When the members of the U.S. women's soccer team announced that they were taking legal action over their wages, especially compared to the members of the men's team, I didn't quite know what to make of it at first. The legal matters of the USWNT have been in the news a lot lately, from the lawsuit over the use of turf at last summer's Women's World Cup to the termination of the CBA in February to this. Then some more details emerged and they were staggering. On this one, they've got a point.
The team, of course, was a source of great national pride when they won the World Cup last year. They're also the defending Olympic champions, which is why it's significant that Becky Sauerbrunn suggested they might boycott the Olympics in protest. It's that serious. And it should be taken that way.
This isn't something that USA Soccer can hope just goes away and try to sweep under the rug. Because the players aren't going to let that happen. And these aren't some random, no-name players, either. The five players that filed the suit are Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Becky Sauerbrunn and Megan Rapinoe, perhaps the five most influential (and definitely the five most famous) members of the team. In fact, outside of Tim Howard, Clint Dempsey and maybe Michael Bradley, there are no bigger names among active players in all of U.S. soccer.
Even if you factor in endorsement dollars, the women make just a fraction of what the men get, despite the fact that the women are the reigning World Cup champions and the men's squad, while one of the top teams in the region, is nowhere near the best in the world. Yet, if you looked at their national team salaries, you'd never know it. The women make between $3500 and $5000 a game. The men get anywhere from $6250 to upwards of $17,000 per game. This despite the fact that the women, due mainly to their World Cup championship, generated more than $16 million in revenue for U.S. Soccer in 2015. The men's team, meanwhile, lost $2 million.
If you factor in the salaries from their club teams, the disparity is even greater. There's obviously much more money to be made in men's professional soccer. Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey have both played in the Premier League, the richest league on the planet, and most of the other top American men's players have lucrative contracts in Europe. That's why they don't play in MLS. Yet the ones that do play in MLS (which now also includes Howard and Bradley) make significantly more than the women do playing in the WPS, which is funded by U.S. Soccer and is the third attempt at a women's pro league in the U.S.
It's obvious why there's more money in the men's game than the women's game. NBCSN paid an awful lot of money to broadcast Premier League games. The Premier League is based in England, yet has enough of an American fan base to warrant those rights fees, not to mention the domestic and continental rights, as well as any other nations that show Premier League games.
Likewise, FIFA collects a fortune in rights fees for the men's World Cup, with coverage of the Women's World Cup included as part of the package. Some of that money goes back to the national federations, who decide on their own how it's going to be allocated. Since most of the money comes from the men's World Cup, most of that money obviously goes to men's teams (some countries still don't have a women's national team). Right or wrong, that's somewhat understandable from a business perspective. Although, if more countries spent more on their women's programs, the game would probably grow much more quickly.
However, the disparity between the men's and women's national teams in the United States is far too great. That I think is the entire basis of this lawsuit. If the men made slightly more than the women did, you could justify it because of the difference in TV revenue. But it's not even close. And, as they noted in the suit, the women are the World Cup Champions. They should be paid as such.
Female athletes have been dealing with this wage issue for a long time. At the Grand Slams in tennis, the men's winner always used to take home more than the women's winner. The US Open became the first one to offer equal prize money about 10 years ago, and the other three have all followed suit. There are many other examples in other sports, but, for the most part, those disparities have been evened out.
I don't know how much USA Basketball pays the members of the national teams, but the men's team is usually filled with NBA stars, so I wouldn't be surprised if they get more than the women do. After all, we all know how little the players in the WNBA make in relation to their NBA counterparts. It's so little, in fact, that many of them play overseas during the WNBA offseason...and make more money! Diana Taurasi makes so little in the WNBA that her Russian team paid her to sit out the 2015 WNBA season, and she still made more than she would've playing for the Mercury.
Will the women's soccer team actually boycott the Olympics? I doubt it. They know that it's one of only two marquee events they have, and they wouldn't exactly prove their point by depriving themselves of that opportunity. But right now, it's the only leverage they've got, so the threat was a smart move to force U.S. Soccer to take action.
At the very least, they've brought attention to a problem that needs to be addressed. There's absolutely no reason for the base salary to be different for the men's and women's teams. If you're on the senior national team, you're on the senior national team. Why should your gender matter? And you can't say they're paid based on performance, either. Because if that was the case, the women would make more, not less, than the men.
One of the reasons why the U.S. has one of the best national women's teams in the world is because the U.S. was one of the first to put money into its women's program. But it's clearly not as much as is being put into the men's program. That needs to change. It shouldn't have taken this long, or required this action, for people to realize that.
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