Football's Coming Home: England Women win Euro Final 2-1 in front of 87,000 in Wembley

England wins its first major international trophy after a 56 year drought, as the Lionesses beat the Germans 2-1 in a packed Wembley Stadium. Ratings will be through the roof - pretty much one of the the most important moments in women's sports in the last decade.

Weirdly, hardly a word on DU.

In his recent comedy special, Bill Burr goofs on women's sports: he starts with the USWNT (that's soccer) asking for pay parity with the USMNT. He immediately switches gears to the WNBA, noting that they play "in front of 400 fans" for the last 25 years, and challenging the "feminists" to name the their top 5 WNBA player, no, any player on their team, no, the name of the team in their city. "You can't!" he laughs.

But there was a little switch in there. He shifted from soccer to WNBA because most people can name or recognize five players from the USWNT, or, if they can't, they can't name five USMNT players either. He switches from soccer to WNBA because the USWNT is undoubtedly the best in the world, and surely don't play in front of small crowds. It is a dishonest shift, because he knows damn well that the argument he makes about the WNBA doesn't apply to the USWNT, which is the group he used to start the sequence.

Do you know why the USWNT is the best in the world while even Euro teams struggle to keep up? Two words: Title IX. Universities considered women's soccer a cheap way to comply with Title IX requirements. So the US women's sport developed competitive leagues far earlier than in Europe (and England!), where footie for girls remained a dubious proposition well into this century. Remember that Bend it Like Beckham came out less than 20 years ago, and that the characters end up in US universities. (Special note: One of the key players for England, Alessia Russo, went to the University of North Carolina...maybe some of the England fans didn't know why her number was...23!)

The English women's national team just won the Euro tournament. Let's give them some applause. Women's soccer (okay, football) is fantastic.