Julie Foudy calls out ‘lack of respect’ broadcasters give women’s sports

In the world of soccer broadcasting, no one is as synonymous with the United States Women’s National Team as Julie Foudy. So when Foudy has something to say, people listen.

The former national team midfielder has been covering soccer on television for two decades, currently serving as the lead analyst for TNT Sports’ coverage of the USWNT. That experience gives Foudy a lot to draw from, both in terms of analyzing the match on the pitch, but also in terms of television mechanics. Broadcasting a sport on TV is practically a sport in its own right.

So following Saturday’s, SheBelieves Cup match between the USWNT and Colombia, Foudy found it important to call out a seemingly small injustice regarding how broadcasters treat international competition in women’s soccer. But even if the particulars of what Foudy called out appeared to be minor, the veteran analyst asserted that it was a microcosm for the “lack of respect” that women receive in a broad sense, both on and off the field.

All @JulieFoudy wants is for women’s sports to get the respect they deserve 🗣️👏 pic.twitter.com/cYrUIScUtG

— TNT Sports U.S. (@TNTSportsUS) March 7, 2026

“Here’s the thing. When we go and we come and broadcast games, we get rosters. And on that roster, there’s a number, there’s a player, there’s caps and goals, and they put all those things down,” Foudy explained. “When we get the Argentina roster, there’s never any caps and goals. When we get the Colombia roster, there’s never any caps and goals. And for so many years I’ve said, ‘Why don’t we have caps and goals for these players? Why not?’ And they said, ‘We don’t have them.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’

“Now at home, you might be thinking, ‘That’s a minor deal.’ It is not a minor deal, and here’s why. For years we have been fighting for stuff, and what this says to me is, ‘I don’t care enough to keep track of your caps and goals. I don’t care enough to write down the achievements of these women, and how many games they’ve played and how many goals they’ve scored.’ They do it for the men. They have caps and goals every time for the men. They never have them for the women. So if you think this is minor, this is not minor, because this isn’t about caps and goals. This is about a lack of respect for the women’s teams globally. And it’s not just about soccer, mind you. It’s in every industry, it’s in every day.

“I will finish it up by saying, on the edge of International Women’s Day, which is Sunday, [USWNT coach] Emma [Hayes] made a great quote yesterday. She said, and this is how we should treat this, ‘We shouldn’t have one day a year for women. We should make every day about women.’ And it starts with just getting us the caps and goals!” an emphatic Foudy concluded.

First, without getting into the broader societal commentary, it is patently absurd that broadcasters aren’t being provided information as basic as the number of caps and goals a player has while representing their country. Sure, those numbers might not be as readily available as they are for the men, but if this has been an issue for so long, as Foudy says it has been, why hasn’t someone started tracking these things for the women?

To be sure, this isn’t necessarily TNT’s fault (or any other network airing women’s sports for that matter). These networks typically rely on third-party databases for their research. Clearly, those databases have a huge blind spot in women’s sports if they don’t include such basic statistics as caps and goals for top international soccer teams.

Secondly, it’s smart of Foudy to raise this not as simply an issue in women’s soccer, but for women’s sports (and women) in general. It would’ve been easy to dismiss her point as low-stakes otherwise. But by putting “caps and goals” in the context of shortchanging the achievements of women athletes broadly speaking, it resonated. What was seemingly a minor inconvenience was now just one small example of how there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to covering women’s sports with the same spirit as men’s sports.

And Foudy, who has more experience covering women’s sports than almost anyone else on television, is the perfect messenger to drive home that reality.