We’ve been here before. It was the early 1970s and Billie Jean King was trying to convince the tennis power brokers to pay women equally for their matches. Nine players made a pact to stick together on the issue and signed a $1 contract, and King made her case to the tennis authorities.
“I told them we weren’t coming back,” King told the Daily News in a phone interview.
It’s a well-established fact in the workplace. Sometimes, in order to get the pay you deserve, you have to leave the company that won’t give it to you.
This week, discussions between U.S. Soccer and the members of the women’s national team broke down on the issue of equal pay, according to the players who are fighting for it. Some of those championship players took to the morning shows to make their case.
“We won’t accept anything less than equal pay,” Megan Rapinoe said on “Good Morning America.” “We show up for a game. If we win the game, if we lose the game, if we tie the game, we want to be paid equally, period.”
It feels like someone put the soccer team, despite its four World Cup victories, legions of fans and sponsorship dollars in a time machine and sent them back to 1970. Somewhere, maybe underneath a disco ball and with polyester pantsuits on, they need to beg a patriarchal federation for their equal share.
U.S. Soccer, a non-profit, has paid lobbyists and lawyers to counter its players’ goal of equity. Literal insult to injury, since that’s money that could be alleviating the gap.
Quiz your average sports fan and they’ll likely be able to name Hamm, Foudy, Scurry, Wambach, Morgan, Rapinoe and a half-dozen more.
Now ask them to name five U.S. men’s World Cup players.
It’s not impossible but it’s harder simply because there haven’t been the wins, the airtime and the ticker-tape parades up the Canyon of Heroes. That doesn’t mean, however, you should pay the men any less for their work.
And here’s the crux, the USWNT will never find satisfaction if the U.S. Soccer Federation fundamentally values men’s soccer more. It doesn’t matter how many World Cups the women win if the federation is biding time until the men win the real World Cup, however poor the odds look.
“Maybe the women should break away,” King said, while readily acknowledging the immense challenges it would bring.
FIFA certainly incentivizes male-centric thinking from its national federations, starting with the difference in prize money for men’s and women’s wins. Women got less than 10 percent of the FIFA prize money in 2019 awarded to men’s teams in 2018. The fact that the U.S. women have brought so many titles and so much positive attention to soccer is a glaringly inconvenient fact. Yet these women can’t negotiate a federation into changing their priorities.
“They’d be such heroes,” King said. “They’d get more support than they’d ever dream of. They need to ask themselves, am I on the right side of history?”
Jean Williams, an author and women’s sports historian at the University of Wolverhampton in England, doesn’t like to hear about how far women have come. If your starting point is 1973, the era of Title IX and the Battle of the Sexes, you can make the case. But go back even farther and you can see that this is cyclical.
Williams recalled the women’s soccer teams in the UK during World War I playing in front of 55,000 fans in stadiums like Chelsea’s.
“My major bugaboo is that ‘women are making progress.'” Williams said. “The problem is not women. We’ve been playing football for 150 years. The fact is we’ve got a rigidly enforced labor market that women didn’t create.”
That the women who play tennis and soccer and all these other sports have been able to follow their passions despite the often arbitrary valuations put on them by predominantly male federations and corporations is nothing short of revolutionary. It makes asking the minimum seem like demanding the moon.
“It’s the view that men’s sport is an economic benefit, and women’s sports is an economic drain, and whatever you give women is a charitable donation,” Williams said. “They can’t see where that value is going to come from.”
King and her then husband, Larry, owned and ran a tournament before the WTA was formed, and that business education schooled her in sports economics. Virginia Slims, the cigarette brand, sponsored women’s tennis in the early days looking to attract women to smoking. The USWNT got the much more palatable Luna Bar brand as a sponsor interested in promoting the team and equal pay.
Like Williams, the key for King was in proving economic value, or speaking the language of the men in charge. King said it was a shortcut to make up for lost time.
“The investments have never been there for the women,” King said. “We’re second in the marketplace by 150 years. If we had the same enthusiasm and support, think of where we’d be.”
The USWNT is so far beyond needing to prove value. It tops the men’s team in terms of highest rated World Cup matches, recent revenue and, what matters the most, the damned World Cup titles.
Realistically, the USWNT would have a much harder time breaking from U.S. Soccer, due to the structure of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee. According to rules, a national body oversees the game for both genders. With U.S. Soccer set to host the 2026 World Cup, there may be ways for Congress to pressure the federation.
In July, the House Democratic Women’s Caucus wrote a letter to U.S. Soccer calling on it to “address institutionalized gender discrimination.”
True that hiring lobbyists, as the federation did this month according to Politico, is a proven Washington move, but it probably doesn’t count.
In the meantime, the team is fighting the U.S. Soccer Federation in court.
“It’s quite simple from our perspective,” Christen Press said during Thursday’s morning media tour. “We want to be paid equally, and that just means that when we show up to a game, that we get compensated the same way a man would for showing up for the same game. Because, on this issue, there is no social equality for women without financial equality.”
There’s nothing more American than the ideal of equality. Even if we have fallen short of it throughout our history, it’s still a guiding principle. As King sees it, U.S. Soccer doesn’t need another reason to pay both teams equally, or use an excuse not to.
“As the governing body of soccer in the U.S., they should do it,” King said.
