Playing for love, not money
Canada’s female soccer stars lead varied lives off the pitch
If it weren’t for this year’s women’s World Cup, Canadian midfielder Selenia Iacchelli and defender Emily Zurrer would be parked somewhere in Vancouver dishing out Belgian waffles and frozen yogurt from a food cart.
Yes, two of Canada’s best soccer players own and operate Sweet Ride FroYo n’ Waffles food truck.
The pair, who share an apartment in Kitsilano, have been friends for more than a decade, from the days when they were teens playing on national youth teams. During their down time between practices and games, they’d throw around ideas about running their own business.
It all came together in 2012 after Iacchelli’s surfing trip in Oregon when she and her sister came across Portland’s truck scene.
“I loved it and I came back and I was like, ‘Em, what if we started a food truck because it’s a semi-affordable business to start?’ And, literally, we just started that day,” says 28-year-old Iacchelli.
It took a while to perfect the waffle recipe but Sweet Ride opened in 2013 and has been doing well. But it’s parked until after the tournament, when Iacchelli, Zurrer and their teammates hope to have gold medals to show off.
“We were thinking of having to sell it just because we don’t have time to do it, but we’ll see,” she says. “We still have it right now.”
Many Canadian players in this year’s FIFA World Cup have full and varied lives off the soccer pitch.
Maybe it’s because the world’s most popular sport attracts a different sort of athlete.
When teammate and goalkeeper Karina LeBlanc isn’t playing for the Chicago Red Stars in the National Women’s Soccer League, she’s often travelling as a UNICEF ambassador. Last year, she spoke at the United Nations about the importance of sports for children.
“Winning an Olympic medal is special and that was an achievement for me as an athlete. Being named a UNICEF ambassador was an achievement for me as a person,” 35-year-old LeBlanc says in an interview.
“It’s about saving children’s lives … to allow them to believe that they can be somebody and be greater than what they believe or what they see every day. Then, we’re doing something with a positive impact to change the world.”
After 17 years, LeBlanc is retiring from the national team following the World Cup, but will play next season in the NWSL.
“It’s going to be a stressful time,” says the Maple Ridge native, who admits she has no firm plan for what comes after soccer.
“I think it will involve some sort of TV,” says the exuberant goalkeeper. “I’ve had different offers coming around TV work and so sort of social (advocacy) work. Obviously, I have a passion for life … and I would love to use my voice in the best way.”
Midfielder Desiree Scott is an assistant coach at her alma mater, the University of Manitoba. Since 2014, she’s been an ambassador for the Homeless World Cup in addition to running camps and clinics for kids.
“I would love to use my voice in the best way.” KARINA LEBLANC , TEAM CANADA GOALKEEPER
There’s only one player on Canada’s team who hasn’t gone to university. That’s Jessie Fleming and it’s only because, at 17, she won’t graduate from high school until next year.
But these “other” lives are often also a necessity, and not just for soccer players.
Few elite female athletes earn anywhere near what the top-paid men earn; some professional female athletes are paid less than minimum wage.
That means that many need other jobs to support their sports habit. Many soccer players continent hop, playing for teams in other leagues whose seasons don’t overlap.
Most need a university degree to ensure that they have a career to fall back on after their sports careers end.
After the Canadian team won the Olympic bronze medal in 2012, forward Melissa Tancredi went back to school full time to finish her chiropractic degree.
“Honestly, that’s life,” she told Sportsnet in a 2014 interview. “I needed to get this done and there wasn’t anything that was going to stand in my way.”
But gender disparity is a problem in other areas. At many Canadian universities, female athletes having fewer opportunities for scholarships and top-level coaching because universities do not fund men’s and women’s sports equally.
It’s why so many go to the United States. There, in 1972, Congress passed an amendment to the federal education act called Title IX.
It made gender discrimination illegal when it came to funding programs from elementary school through to college. It wasn’t only the sport programs, but also access to scholarships, coaching, locker rooms and facilities.
(That 33-year history of non-discrimination is part of the reason a group of players filed a human rights complaint before this World Cup. The complaint, which was eventually dropped, was about the unfairness of elite women forced to play on artificial turf while men’s teams in the World Cup would never agree to it because real turf is deemed the gold standard.)
And while the level of girls’ participation in sports has risen 900 per cent since Title IX was passed, the economic reality is that professional women’s sports aren’t as lucrative as men’s.
They attract smaller audiences and less advertising money.
Of the very few female athletes with lucrative endorsements and million-dollar earnings, most compete in individual sports such as tennis and golf.
For team sports, there’s barely money enough to sustain the stars, let alone their teammates.
The U.S. National Women’s Soccer League’s minimum salary is $6,842 a year. The maximum is $37,800.
By contrast, players in the U.S.-based National Women’s Hockey League that’s scheduled to begin play next fall will earn an average of $15,000, while players in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League earn only $1,000. (The Canadian league’s entire 2014 budget was only $1.8 million or the equivalent to the base salary for a man playing in the NHL.)
In the NWSL, each team has a $265,000 salary cap. (In Major League Soccer, the top North American men’s league, it’s $3.5 million.)
Not included in that cap are allocated national team members from Canada, Mexico and the United States. National team members, including Canadian captain Christine Sinclair, are paid by their national federations.
In the women’s soccer world, nobody’s talking about who makes what. The Canada Soccer Association won’t say what it pays national team members and the league will only talk about minimums and maximums.
When I asked Sinclair about how much she earns, Sinclair said that she makes a “good living.”
For the women’s World Cup, FIFA will pay out $15 million US to the 24 teams. That’s nearly double the prize money from 2011. But there are also eight more teams than last time.
Compare that to the 2014 men’s World Cup where 32 teams had $476 million to divide among them.
Winning gold in the women’s World Cup is worth $2 million. Divided equally among the 23 players that would be almost $87,000. Of course, the players don’t get all the money.
The second-place team gets $1.3 million; third gets $1 million; and, the bottom eight teams will be paid $375,000 or $16,304 a player.
In addition to everything else, once players’ careers are over, it’s tougher for them to get a sports-related job. Women have historically been under-represented as coaches, referees and in management positions in sporting federations and administration even for women’s teams in women’s leagues.
Of the 24 teams in the World Cup, only eight have female coaches.
Jeff Plush is the commissioner of the NWSL after replacing Cheryl Bailey earlier this year.
FIFA, the international soccer federation, has 32 directors, only three of them women. Even though the Canadian men’s team hasn’t won an Olympic medal since 1904 and its highest FIFA ranking was 40th, in 1996, Canada Soccer has only three women on its 13-member board. U.S. Soccer has only three women among its 16 directors.
The majority of the paid staff for the World Cup in Canada, however, are women. So, are the overwhelming majority of team liaison officers, team security liaison officers and the medical health officers at each venue.
But those liaison and medical health officers won’t be getting a salary. They’re doing it for the love of the sport and will only get an honorarium.