Why the USWNT still thinks U.S. Soccer is missing the point when it comes to their earnings

Alex Morgan.
(Image credit: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

It's been a few months since the U.S. women's soccer team won their second straight FIFA World Cup title, but they're still battling things out in court in their quest for equal pay, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The U.S. Soccer Federation last week submitted court filings showing that four players on the women's team — Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Becky Sauerbrunn — each earned a total of between $1.1 million and $1.2 million between March 30, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2019. That's more than any men's national team player earned during that timeframe; the highest earner on the men's side reportedly made $993,967.

But the women's team responded by arguing that they played and won more games, so while the total compensation might have been higher for some players, the relative pay was still less. For example, if the women had the same collective-bargaining agreement as the men's team, Morgan would have reportedly earned more than $4 million dollars over the course of her 58 games and two World Cup titles, which is nearly four times as much as she's made in reality.

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Molly Levinson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. women's players, called that the "very definition of gender discrimination."

U.S. soccer still maintains, however, that the women agreed to a separate collective-bargaining agreement from the men that runs through 2021, and that pay differences result from those negotiations not gender. Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.