U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay

For the first time, soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national teams will receive the same pay and prize money, including at World Cups, under landmark agreements with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will end years of litigation and bitter public disputes over what constitutes “equal pay.”

The revised pay structures are part of collective bargaining agreements with each team announced Wednesday, three months after a group of top women’s team players settled a gender discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Soccer and six months before the men’s team is scheduled to take the field at the World Cup in Qatar.

In addition to guaranteeing men’s and women’s players the same paychecks for taking part in international matches, the deals include a provision, believed to be the first of its kind, through which the teams will pool the unequal payments they receive from FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for participating in the World Cup. Starting with the 2022 men’s tournament and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, that money will be shared equally among the members of both teams.

“No other country has ever done this,” U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said of the deal to equalize World Cup payments. “I think everyone should be really proud of what we’ve accomplished here. It really, truly is historic.”

The American men have made a significant concession in splitting the prize money. They were previously awarded the bulk of multimillion-dollar FIFA payments each time U.S. Soccer played in the World Cup. The agreement to pool money with the women removed what players and federation officials have long recognized as the biggest obstacle in resolving the issue of equal pay. It represents a potentially huge windfall for the women’s team, whose World Cup prize pool is a fraction of that paid to men’s teams every four years.

Under the new deals, which run through 2028 and cover the next four World Cups, dozens of top men’s and women’s players have been told in internal presentations reviewed by The New York Times that they can expect to collect average annual payouts of about $450,000 from U.S. Soccer — and potentially more than double that in successful World Cup years.

“I feel a lot of pride that there are going to be girls who are going to grow up and see what we’ve accomplished and recognize their value instead of having to fight to see it themselves,” said Midge Purce, a member of the collective bargaining committee for the women’s players’ association.

“But my dad always told me, ‘You don’t get a reward for doing what you’re supposed to do,’” she added. “And paying men and women equally is what you’re supposed to do.”

In recent years, the issue of compensation has been one the most contentious in soccer. This was especially after the American women won consecutive World Cup championships in 2015 and 2019 and the men failed qualifying for the 2018 tournament. Over the years, the women’s team, which includes some of the world’s most recognizable athletes, had escalated and amplified its fight in court filings, news media interviews and on their sport’s grandest stages.

The dispute had always been a complex issue, with differing contracts, unequal prize money and other financial quirks muddying the distinctions in pay between the men’s and women’s teams and complicating the ability of national governing bodies like U.S. Soccer to resolve the differences.

However, the federation finally committed to a fair system. U.S. Soccer will distribute millions to its best players by using a complicated formula of increased match bonuses and pooled prize money. Each team will also get a share of the tens or millions of dollars in commercial revenues that U.S. Soccer gets each year from broadcasters, sponsors, and others.

Labor peace will be expensive: U.S. Soccer has committed to single-game payments for most matches of $18,000 per player for games won, and as much as $24,000 per game for wins at certain major tournaments — cementing the status of the U.S. men and women as two of the highest-paid national teams in the world. And the federation will surrender as much as 90 percent of the money it receives from FIFA for competing in the World Cup to the men’s and women’s players on those teams; based on past performances and union projections, that could result in a shared prize pool of more than $20 million as soon as next year.

But despite its cost, the new equal pay policy has incalculable value for all involved, as it will end a six-year battle that battered the federation’s reputation; threatened U.S. Soccer’s relationships with important sponsors; and ran up millions of dollars in legal fees on every side of the fight.

The dispute erupted in courtrooms and negotiating rooms. It also produced some savage exchanges about personal privacy and workplace equality. presidential candidates, star athletes Hollywood celebrities — not all of them supportive of the women’s campaign for pay equity.

The federation could be able to resolve the dispute amicably rather than in court. This would make it easier to attract new sponsors and strengthen relationships with its most prominent players. U.S. Soccer has effectively incentivized its most prominent players to work with it in finding new revenue streams by offering them a share of the commercial revenues.

“There’s no denying that money that we have to pay our national teams is money that’s not reinvested in the game,” Cone said when asked about the effects of the new contracts on U.S. Soccer’s broader mission. “And people can take that perspective. But the way I look at it is that our job is to try to figure out how all three groups can work together to grow the pie so that everyone is benefiting.”

Cone and representatives of both teams said the agreements offered a model for those looking to restructure a multibillion-dollar sports industry in which generational advantages mean money, exposure and opportunities still flow disproportionately to men’s sports and male athletes.

“These agreements have changed the game forever here in the U.S.,” Cone said. “And they have the potential to change the game around the world.”

While the United States will see a significant symbolic and financial benefit from the resolution of the Equal Pay fight, it is not clear if the new deals will be more ambitious than possible.

Since the American women started pressing for equal pay in 2016, soccer federations across the globe, from Australia to Norway to the Netherlands, have been working to pay their national soccer teams more fairly. All of these deals were meant to equalize matchday salaries, which are much lower than what U.S. soccer pays its senior teams. All of them avoided the biggest gap in soccer’s pay: the vast difference in World Cup bonuses paid by FIFA to men and women. The 24 teams at the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France, for example, competed for a prize pool of $30 million; the 32 men’s teams that will compete in Qatar in November will split $450 million.

A negotiated settlement became the only route to equal pay in 2020 after a federal judge dismissed the core claims of a group of top women’s players who had sued the federation for gender discrimination. Cone, a former women’s national team player recently elevated to the role of U.S. Soccer’s volunteer president, greeted that decision with an olive branch at the time, pressing for renewed settlement talks. But she increased the pressure on the men’s players to help bridge that gap last fall when she said U.S. Soccer would not agree to new contracts with either team that did not equalize World Cup prize money.

Walker Zimmerman, a defender on the men’s team and a leader in its players’ union, said he and his teammates had by then come to the realization that “there was no other way to get this done.” Persuading his teammates to ratify the deals that were eventually reached “wasn’t always the smoothest,” he admitted.

“Trying to voice what you believe should happen, what is possible, what is right — those conversations are difficult,” Zimmerman said. “But at the end you have a group of players both on the men’s and women’s side who came together and got it done.”

Despite Wednesday’s spirit of détente, the payments to the U.S. men and women will still not be entirely equal: Injuries, coaching decisions and even the number of games played by each team will continue to affect what individual players can earn. For the first time, the federation as well as the teams will be able agree on a rate of pay.

“We do still have two separate contracts,” Cone said, “but everything economically is exactly the same.”

For the most prominent American women’s players, the deal could soon deliver an immediate payday by unlocking a $24 million settlement, largely for back pay, that they reached with U.S. Soccer in February to settle the gender discrimination lawsuit. U.S. Soccer had made this one-time payment contingent on new collective bargaining arrangements that formalized equal pay among the teams.

With the new deals approved, U.S. Soccer can now seek the judge’s approval to start cutting checks.