The USWNT vs. U.S. Soccer: an Equal Pay Timeline

A settlement announced on Tuesday abruptly ended a six-year legal fight between dozens of members of the United States women’s national team and U.S. Soccer, an often bitter and contentious dispute that had placed some of the world’s most popular and high-profile athletes at the forefront of the fight for equal pay for women.

What was the fight about, anyway? It was complicated right from the beginning. A simple slogan — equal pay — faded into shades of gray upon deeper review of different contracts, different schedules and different values placed on women’s soccer by the sport’s global leadership and its U.S. federation.

The timeline of this fight, which began in March 2016 with a wage discrimination case filed by five top players, is much simpler to understand. This single filing triggered years of court arguments and public statements, difficult feelings, hard-won victories, as well as a humiliating defeat for the athletes.

Here’s a review of how we got from the initial complaint to this settlement, told through reporting by The New York Times.

Five-star players were the first to file a claim for wage discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a U.S. agency that enforces civil right laws against workplace discrimination.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” said goalkeeper Hope Solo, one of the players who signed the complaint. Solo said the men’s players “get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships.”

Solo was joined by co-captains Carli and Becky Sauerbrunn as well as forward Alex Morgan, midfielder Megan Rapinoe and forward Alex Morgan in the complaint. The Times reported that Solo was also joined by co-captains Becky Sauerbrunn and forward Alex Morgan, as well as midfielder Megan Rapinoe.

In their complaint, the five players cited recent U.S. Soccer financial reports as proof that they have become the federation’s main economic engine even as, they said, they often earned only half as much — or less — than their male counterparts.

Players also stated that they exceeded revenue projections by $16 million in 2015. In 2015, their World Cup victory set television viewing records. Additionally, a nine-game win tour in packed stadiums resulted in record attendances and gate receipts.

Wounded by the accusation they were treating the women’s players unfairly, U.S. Soccer — which had for years been a global leader in advancing women’s soccer — pushed back forcefully by citing figures that it said showed the men’s national team produced revenue and attendance about double that of the women’s team, and television ratings that were “a multiple” of what the women attracted. The federation accused the players and their lawyers of cherry-picking figures from an extraordinarily successful year for the women — they had won the World Cup in 2015 — and a U.S. Soccer spokesman called their math “inaccurate, misleading or both.”

Offended by the suggestion that their games, and their successes, were worth less to the federation than those of the men’s team, the women and their teammates dug in for a fight.

It would last for so many years that few knew.

Within a year, the players had taken control of their collective fate, firing their union chief and reorganizing their players’ association in ways that gave them a more active role in the issues affecting them.

“It was always the plan,” Sauerbrunn, the team captain, said at the time, “to have a players’ association that listens to all the voices of its members and then can take that, and elevate that, and try to make that a reality.”

Receiving a high-speed education in topics like labor law and public relations, the players voted one another onto negotiating teams and subcommittees and — between camps and full-time jobs as professional athletes — threw themselves into the task of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer.

They came together as a team through anonymous player surveys, text messaging, overnight emails, and email messages. They then determined the priorities for a new agreement and presented their cases in person to the federation and its lawyers.

Within a few short months, they had a contract.

The agreement includes a sizable increase in base pay for the players — more than 30 percent, initially — and improved match bonuses that could double some of their incomes, to $200,000 to $300,000 in any given year, and even more in a year that includes a World Cup or Olympic campaign.

The agreement mostly ignored the wider equal pay fight that the women had made the foundation of their cause. The players were able to not only take pride in gains on salaries and bonuses, but also in having won control over some licensing and marketing rights that the union saw as an opening to test the team’s value on the open market.

March 2019: Same fight. New forum.

Labor peace did not move the sides closer toward an equal pay arrangement, so in March 2019, the players withdrew from their E.E.O.C. suing U.S. Soccer to redress gender discrimination.

In their filing and a statement released by the team, the 28 players described “institutionalized gender discrimination” that they say has existed for years.

The athletes claimed that discrimination affects their salaries as well as where and how often they play, their medical treatment, coaching, and even how they travel to matches.

The suit not only brought the fight to a new forum, but also presented new challenges. The players now not only had to prove that their team and the men’s national team did the same work, they also had to overcome questions about the differences in their pay structures and their negotiated collective bargaining agreements. The C.B.A. They fought so hard for victory, but suddenly found themselves without any leverage: The terms of the agreement prohibited players from striking until at least 2021.

A public fight was waged in 2019’s summer. social media hashtags and white T-shirts for more than three years moved to its biggest stage to date: the Women’s World Cup in France.

By then, the U.S. national team’s stars were fighting not only their federation and others opposed to their equal pay claims, but also a sitting U.S. president, critics of their victory margins and those who didn’t appreciate their goal celebrations. It was only friends that the team had when it lifted the trophy.

The chant started out faintly, rising from the northern stands of the Stade de Lyon. Gradually, it became louder. Soon it became unbearable.

“Equal pay!” it went, over and over, until thousands were joining in, filling the stadium with noise. “Equal pay! Equal pay!”

Fans chanted the song as Carlos Cordeiro, the president of U.S. Soccer, celebrated the team’s victory in New York.

February 2020: What is the price of peace? $67 million.

Among the voluminous filings before the women’s case was heard in federal court last year were two notable ones seeking to end it outright.

