This week we present the New Zealand side for the Cup of Nations Friendly Tournament later this month in Australia and look at the recent franchise news from the NWSL, with the Seattle Reign moving an hour south to mid-sized Tacoma and becoming Reign FC. We also present the national teams for the annual Algarve Cup at the end of this month in Portugal.
New Zealand names the Australian Cup of Nations Roster, with Abby Erceg's Return
New Zealand Head Coach Tom Sermanni has named the squad for an important friendly tournament in Australia ahead of this summer's Women's World Cup in France. The inaugural Cup of Nations will include three other Women's World Cup bound squads: Australia, Korea Republic and Argentina; the tournament starts February 28. Most welcoming to the Football Ferns was the news that their former captain Abby Erceg (North Carolina Courage), who has 132 caps, has decided to end her national team retirement. Erceg had stepped away twice recently over disputes with the Federation over payments to players and strategic direction. She has been stellar in the NWSL, winning two league titles in three years and is still one of the best defenders in the world—receiving the NWSL Defender of the Year accolade in 2018. Erceg has competed at three Olympic Games and three FIFA Women's World Cups and could do the quartet for both if she makes the final squads in 2019 and 2020.
Tom Sermanni was pleased to have Erceg in the fold: "Abby is a world-class and highly-experienced international player. To have someone of her ability make herself available for the programme as we build to the World Cup is a huge boost for everyone." Erceg said: "It has been a big couple of years. I felt I needed to take a bit of a stand and there have been a lot of changes. Obviously, the last time I came back it was a difficult time and it wasn't quite right. This time I have done my research that it is going to be the right thing for me to do. When I do come back I want to make sure that it is for good this time. I have a lot of confidence in Tom and what he is going to do with the team. Obviously, I have worked with all of the girls before. I think it is going to be a lot of fun."
Forwards Emma Kete and Aimee Phillips and midfielder Daisy Cleverley were also recalled to the national side. Kete (31) last played for New Zealand at the 2015 Women's World Cup and has 48 full caps and 3 goals. Phillips (27) played last season with Serbian power ZFK Spartak Subotica and then with Cardiff of Wales during the 2018 UEFA Women's Champions League, scoring once with two assists in three qualifying round games Cleverley has played in two FIFA U-17 WWC finals in 2012 and 2014, the U-20 World Cup in Canada and the 2015 Women's World Cup in Canada, and is currently at the University of California-Berkeley.
Katie Duncan has 119 caps while others with a century of caps include Ria Percival (135), Ali Riley (119), Annalie Longo (110) and Betsy Hassett (107). Duncan has played with Notts County and FC Zurich in Switzerland in the past and has played in three Olympic Games Finals and three Women's World Cup finals. Experienced forwards Amber Hearn (Logrono of Spain who played at Doncaster Rovers over a decade ago) and Hannah Wilkinson (Vittsjo GIK of Sweden) were not brought into camp due to injuries.
Four of the 23 women on the squad are playing in the U.S.—three in the NWSL and one in college, with three in England and one each in Australia, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Seven are based at home and three are currently without a club. Rebecca Stott of Melbourne City played last season with Sky Blue FC in the NWSL and is thought to be headed to Europe, either before or after the World Cup.
Football Ferns squad for Cup of Nations (Club, Country, Caps and Goals)
CJ Bott (Vittsjo GIK, SWE) 12, 0
Katie Bowen (Utah Royals, USA) 56, 3
Daisy Cleverley (University of California, USA) 6, 2
Katie Duncan (Onehunga Sports) 119, 1
Abby Erceg (North Carolina Courage, USA) 132, 6
Victoria Esson (Avaldsnes, NOR) 3, 0
Anna Green (Unattached) 71, 7
Sarah Gregorius (Upper Hutt City) 88, 33
Betsy Hassett (KR Reykjavik, ISL) 107, 13
Emma Kete (Unattached) 48, 3
Anna Leat (East Coast Bays) 3, 0
Annalie Longo (Cashmere Technical) 110, 15
Meikayla Moore (MSV Duisburg, GER) 31, 3
Sarah Morton (Western Springs) 5, 1
Erin Nayler (Bordeaux, FRA) 57, 0
Ria Percival (West Ham United, ENG) 135, 14
Aimee Phillips (Unattached) 6, 1
Ali Riley (Chelsea, ENG) 119, 1
Katie Rood (Bristol City (on loan at Lewes), ENG) 8, 4
Paige Satchell (Three Kings United) 7, 1
Stephanie Skilton (Papakura City) 8, 0
Rebekah Stott (Melbourne City, AUS) 67, 4
Rosie White (Chicago Red Stars, USA) 95, 23
Seattle Reign moves to Tacoma, Washington
The Seattle Reign had an interesting press conference on January 30, announcing that they are moving out of the City of Seattle and will play in neighboring Tacoma, which is about an hour's drive south of their current home at Memorial Stadium, situated in the near north edge of downtown Seattle. The club will be known as Reign FC, which is interesting, as they will not be labeled as Seattle anymore in their name nor will they take on that of their new city of Tacoma.
