THE RESULT OF a soccer game between a side of US women and a team called the Wrexham Red Dragons has been misleadingly shared online to suggest the US national side lost 12-0 to a lower-league men’s side.
The match, which was held as part of an unofficial tournament, has been cited online in arguments disparaging women’s sport and payment to women athletes, and used to suggest that trans athletes shouldn’t be able to participate in women’s sport.
The claims have featured in online publications, as well as on social media posts which have been shared tens of thousands of times.
One headline read: “4th-tier men’s team destroys US women’s soccer team 12-0, reaffirming that biological males have physical advantages over women.”
The far-right US outlet Breitbart, which has repeatedly published false and misleading content, ended their article (titled: US Women’s Soccer Team Destroyed 12-0 by Team of Older, Male Wrexham Players) by arguing that the result cast doubt that the women’s soccer team deserved the same pay as men.
One person shared that article’s headline on social media with the comment: “Still think Trans in Women’s Sports is Fair?” while a Facebook page called The Antifeminist Warriors 0.3 said the result showed “This is why it’s not ok to put men disguised as women vs women in competition”.
The latter post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook.
Many other posts simply described retired male footballers as beating the US women’s team, without any indication that there were retired players on the women’s team too – and active players on the men’s team.
However, these reports are misleading; the team that played in the charity match was not the official US women’s team that has been number one in the world for the past six years.
The US team was actually made up of former players, while the Wrexham team comprised of a mix of former and still-active players.
The match between the sides known as ‘US Women’ and Wrexham Red Dragons took place last month as part of a competition called The Soccer Tournament (TST).
The competition is an unofficial, televised American tournament which was held for the first time this year.
It featured smaller-than-usual pitches, 20-minute halves, and alternative rules such as no throw-ins, no offside restrictions, and seven players to a side.
Despite having a $1 million top prize, the tournament would be considered a “friendly” under most definitions: it is not overseen by Fifa or Concacaf (North American soccer’s governing body).
Sides featuring well-known names from the world of football were among the participating teams, including Borussia Dortmund, Wolverhampton Wanderers, and West Ham United.
However, these teams were largely made up of former or guest players, and not players from the official team’s lineup.
The tournament featured no current players for Borussia Dortmund, just one current player for Wolverhampton Wanderers and two for West Ham (all of whom are relatively unknown youth players).
The Wolverhampton Wanderers side even featured former Republic of Ireland internationals Stephen Hunt and Kevin Foley, who both retired in 2016 and 2018 respectively.
When it came to the ‘US Women’ team, not a single player currently plays with the official United States women’s national soccer team, which is set to play in the World Cup in Australia this month.
Quite a few of the players never actually played for the national side, and according to the team’s profile on the TST site, most of of the US players no longer play for any team officially, while some retired from professional football more than a decade ago.
The same is true for some of the ‘Wrexham Red Dragons’ players, despite suggestions that the side was made up of players from the club that had fallen on hard times in the UK, but which has begun to find success again after being bought by US actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
A number of those in the squad still play football at a professional level in Wales and, in one case, England.
Two of them are 20-year-old youth players for Wrexham, while one is a senior goalkeeper for the club; another player plays for Port Vale in the third tier of the English league, while another plays for Welsh side Bala Town and featured in the team who lost to League of Ireland side Sligo Rovers in last year’s Europa Conference League qualifiers.
The US Women’s team were not the only squad to have done worse than their team’s namesake might suggest.
Dortmund, Wolverhampton Wanderers, and West Ham were all wiped out in the group stages; they were not in the top 16 teams which got to participate in the tournament stage of the competition, illustrating that the squads participating in TST did not reflect the prowess of the clubs they were named after.
The tournament was ultimately won by Newtown Pride FC, an amateur club based in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
However, it is false to suggest that the US Women’s national team took part at all, or that they lost 12-0 to a team of men who played in the fifth tier of the English football pyramid this season.
Contains reporting by Stephen McDermott.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say