Annabel Crabb on the Spanish kiss scandal

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. You really couldn’t write it. What’s unfolded since the infamous Spanish World Cup kiss is nothing short of extraordinary. And still, the head of the Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, has been defiant, repeatedly declaring, I will not resign after kissing footballer Jenni Hermoso on the lips after the team’s World Cup win in Sydney. Today, the ABC’s Annabel Crabb unpacks that moment. What’s come after it and why the actions of one doofus guy could bring about positive change for women’s football.

Commentator: That’s the last action of the World Cup final. Spain of world champions, as all the Spanish backroom staff bounce on the platform with the players, they’re celebrating, enjoying the match.

Sam Hawley: Annabel I don’t want to relive this too much, but Spain had just won the World Cup. The team is going on to the podium to collect their medals. Star player Jenni Hermoso was grabbed by Luis Rubiales and he kissed her on the mouth. When you saw that, what did you think?

Annabel Crabb: I had almost a physical reaction. What is that guy doing? And I think it was just the hands on the back of the head that just visually didn’t look consensual. It was very quick and everyone was jumping around and so on. But I thought, Oh, what’s that guy doing?

Sam Hawley: Yeah. And that kiss. It wasn’t even the first controversial thing Rubiales had done that night. He had also been grabbing his genitals, so. Yeah, go figure.

Annabel Crabb: Yeah, I mean that to me also. I wasn’t aware of that. I didn’t see it at the time. I learned it later and thought, wow, I mean, you know, literalism is not dead. This guy is grabbing his willy just to make sure it’s still there or to, you know, make almost sort of reinstate the primacy of the penis in soccer. I mean, I’m overanalyzing there.

But I just think the things that this dude is prepared to do on camera just actually significantly communicate how entitled he feels, even what’s happened since when Rubiales has doubled down and dug in. He’s made this a national battle with, you know, the creeping threat of feminism. You know, it’s just wow.

Sam Hawley: Not to mention that most ridiculous press conference he gave Annabel, where he claimed that the kiss was spontaneous. He said he asked her for a little kiss and she said yes. And this was a kiss he would have given one of his daughters. It was spontaneous. Mutual, he said,

Luis Rubiales: Mutual, euphoric.

Annabel Crabb: Look, I think I’m sure he believes that. And I think that it’s not surprising that he would believe it. But the problem with all of this is it’s not so much about the kiss, although that’s obviously what triggered this now kind of national and international controversy. The point is that from now on, Jenni Hermoso, the player, doesn’t get to celebrate her World Cup victory. She’s being chased around, being obliged to deal with clean up after this guy who’s done something to her that she didn’t welcome.

So she’s under huge amounts of pressure. And you can tell this from what she said subsequently. So on the night, a lot of people were making a fuss about it on social media and she said, oh, you know, calm down, everybody. This is just a euphoric moment. And then she came out about a week later saying, listen, this wasn’t this wasn’t consensual. I didn’t welcome it. It’s unfair. I think.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, it was wild that the Spanish Soccer Federation put out a statement on her behalf saying, you know, don’t overanalyze it. It’s absolutely fine. She didn’t even write that statement. It didn’t come from her. That was extraordinary in itself.

Annabel Crabb: Well, I think that sometimes I mean, now that MeToo is a significant political issue. Right? Like it’s it’s a powerful thing to invoke. And the interesting thing that’s happened, a person normally a woman in these circumstances who’s been harassed at work now will be listened to. And that is a powerful thing.

But one thing that I’ve noticed is that that power sometimes gets co-opted by men, particularly if they want to bring other men down. So when new powers emerge, there’s often a move by the old wielders of power to kind of harness it for their advantage. And I think that that’s what’s happening here.

Sam Hawley: The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, he chose the eve of the World Cup final to explain to female players that it was their responsibility to achieve equal treatment.

Gianni Infantino: I say to all the women and you know, I have four daughters, so I have a few at home. I say to all the women that you have the power to change. Pick the right battles, pick the right fights. You have the power to change. You have the power to convince us men what we have to do and what we don’t have to do.