There are some interesting ramifications of the move and as a native of the State of Washington, I see this as a critical decision for the future of women's professional soccer in the state. Tacoma for years was seen as a poor stepchild to the Emerald City of Seattle, symbolized by the iconic Space Needle built for the 1962 World's Fair, which towers over the club's now former home of Memorial Stadium. The club said that, besides not being able to sell beer in a stadium controlled by the local school district, that the 70 year old structure was insufficient for live television telecasts and overall needed too much upkeep and updates. Memorial was set to be demolished later this year, but plans to rebuild it are uncertain as the school district did not include the project funding in its latest public bonding initiative vote this month. The Stadium does badly need some upgrades but the club gives up a prime central location that is the ancestral home of professional soccer in the city of Seattle.
There is a hint of sadness to see professional soccer leave the stadium, even though it is long in the tooth. This author saw his first pro soccer game on May 9, 1969, at High School Memorial Stadium (as it was then known) between Kilmarnock of Scotland and West Ham United, who were playing on behalf of NASL sides in 1969 (Kilmarnock for St. Louis Stars and West Ham for Baltimore Bays), when the league only had 5 teams. The coach of West Ham was future English manager Bob Greenwood, who coached the Three Lions from 1977 to 1982. The crowd of 7,764 outdrew the Seattle Pilots and Washington Senators baseball game that evening (7,148). Major League Baseball Seattle Pilots were in their first and only season in the city before being moved to Milwaukee, where they have remained all these years as the Brewers. Later in the summer, Seattle Wolves—a team put together at short notice—beat Wolfsburg Goettingen SC of West Germany 3-1 at Memorial. The Wolves imported a few Canadians who would go on to play with the Vancouver Whitecaps in the NASL when that franchise also began in 1974, including Glen Johnson and Buzz Parsons. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer summarized the impact of the game thus: "This Wolves club was the most powerful club to ever represent Seattle in a game of this importance." These events helped to convince the NASL to expand to Seattle five years later when the league was on more solid footing.
The stadium became the epicenter of the sport in 1974 when the Sounders joined the NASL and played their first two seasons at the artificial turf stadium (1974-1975), attracting 12,132 fans to their first ever league game, with their smallest crowd totaling 11, 282 that first year. After expanding the stadium to 17,000 seats for year two, they averaged 16,818 with a season low of 14,252. The Sounders needed a bigger home and thus moved into the 50,000 plus Kingdom in 1976, christening the stadium with an exhibition match against the Pele-led Cosmos, setting a national record at the time for soccer in the country with 58,120 attending.
The Reign came to Memorial Stadium in 2014, after a year at suburban Tukwila, near the airport and midway between Tacoma and Seattle. They played at the same site as the Seattle Sounders Women's WPSL team, which won the league championship this past year. Bill Predmore, the owner of the Reign, originally tried to work with the Major League Soccer Sounders in 2013, which averaged 40,641 this past season in a stadium downtown that they share with the NFL Seahawks, with a capacity of 68,740. Predmore went on his own and had to deal for years with the market confusion of whether the Reign or the Sounders Women were the true professional women's team in the region. Reign FC's all-time record at Memorial was extraordinarily strong at 36-16-6 (W-D-L).
Tacoma has quite a history with the sport of soccer as well, with the Tacoma Tides entering the minor league men's American Soccer league for one season in 1976, where long-time U.S. men's national team coach Bruce Arena was a reserve goalkeeper. Then the Tacoma Stars being an indoor force for years in Major League Soccer, attracting large crowds to their multipurpose indoor domed stadium (1984-92). The problem is perception—Tacoma, symbolized by the "Tacoma Aroma" for so many years from a distinctive smell lingering from its wood processing plants—is a suburban city, though it has been revitalized, particularly in the downtown area. They will share a minor league baseball stadium (historic Cheney Stadium, with a capacity of 6,500 that was first built in 1960) with the Pacific Coast League Tacoma Rainier's, with plans to build a soccer specific stadium next season, with a capacity of 5,000. If the Reign or the Tacoma Defiance (the new name for the Seattle Sounders II USL minor league side that will also plays there) draws more than capacity, can it be expanded and who will pay for it? Other salient key questions are: 1) Will the general public in Tacoma adopt a team without the city's name in the title and 2) will Seattleites drive an hour or more for games?
