Last summer time, when Beatriz Álvarez landed the job as president of the Spanish girls’s soccer league, she requested to fulfill the chief of the nation’s soccer federation by videoconference, she stated, so she might stay residence together with her new child little one.

After a long time of being an inconsistently run afterthought, girls’s soccer had just lately grow to be absolutely unionized {and professional}. Ms. Álvarez had a lot to debate.

But Luis Rubiales, the now-embattled president of the soccer federation, refused, Álvarez recalled in an interview. He advised her to ship another person. She stated he advised her that, moderately than taking a gathering, she ought to set an instance by “devoting myself to my maternity.”

Álvarez stated the conferences went on with out her. She stated the incident was simply certainly one of many delicate and not-so-subtle reminders through the years that, within the eyes of Spain’s prime soccer official, girls ought to know their place.

This energy imbalance burst into public view after Spain gained the World Cup final month and Mr. Rubiales forcibly kissed the star participant, Jenni Hermoso, on dwell tv. On Wednesday, Ms. Hermoso filed a criminal complaint with state prosecutors, advancing an inquiry into whether or not the kiss was an act of sexual aggression.

The kiss unleashed widespread backlash and provoked a reckoning in women’s soccer within the nation. On Tuesday, Spain fired its nationwide coach, Jorge Vilda, whom gamers had individually criticized for his domineering, even humiliating administration type.

In interviews with The New York Times, greater than a dozen girls concerned in Spanish soccer described greater than a decade of systemic sexism starting from paternalism and offhand remarks to verbal abuse. Women stated they acquired bedtime checks and had been ordered to depart their resort doorways ajar at evening. One high-ranking official give up after concluding that her hiring was simply window dressing. And Veronica Boquete, a former nationwide group captain, recalled that Mr. Vilda’s predecessor, Ignacio Quereda, advised gamers, “What you really need is a good man and a big penis.”

Mr. Quereda has denied being verbally abusive.

With his kiss and his defiance within the face of suspension and public recrimination, Mr. Rubiales is the face of that system. Ms. Álvarez known as him an “egocentric chauvinist” who by no means cared concerning the girls’s league and ran the game “based on belittlement and humiliation.”

Mr. Rubiales didn’t reply to an interview request, and his soccer federation declined to cross on questions from The New York Times, citing his suspension by FIFA, soccer’s world governing physique. He has described himself as a sufferer of “false feminism.”

While gamers say they may boycott the nationwide group except Mr. Rubiales is gone, additionally they say that his departure wouldn’t be sufficient. The points in Spanish soccer predate his arrival and require main adjustments to deal with, they are saying. Dozens of present and former gamers have signed an announcement demanding administration adjustments. They air their grievances and strategize in a WhatsApp group known as Se Acabó, Spanish for “It’s Over.”

Players need increased wages, contracts that proceed throughout maternity depart and entry to the identical nutritionists and bodily therapists as males. And they’re discussing a possible strike to get them. Union officers say that the minimal wage for ladies is 16,000 euros (somewhat over $17,000), in contrast with 180,000 euros, over $193,000, for his or her male counterparts.

Ana Muñoz, the soccer federation’s former vice chairman for integrity, stated that as an alternative of prize cash on the finish of a contest she witnessed, gamers acquired tablets. “I have daughters,” she recalled Mr. Rubiales remarking. “I know what women would want.”

Ms. Muñoz, who resigned in 2019 after a 12 months on the job, recounted for the primary time the explanations for her departure. “I was just there for decoration,” she stated. “A flower pot.” She stated she questioned the ethics of a number of Mr. Rubiales’s choices, together with a $43 million deal to maneuver a soccer competition to Saudi Arabia. That transfer is beneath investigation, together with public allegations by his former chief of workers and others that Mr. Rubiales used federation cash to host a intercourse occasion at a coastal villa within the south of Spain. (Mr. Rubiales has beforehand denied any wrongdoing in both case).

Fifteen of the federation’s 18 board members had been males, Ms. Muñoz recalled. When she known as for the non permanent removing of a member pending a legal investigation into whether or not he had spent federation funds on residence renovations and his spouse’s enterprise, she stated she was swiftly voted down. She stated she had no authority. “I couldn’t understand that a department of integrity didn’t deal with integrity issues,” she stated.

