Tag: pay

us soccer, women's soccer

Will the U.S. women’s back pay demands hurt future women’s soccer players?

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’ve been covering women’s sports for about three decades now. Not as 100% of my job — through most of my employment, I’ve had a lot of editing and online responsibilities as well as reporting — but I’ve amassed a considerable amount of women’s soccer stories (and a book) and a lot of women’s coverage in my Olympic sports work.

Lately, that’s been less game coverage and more issue coverage. How can we keep young athletes safe from sexual predators like Larry Nassar? How do Olympic sports athletes support themselves? How can an athlete stay in a sport in which women have been denied a spot in the Games?

It hasn’t been good for my career. I lost money on my book, though I could’ve done a better job reporting it. An editor (a woman, and she was a great boss) once told me I should cut back on covering women’s soccer, and I didn’t.

I’ve also delved deeply into U.S. Soccer finances. Haven’t made a lot of money on that, either. The Guardian and Soccer America are good to me, but I’ve done so much extra work on this that my income is far under minimum wage.

I’ve also covered youth soccer. It’s a mess. That’s a big reason why I have a book out now called Why the U.S. Men Will Never Win the World Cup.

But it also has the potential to ensure that the 2019 Women’s World Cup win will be the USA’s last. The rest of the world is catching ahead, and staying ahead will require well-spent money.

So when I see that the U.S. women are looking for $66 million, I have to go back to the math.

U.S. Soccer, of course, has countered with a motion for a summary judgment of $0. I’m guessing negotiations aren’t going well.

And we should say at the outset that such motions, no matter how many volumes of documents are printed in support, still don’t force the court to play “all or nothing,” as the eminent sports law professor Steven Bank points out.

But if the women were seeking $10 million, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. $20 million? Possibly.

Here are a few points demonstrating that neither the Fed ($0) nor the players ($66 million) have taken a justifiable stance.

$66 million is more than even the most generous computation I can find.

I ran the numbers last summer, using the assumption that the U.S. women would ask for the same bonuses the U.S. men would have received had they won the World Cup. That wouldn’t meant the women, who under the current CBA get close to 100% of FIFA prize money if they win (once you include the Victory Tour bonus, which is paid on top of their regular pay for four friendlies), would have received more than 1,300% of FIFA prize money in 2015. (The winning country received $2 million. The men’s bonus for winning would’ve been more than $26 million.)

I came up with $50,365,524.

You can make your own calculations and run different scenarios if you like using this spreadsheet. You can also download from GitHub.

The Federation’s mandate is to grow the game, which will make it possible for the men to get better and the women to stay on top

A lot of people look at pay in a vacuum, as if U.S. Soccer is an NBA team and players should get a specific part of the revenue. But we’re not talking about billionaire owners here. (Yes, we’re talking about overpaid executives — we’ll get to that.) This is a nonprofit organization that is responsible for coaching education, referee education, Paralympic soccer, youth national teams, etc.

The Federation is way behind other federations in this respect

U.S. Soccer doesn’t have the scouting or coaching infrastructure that other countries have.

That’s one reason the men haven’t done as well as anyone would like.

That’s one reason the women’s youth national teams haven’t done well recently, either, and that bodes ill for the future.

The Federation is trying to address this by spending a pile of assets it accumulated, much of it by hosting the Copa America Centenario, on new programs

The initial idea was to spend it down to $50 million. Thanks to legal fees, that’s now $42 million.

Which is less than $66 million.

That said, we don’t know how well the Federation is spending that money

Take a look at the Federation’s budgets — not just in FY 2019 but in past years as well.

A couple of things seem sensible. They’re spending more on the U.S. Open Cup and much more on referee and coaching education. They’ve also spent a bit on technology so they can keep track of players and shore up the Fed’s awful web sites. They’ve launched a terrific Innovate to Grow grant program that was a big hit among state federations (who deserve none of the blame for the Federation’s spending or contract negotiations) at the Annual General Meeting.

But in the Annual General Meeting book (see AGM books tab on the spreadsheet linked above), they have a $3 million line item for “Various.” And executive pay is out of whack. Maybe they can go without replacing Jay Berhalter. (Not Gregg. They still need a men’s coach.) Maybe they don’t need to hire so many staffers and relocate them to Chicago.

Still, the new CEO will probably command a lot of money, maybe even more than Dan Flynn made. They need someone good.

It’d be cool if they hired a woman, right? Maybe a former Board of Directors member?

Historically, the Federation hasn’t treated the women as well as they should have

There’s a reason the women went on strike in 2000. There’s a reason they filed an EEOC complaint. And the new collective bargaining agreement should have equalized some things that could’ve been equalized. (You could argue that hiring lawyers who have lost multiple times to U.S. Soccer was a bad idea on the women’s part.)

Hank Steinbrecher is gone. Dan Flynn just left. Sunil Gulati is an ex officio member of the board.

And to be sure, they’ve invested more into women’s soccer than other federations. Yes, even Norway and Australia, with their much-hyped “equal pay” deals that (A) don’t account for the differences in prize money that the U.S. women clearly want to address and (B) don’t pay either team that well, especially in Norway.

