Sanjay Sujanthakumar
On Friday, the wage discrimination claims in the USWNT’s equal pay lawsuit were effectively crushed, and the women lost significant leverage ahead of an expected settlement with the federation that is undoubtedly in the best interest of all parties. The USWNT’s push for equal pay has been politicized and as a result, there’s been an unavoidable comparison of the performances of the American women to the men while missing – and perhaps distracting us – from a deeper economic issue facing the USWNT and women’s soccer globally: figuring out their value.
On International Women’s Day in 2019, a few months before the World Cup, the USWNT sued the United States Soccer Federation, an unsurprising but nonetheless symbolically stinging step in a legal battle that began in 2016, alleging gender discrimination on the part of US Soccer. The main point of contention was equal pay and with our country seemingly submerged in an endless election cycle, politicians were eager to get behind the USWNT’s fight and prove their commitment to equal pay in general. Media coverage based outside of the soccer community also mostly served to distill this debate into a straightforward economic comparison between the USWNT and their male counterparts, where the women are supposedly paid less for “equal work” despite being far more successful than the men. But due to differences in pay structures – the appearance and bonus fees are higher for the men while the women have guaranteed annual salaries and additional benefits – this simple comparison was never possible, and on Friday that was emphatically confirmed.
From the start of the Women’s World Cup, Democratic presidential candidates weighed in on the equal pay conversation and in advocating for the women, inevitably compared their performances to the men. After winning the 2015 World Cup, the USWNT stood alone with three titles and the claim to best on the planet. The 2019 triumph was an exclamation point on their superiority, even if Europe – where the traditional powers of the men’s side are starting to take the women’s game seriously – appears to be gaining ground.
Meanwhile, the upward trajectory of the American men’s program evaporated on October 10, 2017 when they shockingly lost to Trinidad & Tobago’s JV team on the last day of qualifying. That loss, coupled with a perfect storm of results elsewhere in the region, sent the USMNT’s reputation into a nosedive. The “Catastrophe in Couva” would provide unforeseen ammunition in any juxtaposition of the American men’s and women’s programs. For the first time since 1986, there was no World Cup to exponentially raise the revenues and profile for the USMNT. The men had sunk to their nadir. They were a doormat, and when the women once again dominated the world in France, this juxtaposition rendered the men an easy jab in the equal pay debate.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, who hosted the USWNT’s ticker tape parade when they returned as champions, said he’d sign an executive order enforcing equal payment by the non-profit, tax-exempt USSF. At the parade, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also signed equity pay legislation. Announcing it on Twitter, Cuomo went further. “The women’s soccer team plays the same game that the men’s soccer players play — only better. If anything, the men should get paid less.”
Sharing a New York Times article on the matter on social media, Senator Elizabeth Warren, then a candidate for President, had commented, “The @USWNT is #1 in the world & contributes higher revenues for @USSoccer than the men’s team, but they’re still paid a fraction of what the men earn. Women deserve equal pay for equal (or better!) work in offices, factories, AND on the soccer field.” Scratch the surface of the rhetoric and the situation is not so clear cut.
Assessing the value of women’s soccer includes finding out the value– and raising the value– of NWSL, the domestic league in the United States.
In attempting to unpack the obvious question of revenue generation, this is where tweets, chants and headlines fall short of the matter for a few reasons.
Firstly, FIFA’s prize money pot for the 2018 Men’s World Cup was about $400 million, dwarfing the total for the 2019 Women’s tournament of $30 million, and despite doubling the women’s pot, that gap for the next two World Cups is set to widen by another $10 million. Of course, “this money, and all other World Cup prize winnings, are paid to the football association of the team’s nation. Thus, how these prize winnings are allocated and distributed to players is at the discretion of the national football association, not FIFA,” and Norway and now Australia are examples of discretion exercised toward equal pay (which entails the agreement of the men). But back to FIFA’s prize money pot. FIFA President Gianni Infantino attributed this disparity to how rights for the Women’s World Cup were devalued by being bundled with the men’s tournament in previously negotiated deals, obscuring the general debate about revenue generation. And a similar problem exists in determining the value of the women with the marketing and media rights domestically.
Beyond tournament money, sponsorships and broadcast rights accounted for almost half of US Soccer revenue in 2018, while revenue from games was just a quarter. Both the men’s and women’s national teams are also bundled together by Soccer United Marketing (“SUM”). But World Cups are a broadcast exception.
“U.S. Soccer doesn’t earn broadcast-rights fees from World Cups. In the U.S., those tournaments’ English-language broadcast deals are between Fox Sports and FIFA,” leaving the other games for the package with MLS and further blurring the breakdown. In terms of measuring the difference in broadcast value between the American men and women, David Neal, the Executive Producer of the World Cup and VP of Production for Fox, said, “‘I don’t know how you quantify that.’”
It’s also complicated attempting to quantify and compare how US Soccer supports both MLS and the NWSL today.
According to UCLA Law Professor Steven Bank, who teaches a class on soccer and the law and specializes in antitrust and marketplace competition issues, US Soccer “subsidizes Major League Soccer for the men and possibly to a much greater degree” than the NWSL “depending upon how you interpret the financial benefit to MLS owners from the grant of U.S. Soccer media rights to their separate Soccer United Marketing company.” Besides guaranteeing NWSL salaries for its USWNT pool, US Soccer directly managed the league until through last season. SUM also just brokered the NWSL’s significant sponsorship deal with Budweiser. SUM “previously negotiated sponsorships for the league in the era before the formation of the media and commercial arm of the league, NWSL Media,” and SUM’s role vis-a-vis the NWSL moving forward remains to be seen.
However, SUM is controlled by MLS owners, and in four markets they have doubled down investing in the women’s game too. In Portland the Thorns are the flagship franchise of the NWSL, and in Utah in their first two seasons in the league the Royals have been second in attendance to the Thorns. Portland owner Merritt Paulson actually nudged Dell Roy Hansen and the Royals into the NWSL ahead of schedule, and considering how quickly MLS is expanding, there could be more examples to follow (potentially in Los Angeles soon).
FIFA is also planning massive investment in the women’s game soon.
Nevertheless, the broadcast and sponsorship deals at the national and international level were already agreed to before the 2019 World Cup, and it is their next negotiation and the underlying economic arrangement – and how to propel women’s sports overall – that should be the increasing public focus if women’s soccer is to have an idea of its deserved slice of the pie in the United States and beyond. The struggles of the men relative to the women will always be a talking point, but, as the Court ruled, MNT payments cannot seamlessly correspond to women’s anyway because of CBAs that are fundamentally and understandably different. In order to be paid fairly – if the circumstances do not permit equally – we need a better, more concrete idea of what the women’s game is worth – and that’s an issue in soccer that seems rectifiable in the future, at least on FIFA’s end.
Despite all it has done to date for women’s soccer, the US Soccer Federation found itself in a difficult situation where it was virtually impossible to win in the court of public opinion even before its legal representation made a highly offensive argument it didn’t need to. Now, with the economic consequences of the pandemic endangering the momentum of the women’s game worldwide and political attention ratcheted up, under new leadership US Soccer has an opportunity to repair the relationship with its iconic USWNT and resume leading by example in pushing the women’s game.
Sanjay Sujanthakumar is a soccer journalist and coach based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter @the_Real_Kumar.