dominated a tournament that had been hailed as the ‘great leveller’ for the women’s game, with his mother apparently so perturbed by the furore as to have locked herself in a church and gone on a hunger strike.
The fallout has unleashed a ‘social tsunami’ in Spain, where women have taken to the streets in support of Hermoso, who described the kiss as “unconsensual behaviour” that left her feeling “vulnerable and a victim of aggression.” Her teammates have released a statement refusing to play for their country until Rubiales resigns, a sentiment reiterated by England’s Lionesses, who shared their support on social media, writing that “the behaviour of those who think they are invincible must not be tolerated.”
Through it all, there is a curious silence from one group in Britain: most male players and pundits. Beyond Gary Lineker tweeting that Rubiales is an “awful bloke,” and Ian Wright criticising UEFA’s failure to take him to task, the much-lauded men of the English game appear to have been little moved, making no such team statement nor public comments of their own.
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Why? Backing women’s fair treatment in a sport that has, until recent years, denied them that chance, and in a week where Mason Greenwood departed Manchester United in a cloud of controversy, seems a small ask.