This has finally closed the pay gap. Along with erasing disparities in working conditions, the new agreement puts both teams on level financial playing fields including a share of “broadcast, partner, and sponsorship revenue” to be split equally between both teams, per CNN.
The USSF is not the first federation to equalize salaries between its men’s and women’s soccer teams—since the women of the USWNT filed their equal pay lawsuit in 2019, at least five other countries including Australia and Ireland have reached equal pay deals with their national soccer teams. CNN reports that this is the first equal-pay soccer deal that equalizes FIFA prize money.
This is a big deal.
Salaries are just one small piece of the pay gap in sports—in soccer, the biggest pay discrepancy comes in the form of FIFA World Cup prize money: Men in the 2022 championship will compete for a total prize pool of $440 million, while the women competing in the last World Cup did so for a relatively measly $30 million in total prize money.
Players were compelled to close this pay gap. “We would not agree to a deal that did not have equal pay across the board,” says Roux. That meant bringing the USMNT players aboard. Under the new agreement, National Team players in the U.S. will pool and share their winnings—which means cutting the men’s team in on the USWNT’s success. “If we were doing it on our own, that’s not the model we likely would’ve ended up with,” says Roux. “That’s a model that the Men’s National Team Players’ Association would accept.”
In theory, that’s a little cringey, but given how much bigger the prize pool is for the men’s team, in practice, the women will ultimately have more to gain. For example, if the USWNT wins the World Cup again in 2023, they’ll take home a reported $7 million—a little more than half of the $13 million the men’s team would earn just for making it to the top 16. Roux says that the pooling-and-sharing model is only valid if both teams qualify to their respective World Cups. If the same structure had been in place during the last World Cup cycle—where the USWNT won and the USMNT failed to qualify—the women would have kept the entirety of their winnings.
The deal highlights a complex problem in the fight for equal wages. It’s not ideal for women to have to make concessions—the ideal scenario would be seeing women rewarded for their performance with no caveats, qualifiers, or obligations to team up with higher-paid colleagues to see an equal paycheck. The reality is that men must have skin in order to close the gender pay gap. (For the record, the USMNT has long been supportive of the women’s fight for equal pay. In 2020 it sent a “scathing” letter to U.S. Soccer calling its treatment of the USWNT “indefensible” and urging them to “pay the women significantly more.”)
Source: Glamour