Backpass: US Soccer has achieved the biggest prize. Equality.
Did you have a trophy case at your high school? You probably did. Did you ever look at it? Probably not. My high school was a nerdy prep school for most of its history; before that it was a military/boarding school for kids with behavior problems, or 1950s ‘seen not heard’ parenting types. And thus our trophy case was long on big prizes for things like tennis, golf, and water polo.1 And debate.
Mostly, nobody cares about the trophy case at their high school. The trophy case is locked. Students pass it in the halls. Maintenance forgets to dust it. Nobody remember the guys from the 1971 league championship football team.
When a team, any team, wins it all, it feels great for a few years. And then the victory recedes into the background. Memory fades. I only know a handful of Colorado Rapids fans who were present for the 2010 MLS Cup championship. I think the only staff person who was there is Player Development Director Brian Crookham. That doesn’t mean we aren’t proud of it. It just means it isn’t, you know, a big deal for us in the present tense.
A World Cup is different, but also not. Brazil’s men have five World Cups, but none since 2002. The US Men’s National Team has zero World Cups, but they’re also far closer to winning one in the near future than Uruguay, who have two (1930 and 1950). The US Women have won four World Cups, which we should be immensely proud of. But that success breeds expectation. I think most American soccer fans approach Women’s World Cup season with the expectation that we win it all. It’s not that special. I mean, it IS special, and I’ll get amped up for, but still, I think you get my drift. It is not ‘We’ve never done this before’ special.
This week’s news that US Soccer and the players on the men’s and women’s team have agreed to equal pay is unique and special; a groundbreaking achievement in sport that transcends the trophy case. The move is huge in that it flanks FIFA and lays down a gauntlet for every other country in the world regarding equality. It is a statement larger than sport; and those moments are far more rare than winning a big game.
FIFA has always collected the revenue of the men’s World Cup, and split it up with the men’s teams, and collected the revenue of the women’s World Cup, and split it up with the women’s teams. They will continue to do that. US Soccer will take the money from both World Cups (men’s and women’s), pool it, and split it evenly to the men and the women.
Every other country on earth now has to decide - are our women as valuable as our men? Is equal pay in sport a value in our culture? Is equal pay *in general* a value for us? It is a potential watershed moment - a 1776 of human equality. Or at least, a big step in the right direction.
The counter-argument to equal pay that I have seen many times is about revenue generation - a kind of über-capitalist ‘everyone should be paid what they generate in revenue’ argument that, for most of us working schlubs, doesn’t make sense. Does every business value the sales team more than the product development team because they literally sell the product? Is the social media and marketing department worthless because they only spend money, but never generate income? The opposite argument applies with national teams too - we already pay every player on the National Team the same as every other player on the team. Unlike in club football, Megan Rapinoe does not make more than Abby Dahlkemper. So there’s no reason not to go one step further and say ‘Our players that play for the stars and stripes will all be paid the same’. It feels totally logical to me.
The credit for this change should mostly go to the women, who fought and sued and argued for six years to get to this moment. They struggled through the years when a player’s minimum salary in NWSL was worse than being a Starbucks barista or a Home Depot trainee. They are the heroes here.
But credit must also be given to the US men. I thought this quote from Andrew Das’ article was particularly thoughtful:
“When we got together as a group, certainly we saw that there was not going to be a way forward without the equalization of prize money,” said Walker Zimmerman, a defender on the men’s team and a member of his union’s leadership group. He said the process of persuading the rest of his teammates to share the money involved “difficult conversations, a lot of listening, a lot of learning.”
Kudos to the men, then, for making a sacrifice. It’s one thing to say ‘we make less, they make more, pay us more.’ It is a very different thing to say ‘we make more, they make less - pay us less.’ And sure, nobody on the men’s team is going to struggle to pay the bills as a result of this decision. But the men made a sacrifice in the name of what was right, and that ought to be held up. Respect.
The last thing I want to note, mostly as a dad and an equal caregiver to my kids, is a benefit that was extended that was kind of buried in the fine print of this deal. This little nugget comes from the official US Soccer release:
Child Care: During Senior National Team training camps and matches, U.S. Soccer will provide childcare, as it has for the USWNT for more than 25 years.
I love this. Love, love, love this. No longer do we assume as a sporting nation that women get stuck with the kids while the men go to work - which isn’t the reality in my life or my friends or peers lives either. I remember years ago being on trips with my little ones, solo, and changing a diaper on a plane or in an airport, or bottle feeding a kid, and having some older woman say ‘oh, my aren’t you a great dad?’ - like I deserved an effing medal of honor for wiping a tush. To me, I was simply parenting. Doing my half of the job. My gender doesn’t determine my ability to handle stuff, or what I know how to handle. I cook and clean and work and do laundry and wipe tushes. I’m glad US Soccer agrees. I hope all the USMNT dads bring their tiny chickens to camp if they can.2
Equal pay for equal work is a simple principle - you do a job, you do it well, you deserve to be compensated, your gender is irrelevant. Soon, we hope, the equal work and equal pay will ultimately end up where all us Americans want it to for the two US national teams - trophies in the case for team.3
The boys team won our league from 1986 to 2006. The boys and girls together have won nine CIF Southern Section Championships. In a state as big as CA, this is like winning state, if your state was huge. I had a good friend who rode the bench all four years at our school. When he went to college at MIT, he was a starter, rookie of the year, and league MVP as a freshman.
How frikkin’ adorable would USMNT pre-school footie be? Give me all the 3v3 matches on tiny pitches with onesies with tiny numbers. I am here for the cuteness.
America. Eff yeah!
