I just saw a 15 minute video by** Sargon of Akkad **about female Football/(soccer) players suing to get paid as much as men do, and I couldn’t disagree with him more.
…Though I have NO idea how it, (women getting paid as much as men in sports,) would be implemented, I’m not interested in sports. I doubt it will ever happen because it doesn’t seem feasible.
There are times when I don’t agree with what’s claimed to be “unequal”, but women put in just as much as men. So… it seems to me to be inequality.
Link to the video… it’s really not worth watching though. It’s just what introduced me to the issue.
As long as the income to the teams were equal (M & F), there’s no reason they shouldn’t receive equal pay. But I’m betting male teams (soccer) draw more fans, and therefore make more money for the owners allowing them to demand a bigger share of that profit.
Sargon of Akkad seems to be a real asshole but he also seems to be a correct asshole.
I suppose you can argue that men’s soccer should subsidize women’s soccer the way football and basketball subsidizes pretty much every other sport at some colleges but that doesn’t seem to be the argument.
If you are representing the nation then I don’t think we compensate people based on profitability. I don’t think we should pay the women’s gymnastics team any more than we pay our men’s gymnastics team even if the women get more views.
Or am I missing something about what the world cup is and represents.
What don’t you understand? They’re paid to fill seats. They are in the sports/entertainment industry. Seriously, what about this is confusing?
The video goes over the numbers involved so saying it’s not worth watching is about as disingenuous as it gets. 3.2 billion viewers for men’s soccer versus 750 million for women’s.
I’m not a sports guy but if I understand it correctly, the current US women’s soccer team is generating WAY more money than the US men’s soccer team. Yet, they get paid way less.
I mean fuck; they got four gold medals and are the current world champions.
It’s entertainment and it should be based on revenue for the team or league. If women’s teams generate the same kind of income as men’s teams then they should get paid the same. The gender doesn’t even matter. If women aren’t getting paid proportionally to men based on the revenue then there’s a problem.
but I also argue that modeling pay should also be based on revenue. Since male models bring in less revenue than females, the fact that they don’t get paid as much is not some violation of “gender equity,” if “equity” is what this is about. Ditto the female athletes.
The US women’s World Cup team has been way, way more successful, and their latest World Cup victory match got higher TV ratings in the US than any game from the US men’s team ever… and the women players get only about 1/4th of the pay. That does seem like total bullshit inequality, and at least in this case, the women should get paid as much as the men’s players.
Equal pay for athletes who do not draw equal crowds is a classic case of conflating equity of opportunity with equity of outcome. There is a rather a lot of this particularly in the professional tennis scene, to the point where several Grand Slam tournaments are downright hypocritical in the sense that they boast of “equal pay for equal work”, and all the while the men play 5-setters while the women play 3-setters. It is nonsense, and nothing more.
We genuinely will not achieve true equality until people internalize that nobody deserves anything on the basis of gender alone - work merits pay on the basis of quality and correlated profit, not on the merit of genitalia.
Edit: With regards to the men’s team garnering lower TV ratings than the women’s team, remember that at the respective World Cups, each team receives prize money from FIFA based on their final placement, and due to the fact that the viewership of the men’s WC dwarfs that of the women’s WC overall by somewhere near a factor of 4, the pool from which prize money is distributed is simply vastly larger than the corresponding pool for women. The American FA would have to pay the difference out-of-pocket to equalize WC money between the genders - although granted, if the women do in fact draw a larger crowd in the home market, doing so has some merit.
The US women do not get 1/4th the pay. They get paid something like 90% of what the men do on a per game basis PLUS they get paid a salary by USSF. The women get paid far higher than the men based on the revenue that each of them take in. All the stats put out there by the USWNT and their lawyer have been highly disingenuous, for example, comparing WC year revenue for the women vs non-WC revenue for the men and assuming massive victory tour cash after the Olympics while ignoring the gigantic Copa America tournament that the men are playing in this year.
They also conflate WC payments with USSF payments. Yeah, the women got paid less for winning the WC than the men did for losing to Belgium. Those are FIFA payments, not USSF payments! The men’s world cup is by far the biggest sporting even in the world. It takes in massively more money than the women’s tournament. Of course the payments are different.
The only real arguments are regarding playing surfaces and per diems. However, the women only play on turf fields because they can’t sell out the larger stadiums that tend to be all grass. If they restricted themselves to smaller stadiums that also had grass that would greatly restrict where they could play. As far as per diems, those were negotiated in the respective collective bargaining agreements with each players association. The CBAs aren’t negotiated at the same time. The per diem was even until the men renegotiated more recently than the women. Meh.
Your understanding is incorrect. The men create much more revenue.
If women’s soccer players, or any women’s sport is earning money on par with a men’s sport and the women’s pay isn’t on par with the men’s then I’d like to see some clear, definitive evidence of that. Every time I hear about this subject the details of the actual money are buried, and cloudy. If there is such a disparity it should be the lead of the story, since it’s not then I assume the disparity is not real.