No winner as women fight with U.S. Soccer
The ultimate winners took a bad loss. And U.S. Soccer is somehow being rewarded for its incompetency.
On Friday, a federal judge dismissed the heart of the United States women’s soccer team’s lawsuit against its employer, the U.S. Soccer Federation. Judge R. Gary Klausner sided with U.S. Soccer in a motion for summary judgment, rejecting the argument that the women’s team had been systematically underpaid, in comparison with the men’s team.
But perhaps the most startling thing about the ruling was that the judge used the women’s sustained success and the men’s team’s failures to make his decision.
Women punished for being too successful? Men’s fiascoes used to undermine women’s standing? Shocking.
During the classaction period covered by the ruling, February 2015 to November 2018, the women’s team played 111 games. The men’s team played 87 games. The total compensation for the women’s team over that period was $24.5 million, or an average of $220,747. The total compensation for the men’s team was $18.5 million, or an average of $212,639. In other words, the women averaged more money per game.
But those facts, which Klausner describes
as “undisputed,” carry a great deal of context that any American soccer fan with the most rudimentary knowledge of results fully understands.
Between 2015 and 2018, the women’s team won a World Cup. In contrast, the U.S. men’s team failed to qualify for the World Cup. The men’s team during that period was a comedy of errors; the result was such a complete disaster that it ripped apart the infrastructure of U.S. Soccer and turned the men’s team into a point of national ridicule.
According to calculations done by Yahoo Sports, if the men had qualified for the 2018 World Cup and had still lost every game in Russia, their compensation would have leapfrogged the women, because of their bonuses for making the World Cup. If they had made it to the knockout stage, as they had done in the previous two World Cups, their compensation would have skyrocketed far past the women’s.
The women’s team’s primary argument for years has been that it shouldn’t have to be the topranked team in the world and maintain such a sustained level of excellence in order to be compensated even close to what the men’s team makes.
But that seems to exactly what Judge Klausner is telling them.
Once again, the women’s own success is being used against them.
Legal fights are far less satisfying and less clearcut than competition on the field. The women’s team members knew that when they filed the classaction lawsuit. All the public support and equalpay chants don’t carry weight in the courtroom. Or, in this case, on the path to the courtroom.
The original trial date was scheduled for this week, but was pushed back until June because of the coronavirus outbreak. Klausner gutted almost all of the women’s claims of unequal treatment, including dismissing the notion that forcing the women and not the men to play on artificial turf was discriminatory. Klausner accepts U.S. Soccer’s argument that it didn’t need to install real grass, as it does for the men, because the federation did not anticipate generating enough revenue to make the accommodation financially prudent, nor did it think it was required to attract opponents. Klausner called that “a legitimate, nondiscriminatory explanation,” to which many of us would simply say, “Huh?”
The two prongs of the suit that are allowed to go forward to trial are very narrow: differences in travel accommodations and team staffing in relation to trainers and medical staff.
The women’s team has vowed to appeal, and Klausner does have a history of being reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But such a process would be lengthy, estimated at one to two years.
So, what happens next? U.S. Soccer issued a statement saying that it looked forward to working with the women’s team “to chart a positive path forward.” Will it be willing to reach a settlement? Will the negotiations for the next collective bargaining agreement (the current one is set to expire next year) look remarkably different? Will the men, who are working without a CBA, and women join forces and collectively bargain together?
U.S. Soccer might be a winner in court, but it is still a loser in the court of public opinion. Its reputation, already damaged by the failures of the men’s team and internal fighting, was crushed in recent months by the federation’s “scorched earth” legal tactics used against its most successful team. The federation lawyers argued that playing for the men’s team “carries more responsibility” than playing for the women’s team and that women players have “less ability.” That legal strategy was condemned by five of the federation’s biggest sponsors.
The federation has new leadership, notably its first ever female president, Cindy Parlow Cone. Cone took a conciliatory tone in a March conference call, saying that she hoped for a settlement. She noted that “a lot of damage has been done. We have to rebuild that trust and that relationship.”
How that happens remains to be seen. The U.S. women took a crushing loss.
But that certainly doesn’t mean the U.S. Soccer has come out the winner.