In separate requests for summary judgment — the process in which each side claims its case is so strong that the judge should rule in its favor — U.S. Soccer and the players showed just how far apart the players and the federation remained not only in what they considered a fair outcome, but also in their basic concepts of what constituted equal pay, despite years of litigation, depositions and public relations campaigns.

U.S. Soccer asked for a simple declaration that the players’ claims were without merit; simultaneously, the players finally put a price tag on what they considered a fair outcome:

The federation sought to avoid a looming gender discrimination trial by asking the judge to dismiss the players’ claim. The women’s players also asked for a pretrial decision, but on far different terms: They are seeking almost $67 million — and potentially millions more — in back pay and damages.

March 2020: The fight gets ugly.

Rapinoe had offered an olive leaf at the victory parade, hinting to the possibility of a settlement on points where the two sides could agree, but that hope was lost months later.

The spark was a court filing in which U.S. Soccer, through its lawyers, argued that “indisputable science” proved that the players on its World Cup-winning women’s national team were inferior to men.

“I know that we’re in a contentious fight,” Rapinoe said, “but that crossed a line completely.”

U.S. Soccer fired its attorneys, but the damage was done. Cordeiro resigned after unsuccessfully trying to manage all the fallout. Talks of a settlement which might have prevented the march to federal court collapsed.

April 2020: A crushing defeat to the players

The lawsuit’s ruling was devastating for the players when it came. The judge, R. Gary Klausner of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, granted the federation’s motion for summary judgment. But he went further: He declared that the women’s core argument — that they had been paid less than players on the men’s national team — was factually wrong.

In his ruling, the judge dismissed the players’ arguments that they were systematically underpaid by U.S. Soccer in comparison with the men’s national team. In fact, Klausner wrote, U.S. Soccer had substantiated its argument that the women’s team had actually earned more “on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis” than the men’s team during the years at issue in the lawsuit.

The brutal irony, of course, was that in going to court against U.S. Soccer while they were at the peak of their powers, the women’s team had also picked the absolute worst time to line up a few years of their salaries against a few years of the men’s pay.

Since February 2015, the agreed-upon start of the class-action period in the case, the women’s team had won two World Cup titles (and millions in bonus payments for those triumphs) and other major salary gains by negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. During the same period, the men’s team had plumbed new lows, with its failures serving to cripple the women’s case.

By failing to qualify for the only men’s World Cup played during the class window, the men became ineligible for millions of dollars in performance bonuses of their own. They would have received far more U.S. Soccer performance bonuses than the women.

Chance to save something from defeat

It was difficult to overstate the impact of the court decision a day later. Judge Klausner had not only ruled against the players’ arguments; in effect, he had said they could never win. Yet even though U.S. Soccer’s victory in court was complete, and the players immediately announced their intention to appeal, the federation signaled just as quickly that it was still happy to discuss a way out.

“We look forward to working with the women’s national team to chart a positive path forward to grow the game both here at home and around the world,” it said in the briefest of statements after the ruling.

The federation’s words seemed carefully chosen. The seemingly endless battles with its most popular players have unquestionably damaged — and continue to damage — U.S. Soccer’s reputation. The dispute even caused it to conflict with its sponsors.

But much has changed since the equal pay war began: U.S. Soccer has a new president, the former women’s player Cindy Cone, and a new chief executive, and neither of them could reasonably be tied to past missteps and injustices.

For them, and for U.S. Soccer, rebuilding a functional relationship with the women’s team — the federation’s most valuable asset and a critical moneymaker in troubled economic times — should be a top priority. It might work, even if it means cutting some checks to show an eagerness to move ahead.

November 2021: A small victory but a new start.

U.S. Soccer reached an agreement with the players in November last year to resolve claims of unequal working conditions. The deal, a rare moment of détente in the yearslong fight, formalized an effort the federation had already begun to remove differences in areas like staffing, travel, hotel accommodations and venue choices related to men’s and women’s national team matches. It was an important step for the players to take before they could appeal their larger loss in federal court.

For the players and their lawyers, the agreement brings opportunity: In settling their issues related to working conditions, the women’s stars cleared the way to appealing a judge’s decision in May that had rejected most of their equal pay claims. For the federation, removing one of the last unresolved items in the team’s wage-discrimination lawsuit allowed its new leadership team to rid itself of one more point of contention in a dispute they would prefer to see end, and to signal that U.S. Soccer is open to more accommodations.

U.S. Soccer’s president, Cindy Parlow Cone, hailed the agreement, saying it signaled the federation’s efforts “to find a new way forward” with the women’s team and, hopefully, a way out of the rest of the litigation.

“This settlement is good news for everyone,” Cone said, “and I believe will serve as a springboard for continued progress.”

Tuesday: The fight is over.

Tuesday’s settlement between the women’s players and U.S. Soccer includes $24 million in compensation for the athletes — largely back pay for dozens of players who were included once the plaintiffs were granted class-action status, and several million dollars in seed money for a fund that will be available to players for post-career plans and initiatives to grow the women’s game.

It also includes a pledge from U.S. Soccer to equalize pay, appearance fees and match bonuses for the women’s and men’s national teams for all games, including the World Cup, in the teams’ next collective bargaining agreements.

That last bit is the stage for the next fight: Both the men’s and women’s teams are playing under expired — and separate — agreements. Negotiations for new agreements are ongoing. It’s not clear when a deal will be struck.