Former Chapel Hill Attorney Led Fight Against FIFA

When Hampton Dellinger saw the turf burns U.S. women’s soccer players were posting to social media, he decided that as an attorney he was in a position to do something about it.

The 2015 World Cup was the first World Cup to be played on turf, a plastic approximation of grass, instead of the real thing. Dellinger believed it was no accident that the first World Cup FIFA held on turf was a women’s event.

“You don’t have to be a soccer expert to know that natural grass is the preferred surface, and artificial turf is really a second-class surface,” Dellinger said. “At the end of the day, the only reason they [FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association] tried something that the men never would have stood for was because it was the women’s World Cup.”

Players dislike turf because it changes the play of the game and because it puts players at more risk for injury. But despite a general consensus that turf is inferior, FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) decided to host the 2015 women’s World Cup on an artificial surface.

“There have been increasing financial ties between the artificial turf industry and FIFA,” Dellinger said.

However, Dellinger says FIFA had already planned all future men’s World Cup games up to 2022 on real grass.

Dellinger, who used to cover UNC women’s soccer games as a commentator on WCHL, reached out to several UNC alumnae on the U.S. Women’s Team.

“I told them that if they wanted to challenge the discriminatory treatment based on their gender in court that I’d be willing to represent them for free, ” he said.

Several players on the U.S. team and other national teams worked with Dellinger to bring a gender discrimination case against FIFA and the CSA in the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. However, the players withdrew their case in January because they needed to know what surface they would be playing on in the tournament.

“We got several favorable preliminary rulings,” Dellinger said. “But FIFA did everything they could to avoid a decision on the merits. And ultimately we could not get a trial date before the tournament started. And the players and coaches had to know what surface to train on because the differences are so dramatic.”

Dellinger says even though the lawsuit did not end in a ruling against FIFA or the CSA, he believes the suit pushed gender equality forward in the sports arena.

“FIFA committed to never put another women’s World Cup on artificial turf, they used goal-line technology for the first time in the women’s game after we raised it [as a point of contention], they increased the prize-money purse—although it’s still woefully insufficient,” Dellinger said. “So I think FIFA learned a lesson, and I think it raised consciousness about continuing gender discrimination in sports.”

Dellinger notes there are many more battles to be fought for gender equality in soccer, including the fight to bring in more women coaches.

“Many of the preeminent coaching positions are taken up by men in women’s soccer,” he said. “There need to be more opportunities for women in the coaching ranks and the administrative ranks.”