Players tried and didn’t drive change final 12 months over the conduct of Mr. Vilda, the now-fired nationwide coach.

Boquete recalled that on the nationwide group from 2015 to 2017, when she was captain and Mr. Vilda was coach, he insisted that, when girls gathered for espresso, they achieve this the place he might see them. She stated he needed to watch their physique language, whom they had been assembly and whether or not they had been complaining about him. Team captains had been advised the place to take a seat at meals, she stated, so he might preserve eye contact with them.

Mr. Vilda additionally required gamers to maintain their doorways open at evening till he might test that every of them was in mattress. “If you go into the other rooms, maybe you’ll talk about him,” Ms. Boquete stated. “He wanted to control everything.”

It’s unclear whether or not that continued for the latest nationwide group. The gamers have declined to talk publicly amid the controversy. People near the gamers stated the ladies feared retribution. And within the few circumstances through which brokers stated their purchasers did wish to discuss, the golf equipment shut them down.

Fifteen gamers in the end banded collectively and refused to play beneath Mr. Vilda. Mr. Rubiales refused to fireplace him, and the federation responded by requiring that the gamers apologize for his or her actions earlier than contemplating whether or not to permit them to return to the group.

Some gamers had been notably offended final month, after the World Cup victory and the controversy over the kiss, when Mr. Rubiales not solely refused to step down and apologize but in addition introduced that he deliberate to resume Mr. Vilda’s contract and provides him a increase. That plan got here to a halt this week with Mr. Vilda’s termination, however Mr. Rubiales is clinging to his job. Though the federation has not fired him, it known as his conduct on the World Cup “totally unacceptable.”

Mr. Rubiales resisted the concept {of professional} girls’s soccer from the start, information obtained by The Times present. In 2020, throughout discussions about making a unionized, official girls’s soccer league, the nationwide federation beneath Mr. Rubiales opposed the concept, in line with a doc from Spain’s National Sports Council.

Mr. Rubiales questioned whether or not golf equipment might afford the improve, recalled María José López, the highest lawyer for Spain’s chief gamers’ union, who was concerned within the discussions. But she suspected Mr. Rubiales actually didn’t wish to cede energy to the ladies’s groups. “In particular, he didn’t want the clubs to negotiate TV broadcasting rights,” Lopez stated.

Generations of feminine athletes have endured demeaning feedback.

When an unofficial Barcelona girls’s group performed its inaugural match on Christmas in 1970, the general public announcer stored asking, “Has her bra broken?” as gamers ran the sphere, group members have recalled.

The following 12 months, José Luis Pérez-Paya, then the president of Spain’s soccer federation, stated: “I’m not against women’s football, but I don’t like it, either. I don’t think it’s feminine from an aesthetic point of view. Women are not favored wearing shirts and shorts.”

Decades later, Mr. Rubiales cracked an analogous joke on dwell tv. Monica Marchante, a Spanish sports activities commentator, recalled being on air with him as gamers wore T-shirts and shorts after observe. “They’re in their underwear,” he joked. In an interview, Ms. Marchante stated she smiled politely however realized then that Mr. Rubiales was “old-fashioned and rancid.”

Álvarez, the league president, stated the soccer federation additionally tried to sabotage the opening of the 2022-23 girls’s season by serving to to orchestrate a referee strike that postponed the opening weekend. The federation, she stated, is a “corrupt structure.”

In January, when the Barcelona membership group gained the Women’s Super Cup, an vital Spanish competitors, Rubiales and different prime federation officers skipped the medal ceremony. Players needed to collect their medals from containers.

Spain is much from alone in its therapy of feminine gamers. In 2004, FIFA’s president on the time, Sepp Blatter, suggested that girls might improve their sport by carrying tighter shorts. During a 2015 interview in Zurich, he repeatedly petted a Times reporter’s hair.

European powers like England and Germany barred girls from taking part in for years till 1970.

“The Spaniards are not outliers,” stated Andrei Markovits, a University of Michigan politics professor and the writer of “Women in American Soccer and European Football.” “They are totally the norm.”

Spain’s skilled girls’s soccer season kicks off this weekend. But on Wednesday, the eye was on an workplace in downtown Madrid, the place league and union representatives had been assembly to debate salaries and dealing situations. Union leaders say that, if no settlement is reached, a strike is feasible that would delay the season.