The US have won three World Cups, and also helped make the women’s game what it is today. Even if their reign ends, they should be praised

It would be difficult to script a more idyllic beginning.

On a balmy August afternoon in 1985, the US women’s national team warmed up for their first ever game on a pristine pitch in Jesolo, a stunning resort town on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The sky was cloudless, the stands were filled and, to make the visitors feel welcome, Bruce Springsteen boomed over the PA system.

In that moment, it hit USA goalkeeper Kim Wyant that she might be a part of history in the making. She looked around the stadium and thought, “This is phenomenal. This is the first game that the US women are ever going to play, and I’m on the field and I get to play in it.”

But she never could have imagined how far history would take the US women’s national team, to their fourth World Cup final, their third in a row, which will kick off in Lyon on Sunday night in front of tens of thousands of spectators, the climax of a competition that has smashed records and garnered a global audience of over a billion viewers across all platforms. The USA is the team to beat, an unparalleled, world-dominating squad of bold, eloquent, fierce, headline-grabbing athletes, a juggernaut barreling aside its competition with ruthless aplomb.

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Back in Jesolo, things weren’t so peachy. The team’s first game ended in defeat, felled by a lone strike from Italy’s Caroline Morace, compounded by a missed penalty from the USA’s first player of the year, Sharon McMurtry. It didn’t occur to the team that they might be worth more than $10 a day, or that they should have their own kits, not cast-off training wear from the men’s team. As Wyant recalls, “the [kits] fit just fine. They weren’t stained up or anything.”

It would be a while before the players learned how to ask for more.

Women’s football in the USA grew out of the college system, the product of Title IX legislation enacted in 1972 to prohibit sex discrimination in education. After the national team formed, competitive games were hard to come by. In 1987, it appears they only played once. Around the same time, a group of players was pushing Fifa to give the women their own World Cup. Michelle Akers, the USA’s legendary centre-forward of the 1990s, travelled to Switzerland to sit in boardrooms with leading figures from the men’s game such as Pele and Franz Beckenbauer. Akers, a free-scoring powerhouse who played at the highest level while managing a chronic health condition, had to sit and listen while the men debated whether women could cope with their own tournament.

It was decided they could, as long as the games only lasted 80 minutes, the tournament was played in China, the competition wasn’t televised to the outside world and the official World Cup brand wasn’t tainted by association.

It was Akers and the USA team who won the snappily titled Fifa World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup in 1991, which was retroactively named the first Fifa Women’s World Cup. They defeated arch-rivals Norway 2-1 in front of 63,000 spectators in Guangzhou, and the players wept and cheered as they held the trophy aloft and flew back home to total anonymity.

It didn’t suit them.

The team kept playing hard and overcoming disappointments like defeat in the semi-finals of the 1995 World Cup to eventual winners Norway. At the 1996 Olympics, goals from Mia Ham and Tiffeny Milbrett secured the US the first gold medals for women’s football against a technical and tenacious China team.

Some teams might have sat back and reveled in their success, but not this one. For the next three years they prepared for the 1999 World Cup, which the USA was hosting, by going on the road to drum up support, meeting fans, hosting open training sessions and attracting publicity for the women’s game. Their relentless drive paid off, culminating in a penalty shootout win over China in front of a crowd of 90,000 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The famous image of Brandi Chastain’s shirt-waving celebration brought women’s football to the attention of the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brandi Chastain’s celebration at the end of the 1999 World Cup final is one of the most famous images in women’s football. Photograph: Branimir Kvartuc/REX/Shutterstock

But that USA team, dubbed the ‘99ers, kept striving. They leveraged their fame into setting up the first-ever professional women’s football league in the world, the WUSA. The best players in the world, such as China’s Sun Wen and England’s Kelly Smith, came to play. When the league was about to fold a few years later, it was the ‘99ers who took a pay cut to try and keep it alive. The US women’s players, with their endeavor and generosity, pretty much single-handedly carved out the professional game from nothing.

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The success of the current league, the seven-year-old NWSL, is still intertwined with the success of the US women’s team; every member of the current squad plays in the league. It has survived on their victories, a total of four Olympic gold medal wins and three World Cups to date, including the most recent, in 2015.

Yet if this World Cup has showed anything, it’s that Europe is catching up, as traditional powers in the men’s game put their weight behind their women’s teams. The Netherlands have made it to their first World Cup final on the strength of performances from Arsenal’s Vivianne Miedema and Barcelona’s Lieke Martens.

“I think this could be a tipping point, unfortunately,” says Wyant. “For the US, it should motivate us to think about our women’s professional league, about how we’re going to keep these women playing after college in a very competitive environment. Because when I think about teams in England and Spain, they can invest in these players from a very young age and it could make a big difference moving forward as to how it shakes up the world power structure.”

Much has been made of the US team’s attitude throughout this World Cup: the so-called arrogance, the pointed celebrations. But to label this team, or any women’s team, as arrogant is to misunderstand women’s sports entirely and the daily struggle for recognition and recompense. Still paid according to an archaic Fifa bonus structure that seriously undervalues the women’s game, the US women’s team is engaged in a federal lawsuit with US Soccer to demand equal pay with their counterparts on the men’s team.

These are players who believe that women’s rights are human rights and that equality is achievable and worth fighting for. This is a team for our time. So, if the sovereigns of women’s soccer are to be deposed in years to come, may their reign end in scenes of triumph.