Women’s World Cup captured public’s imagination despite Fifa’s worst efforts | Marina Hyde

Patronising scheduling set it up to fail but players used their platform to highlight how the governing body lets them down

Gianni Infantino is one of those intensely political people who believe that as far as everyone else is concerned, there is no place for politics in football. It was just last year – at some grimly political press conference in Iran, naturally – that the Fifa president announced: “It’s very clear that politics should stay out of football and football should stay out of politics.” Is it? If so, the conclusion of the Women’s World Cup on Sunday suggests it is time to ask Infantino how that one’s working out for him.

So much of the previous month’s tournament had felt exuberantly political, from the delicious insolence of Megan Rapinoe in pre-emptively declining any invitation to Trump’s White House, to the boos and chants of “equal pay” that greeted Infantino’s own arrival on the pitch after the final, right down to the US players running over to the stands to kiss their wives and girlfriends in the hour of maximum-ratings triumph. I know this is a moment at which we have to talk about the potential to “grow the game”. So let me say that the last of those spectacles in particular served as a reminder of how far the men’s game has to grow in this department. Let’s hope it manages to ease itself into the late 20th century at some point over the next decade, so that maybe – by the year 2086 or something – we might one day even see a gay male player feel remotely able to do the same.

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