Annabel Crabb: Yes, he said, You know, you’ve got to convince us. You’ve got to get out there and make the case, you know, the door is open. All you’ve got to do is push on it. You think, Well, hang on, buddy. Isn’t that supposed to be your job? I mean, extraordinary.

Sam Hawley: We’ve been pushing on doors and ceilings for a while, Annabel?

Annabel Crabb: They’re probably too busy working three jobs because they don’t get paid to do what they’re good at, which is playing football.

Protestors: Well, rubiales palmeros esta fuera de juego.

Sam Hawley: And Annabel in Spain, they’ve even taken to the streets to protest because, of course, Luis Rubiales repeatedly said he will not resign. He will not resign. He kept saying.

Luis Rubiales: No voy a demitir, no voy, a demitir.

Sam Hawley: And the world championship team has said they’re boycotting national games until the current leadership is out. Prosecutors at Spain’s top criminal court have launched a sexual assault investigation into the kiss. So a lot is going on. And not only that, the whole focus has turned to Spanish society and the chauvinistic nature of it. But I suppose it’s not just Spain that has this problem.

Annabel Crabb: Well, I mean, football is a pretty good model for analyzing this stuff. It’s very common for men to coach women’s teams. It is unknown for a woman to coach men’s teams. The powerful people at the top of football organizations are men. Interestingly, something that we saw in the recent World Cup is that the decisions made by, again largely male TV executives hugely undershot the level of demand and interest that there is in Australia and beyond.

In watching women’s football, it’s only a year ago that Robbie Slater, remembering the former Socceroo, wrote of Sam Kerr’s 54th goal and she had eclipsed Tim Cahill’s record. Said, Well, you can’t compare the two because, you know, Sam Kerr is great, but, you know, she’s she’s not a Socceroo. And so to make that comparison is insulting to Tim Cahill. There’s Only a year ago we had entrenched ideas about who watches women’s sports how important it is and how much merit it has.

For instance, if you’re looking at the broadcast rights for the World Cup, well, Optus paid $13 million for access to all 64 World Cup matches and then they sold the Matildas matches for 5 million. Incredibly cheap. When you consider that looking at AFL rights, the AFL gets paid on average $26 million per weekend or so per weekend, five times more than Channel Seven paid for all the Matildas games. Now those figures are from an article that our colleague John Lyons wrote.

Sam Hawley: Yes, it.

Annabel Crabb: Is stunning.

Commentator: Still racing forward. Edge of the Box. Sam Kerr shoots right-footed. What a strike. What a goal from Sam Kerr.

Annabel Crabb: And I think that that that the entire experience of the World Cup where you essentially saw hundreds of women being unremittingly meritorious at their job. I mean, they were just really good. They were all good at football. And that’s what they did on television and in front of packed stadiums and so on. They were displaying merit. And our attention, our rapt attention to this was only ever perforated by the spectacle of some doofus guy being bad at his job. And that is weird and wrong.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. All right. I want to ask you then, Annabelle, is there anything positive? Do you think that will come out of this? Could it trigger some sort of change, do you think?

Annabel Crabb: Oh, there’s heaps of positive stuff that’ll come out of this. I mean, when terrible things happen or controversial things happen and people pay attention, it generates a force for change, right? I mean, if this guy hadn’t behaved like such a prawn, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And it helps to surface the injustice that exists. It helps to surface the assumptions that go into building the structure of how women’s football works as opposed to men’s football.

This is a serious issue because women struggle to be professional football players because they don’t get paid as much. So it means that they can’t devote themselves to training in the same way. It means that they’ve got to be as good with a fraction of the support. Right. And that is something that people are talking about now that this behavior has surfaced, that discrepancy.

Sam Hawley: Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer commentator and host of Kitchen Cabinet. This episode was produced by Nell Whitehead, Veronica Apap, Sam Dunn, and Anna John, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. Over the weekend, Catch This Week with Sally Sara, where she’ll be looking at the voice referendum. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.