Carlos Cordeiro resigned as U.S. Soccer president late Thursday night, culminating a historically traumatic week for American soccer in which the sport’s governing body had argued in writing that “indisputable science” meant the world champion U.S. women’s national team was inherently inferior in skill, ability and responsibility to the U.S. men’s team simply because of its gender.
It was an unconscionably offensive legal strategy for U.S. Soccer to take during the USWNT players’ gender-discrimination case against the federation, and it brazenly put into writing for posterity the discrimination that the USWNT had sensed for decades. Cordeiro’s resignation was the only tenable result after such a strategy, not least because he was facing extreme pressure from media and several U.