A mere 2,155 days after the US women’s soccer team filed a complaint with the USA’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and 1,082 days since the team filed a lawsuit against US Soccer, the team and the federation announced a settlement on Tuesday.
Unusually for legal action, the terms of the settlement were immediately made public: $24m, with $2m of that money earmarked for “USWNT players in their post-career goals and charitable efforts related to women’s and girls’ soccer.”
Now comes the hard part.
The deal is contingent on the ratification of a new contract between the federation and the players. That new contract is tied up in part because US Soccer president Cindy Cone has insisted that the men’s and women’s national teams come together with the federation to figure out the pesky problem of how to pay both national teams equally when Fifa’s prize money for World Cups is hugely unequal – $440m for the men in 2022 against a proposed $60m for the women in 2023.
On a related note, all parties that take women’s soccer seriously would very much like Fifa to even out that prize money. Today. Yesterday. It’s money Fifa could afford to, considering the organization made around $3.5bn in profit from the 2018 World Cup alone.
“We’re not wondering if the women’s game can make money,” Megan Rapinoe said of Fifa on a Tuesday conference call. “It’s just willful discrimination and willful negligence.”
Since 2018, the US men have been playing under the terms of an expired collective bargaining agreement. The women agreed in December to extend their current deal through March.
Players on Tuesday’s conference call said they’ve been working with the men’s team on CBA talks, and Becky Sauerbrunn noted that lawyers have been coming up with creative proposals. But representatives for the men’s players association did not return a request for comment from the Guardian, nor has the association posted anything on its Twitter feed, which instead focused on the match-up of two USMNT stars in the Champions League tie between Chelsea (Christian Pulisic) and Lille (Timothy Weah).
The lawsuit settlement seems rather generous given the team’s losses in court. Last year, US district judge R Gary Klausner granted a partial summary judgment in favor of the federation, accepting the argument that the women had actually been paid more than the men, albeit in a cycle in which the World Cup champion women were considerably more successful than their male counterparts, who failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.
A more damning argument: In their 2017 collective bargaining agreement, the women had accepted not just a different pay scale but a completely different structure. Given the lack of professional opportunities throughout most of women’s soccer’s history, the federation has long paid salaries and benefits to most of the team’s most frequent players. Klausner wrote that the women’s team rejected an offer to go to the men’s “pay-to-play” structure and therefore couldn’t “retroactively deem their CBA worse.”
And even if the men and women manage to coordinate on their CBAs, the teams will still have some differences. Sauerbrunn said on Tuesday that the team still wants to negotiate issues such as maternity leave, which will be tricky as coach Vlatko Andonovski expands the player pool rather than following the precedent of sticking with the same faces.
On the other hand, from the federation’s point of view, $24m is certainly less than $67m, the figure cited by an economist filing a brief on behalf of the women’s team. Cone, herself a longtime player for the national team, argued that such a payout “would likely bankrupt the federation.”
That dramatic statement might not be literally true. The pandemic and other factors brought the federation’s spending plans to a screeching halt and, paradoxically, resulted in a surplus in the fiscal year ending March 2021. The federation, which had previously planned to spend that pile of assets down to $42m by March 2023, is now targeting $102m by that date.
But the federation has a lot on its plate, not the least of which is building up national teams that have either aged (women) or underachieved (men). Since landing a $50m windfall with the hosting of the Copa America Centenario in 2016, US Soccer has been under pressure to invest in many areas – coaching education, extended national teams (disability soccer, beach soccer, futsal), the US Open Cup (including a new competition for women) and grassroots grants programs.
The settlement also surely removes a sizable chunk of legal fees from the budget, though the federation still faces interminable lawsuits from the NASL and sports promoter Relevent Sports – both represented by Jeffrey Kessler, who also represents the US women and once represented MLS players in an ill-fated legal action against the league and federation. Also still suing the federation – Hope Solo, the longtime US women’s goalkeeper who wound up going her own way in court.
Perhaps most important of all for the federation is a rare bit of good PR, or at least an interruption in the drumbeat of bad PR. The women found little trouble attracting sympathetic reporters, influencers and documentarians who eschewed numbers and even touted “equal pay” deals in other countries that are, in fact, not equal and pay both men and women considerably less than US Soccer does.
“Management,” even when it’s a volunteer-driven nonprofit, is never the popular side in a labor dispute. The federation’s former legal team and former president Carlos Cordeiro took that bad hand and made it worse. Cordeiro was tone-deaf in public statements, even at a parade for the women after their 2019 championship. The legal team argued that women lacked not just the speed and strength of men’s players but also the skill and effort, an argument that was all the more insulting because it was hardly necessary, given the strength of the federation’s other arguments.
Cordeiro is running again for his old gig, and Rapinoe noted on Tuesday’s call that he didn’t have her vote. She doesn’t officially have a vote, but Sauerbrunn and Morgan do, along with several recent national team players who are part of the Athletes Council. The settlement surely bolsters Cone’s case for re-election. But she still has to deal with negotiations with men’s and women’s players who have grown accustomed to being paid more than their peers. Cone is hopeful things will be nailed down before the women’s extension expires on 31 March.
“Are we close?” Cone said on Tuesday’s call. “It depends on your definition of close. Are we going in the right direction? Yes.”