One worries about Predmore's decision to leave soccer-mad Seattle. Grant it, the Reign have been quite far down the awareness radar, odd for a team whose owner heads an advertising agency and should know about promotion. The club has struggled on the field, ranging from a low of 3,632 in 2014—their first season at Memorial—to a high of 4,602 in 2016. Last season, the club slipped under the 4,000 mark for the first time since 2014, averaging 3,824. While at Tukwila in 2013, they averaged only 2,036, while the Sounders Women of the now defunct W-League averaged 1,090, after drawing 4,329 a game in 2012, a gap year for women's professional leagues after the WPS folded ahead of the 2012 season, almost ten times the W-League average of 442. The Sounders Women drew sellouts to Starfire Field in Tukwila in 2012 with U.S. National Team stars Hope Solo and Alex Morgan leading a star studded lineup ahead of their Olympic Games-winning summer.
Also, the move will see the Hanauer family come into the Reign ownership group as well as the current owners of the Raniers, led by Mikal Thomsen, the Chairman and CEO. Adrian Hanauer steered the Sounders through years of minor league soccer and were part of the ownership group of the hugely successful MLSSeattle Sounders when they came in the league for the 2009 campaign and really helped advance the standards of the league. The Sounders have never missed the playoffs and won a title in 2016.
Predmore explained his decision to move the club: "We spent a lot of time inside Cheney Stadium to imagine the matchday experience we could provide. We can say with certainty that the experience our players and fans will have at Cheney Stadium will be an exponential jump from what we could deliver at Memorial Stadium. We worked incredibly hard over the past year to find a solution that would allow us to continue playing our home matches in Seattle, but the requirements imposed by the NWSL limited our options. Out of these challenging circumstances arose an opportunity that fills us with great optimism for our future."
With regards to Tacoma, Predmore added, "Over the last year we spent a significant amount of time with the group operating the Rainiers and Sounders FC's USL squad. We found their vision for growing the game in Tacoma extremely compelling. The more we talked, the more we believed Tacoma could be an ideal long-term option for our organization. The name change reflects not just our move to the South Sound, but also celebrates our ambition to represent the entire region. Tacoma will be our home, but we'll invest significant effort to retain our connection to Seattle and the Eastside."
The Predmores said that they looked at seven other stadiums in and around Seattle but all failed to meet Pro League Standards in terms of non-compliant playing surface or seating while the baseball Seattle Mariner's T-Mobile Field's rent would have been too expensive. Discussions to share the Sounders stadium broke down over undisclosed issues, but cost was certainly a factor for the low-drawing Reign.
The move of the team to a mid-size city, that essentially is viewed as a suburban site, is interesting and if the Reign has success there, they may take on the Tacoma name. This move and potential name change also may not please league officials and the overall concern is that suburban teams have not been successful in the NWSL. Sky Blue FC in Piscataway, New Jersey is ostensibly the New York City team but is an hour south of the Holland Tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey and has been an unmitigated disaster in terms of building a fan base. Chicago Red Stars started out in suburban Naperville and moved to Chicago Fire's MLS stadium a few years ago in Bridgeview, Illinois—again in a south Chicago suburb but that is a major attraction for area soccer fans. The Reign's move is one that will be scrutinized by many this year and in the future to see if it is precedent setting or just another poor off-field decision by the franchise.
Algarve Cup 26th season lineup set with 8 of 12 teams in France this summer
Algarve Cup 2019 will see four groups of three teams' battle it out for the title, with the hosts Portugal in Group D alongside Sweden (joint tournament title holders in 2018) and Switzerland. The event is hosted by the Portuguese Football Federation.
Eight of the 12 teams are World Cup bound this summer:
Group A: Canada, Scotland—both WWC bound—along with Iceland.
Group B: Spain and Netherlands—both WWC bound—and Poland.
Group C: China, Denmark and Norway—all 3 WWC bound.
Group D Sweden—WWC bound—and Switzerland and Portugal.
The tournament begins on February 27 with medal games on March 6.
Tim Grainey is a contributor to Tribal Football. His latest book Beyond Bend it Like Beckham on the global game of women's football. Get your copy today.
Follow Tim on Twitter: @TimGrainey
