A Rising Women’s Team Looks Past the Pandemic

PARIS — Khadija Shaw sensed opportunity.

Shaw, a Jamaican striker with seemingly unlimited potential, had her pick of top European teams on the eve of last year’s Women’s World Cup. Manchester City had called her agent. So had Paris St.-Germain in France and Juventus in Italy. But Shaw, who is known as Bunny, saw potential at Bordeaux, a club on the rise in France’s women’s league.

Bordeaux was a recent convert to the women’s game. Its women’s team had been formed only in 2015, and won promotion to France’s top division a year later. Financed by revenue from Bordeaux’s top-flight men’s team, it immediately began a methodical rise up the league table: 10th in its first season, then seventh, then fourth.

“I had many offers in the world, but the Bordeaux project seduced me,” said Shaw, who had learned the game playing pickup soccer with boys in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and blossomed into a star at colleges in the United States.

Last season, with the addition of Shaw and several other top players, Girondins de Bordeaux Féminines were “living the dream,” according to the team’s Spanish coach, Pedro Martínez Losa. With a team-record 37 points, Bordeaux was third in the standings behind France’s perennial women’s champion, Olympique Lyonnais, and its well-financed pursuer, Paris St.-Germain, when the coronavirus stopped the season in its tracks.

The standings were frozen, Lyon was declared champion, and Bordeaux’s hopes of claiming a Champions League spot ended. Now, as Europe’s top women’s clubs compete in Sunday’s Champions League final in Spain, and Bordeaux prepares for the new season, followers of the rise of women’s soccer in Europe are worried that a looming financial crisis in the men’s game will leave women’s teams paying the price.

For the moment, though, the pandemic has done little to alter the plans at Bordeaux. In five short years, the club’s women have moved swiftly up the ranks — evidence, Losa said, that when given the opportunity and freed from comparison to the men’s game, women’s soccer can thrive. The club would not discuss the women’s team’s finances specifically, but its investments in international players and coaches are most likely bets on future revenues rather than a reflection of current ones.

Losa has a history of transforming club dynamics. With experience in Spain and in the National Women’s Soccer League, he moved to Arsenal in 2014 and helped the club — for years the top women’s team in England — navigate a transformation as money poured into the country’s top division. By 2019, Losa was off to Bordeaux, and Arsenal was back on top.

In France, he is taking a two-pronged approach. The first is to develop players. The second is to attract elite talent.

“The secret is not the ideas,” Losa said in a telephone interview this summer. “It’s the people who execute the ideas.”

One of the latest moves toward that vision is Bordeaux’s newest addition, Ève Périsset. At 25, she has already competed for France in the World Cup and spent time with Lyon and P.S.G.

The changes at Bordeaux, she said, were reminiscent of Lyon’s integration of its men’s and women’s teams throughout club facilities. It’s one of the many ways Bordeaux has modernized, and professionalized, in recent years.

Three years ago, only half of Bordeaux’s players were playing full time, said left back Delphine Chatelin, who joined the club in 2017. Many washed their own uniforms and training gear and weren’t considered professionals. But as the team directed more money and interest to the women’s team leading up to the 2019 World Cup, which France hosted, playing soccer became the primary occupation of every member of the squad.

“I think,” Losa said, “it’s a work in progress.”

Périsset agreed. The French soccer federation still falls short in requiring all women’s teams to professionalize players’ contracts in accordance to their elite status, she said. “To have this professional step, it would change things,” she said.

While investments in salaries and facilities have helped transform women’s teams at several top European clubs, a wide gap remains between established powers like Lyon, Chelsea and Barcelona and their domestic rivals. Despite its recent focus on its women’s team, for example, Bordeaux still operates under a budget estimated to be three times smaller than that of Lyon and P.S.G. Many other French teams, including some in the top division, still field teams with amateur or semiprofessional players.

France’s professional players’ union said talks initiated after the Women’s World Cup were an effort to encourage competitive parity in France and “to avoid widening the growing structure of other European countries.”

For Shaw, playing in Europe has been a dream come true.

“There’s not a lot of opportunities in the Caribbean like there are in the U.S. and France,” said Shaw, who played college soccer in Florida and Tennessee. Joining Bordeaux was an opportunity, she said, to learn a more European style of possession play under Losa and to continue to motivate young players back home.

“I try to tell the younger girls back home, ‘Hey, look, we’re not going to be as privileged, but that doesn\'t define what we can do,’” Shaw said. “For me, it’s not about where you are coming from. It’s where you are going.”

In many ways, Shaw’s outlook mirrors the ethos of her club. Having increased its budget recently to sign the likes of Shaw, Périsset, the English goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse and the Dutch forward Katja Snoeijs, Bordeaux’s continued rise now hinges on overhauling at least one of France’s traditional powerhouses. The financial commitment so far has been significant, but it is not one that the club’s chief operating officer, Frédéric Longuépée, regrets.

At the end of the day, he said, “what makes the difference in football is budget.”

That is what has made this year so difficult. Bordeaux took a significant financial hit from the coronavirus crisis and the cancellation of the men’s and women’s league seasons, Longuépée said, and that hole in the budget will have consequences for all of the club’s programs.

“We will need to adapt ourselves to these new norms, and it’s going to be a tough season because the economic crisis will be huge again,” he said.

Already, the losses are piling up. In May, Lyon’s women’s players unanimously accepted a wage decrease to help ease the club’s financial crunch; the club’s men refused to do the same. Sponsorship negotiations stalled at the height of lockdown, and with the drastic loss of advertising and subscription revenue the league is moving into an uncertain financial future.

Should another wave of the pandemic lead to the loss of more television payments this fall, Longuépée said, one solution he has proposed is exploring a way to have players’ salaries directly linked to revenues. French labor laws, however, may pose a challenge, he added.

With the women’s team back in training since July, the future, for now, remains bright. Despite months in lockdown, the team only narrowly lost its French Cup semifinal in August against P.S.G., 2-1. The coming season brings new challenges, Losa said, but he insisted that he and his players were prepared to face them.

“Bordeaux is only five years old, and has progressed very quickly,” he said. Now it is society’s turn, he added, “to trust in the women’s game.”