But they left a mess. There’s no reason the women’s CBA shouldn’t have equal bonuses for friendlies at the very least.

One important myth to debunk here: Typically, the WNT’s revenue is not equal to the men. Not close. But the women can still make a case. Go back to the notion that the Federation is a nonprofit that’s supposed to grow the game. They’re not going to make a profit on beach soccer (which has a new women’s team), Para soccer and youth programs, but they have to do so anyway. They may not make a profit on women’s soccer, but it’s their mandate to support it equally anyway.

I’ll write more for various outlets on this at some point, but I hope everything above is helpful.

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us soccer, women's soccer

Women’s soccer: How about equal spending in general, not just equal pay?

Posted on by Beau Dure

Harvard Business Review had a piece on lessons to learn from the U.S. women’s soccer team’s “equal pay” push, which may be premature given that the lawsuit hasn’t proceeded yet (and, based solely on what’s going to end up presented in court, may not go well for the women).

Here’s how I responded:

I’ve covered women’s soccer for two decades, and I’ve covered the pay issue for several years. This piece makes a few assumptions:

  1. That the USSF data is incorrect and the data associated with the women’s team, such as the dubious “38 percent” claim, is correct.
  2. That the differences between the MLS and NWSL broadcast deals are somehow related to U.S. Soccer even though the federation has heavily subsidized the NWSL. (Yes, you could argue that the overlapping entities of U.S. Soccer, MLS and Soccer United Marketing have amounted to a subsidy for MLS, but that case isn’t made here and hasn’t been fully made elsewhere to my knowledge.)
  3. That the USSF is to blame for a lack of outside investment in the NWSL even though all the pundits and media personalities who jump on the “equal pay” bandwagon have failed to cover or invest in the last two women’s leagues.
  4. That “equal pay” is easily defined. The U.S. women play under a vastly different set of circumstances — no high-stakes trips to hostile venues in Central America and the Caribbean, scant competition for places — in addition to a salary structure that the women declined to go without when they agreed to the last collective bargaining agreement in 2017.
  5. That the women’s aggressive and often misleading stance in 2016, led by Hope Solo’s recommended lawyer Rich Nichols, didn’t hurt their bargaining position when they signed their deal in 2017.
  6. That the Manchin bill would help the U.S. women even though the men’s World Cup will be a money-maker for U.S. Soccer that can only help the women’s program.
  7. That the national teams, not youth programs where the USA is falling behind European countries, are the priority for additional spending.

Simply put, it’s not that simple.

In my work, I try to present the facts as they are, but I have a bias — I want to see women’s soccer succeed at ALL levels, especially because soccer success trickles up from the youth ranks, not down from the national team.

It’s easy to make a case that U.S. Soccer — which, it must be said, started investing in women’s soccer before nearly any other country in the world did — should spend more on development for women (and actually a bit more for the men as well). It’s not just “equal pay” for a handful of players who actually earn more than the men in many scenarios, including the real-world scenarios of the last several years. It’s equal spending.

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us soccer

English pay and what it means for U.S. men’s soccer

Posted on by Beau Dure

In yesterday’s Soccer America piece, I tried to give some perspective on the U.S. men’s soccer team’s collective bargaining negotiations (remember: they’re still playing under an expired deal) by taking a look at national team pay in other countries and other sports.

I looked at several examples — English rugby (a considerable amount of money), Indian cricket (also a lot of money), U.S. basketball (little disclosed aside from a new system of paying the women’s players to stay home in the WNBA offseason and go to training camp, though Olympians always have some commercial opportunities if they win).

The one that has drawn some criticism in my inbox is the note that England’s men give their low match fees to charity. The response is that England’s players also receive a substantial percentage of the sponsorship paid to their federation.

The info I received is from a credible source, but details are scarce, and the only mentions of this deal the source passed along are in English tabloids. One of those reports, in The Sun, suggests a split among English players’ unity on the matter. Sky Sports News has a similar report suggesting agents are wary.

I’m surprised I wasn’t pointed to more concrete details. The Times: Players have complained that the money has dropped to “about £150,000 per player.” The Telegraph: “The players’ slice is worth collectively anywhere between £4 million and £6 million annually, paid on a sliding scale according to appearances on behalf of sponsors and their place in the squad.” That’s $5 million to $7.5 million. From my calculations, the U.S. men make a little less than that in a down year of the four-year cycle and more in other years.

If England won the World Cup, The Telegraph reported elsewhere, the players would get a bonus of £5 million. Other countries would get slightly more (Germany), a good bit more (Belgium) or a lot more (Brazil).

So by all available information, if England were to win the World Cup, the bulk of the FIFA prize money of £28 million would go to the federation. But that said, sponsorship money ensures players receive a tidy sum on top of the fortunes they receive from Premier League clubs.

And commercial money makes things interesting. Under their new-ish collective bargaining agreement, the U.S. women have a chance to cash in on licensing rights. (Noteworthy: This all goes through Meghan Klingenberg, who has been out of the national team picture recently.)

Does this mean players have a chance to strike a new deal that isn’t simply about bonuses for friendly wins, draws and losses?

We don’t know. So far, negotiation details are being kept quiet. And the U.S. men are finishing their ninth month with no deal.

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