I think you’re overestimating the abilties of the USMNT and of women players.
If you take the starting XI’s of the big 4 European leagues (La Liga, Bundesliga, Premiership and Serie A) that’s 858 players alone. Players who get minutes in the top 12 or so soccer leagues in the World and you’re already looking at about 5000 players.
USMNT players have made the FourFourTwo top 100 players list in the past, but if you look at the current top 100 (December 2015) there isn’t a single US player in it. Worse, considering current PL top scorer Harry Kane is ranked at 90 and PL PotS Mahrez isn’t even ranked (not that I would necessarily agree with their rankings), it’s clear that none are currently even in the same ballpark as the top 100 and it’s highly debatable if currently any USMNT player would be realistically be ranked in the top 200.
However it is clear Women’s soccer is well below the standard of men’s pro soccer which would mean their are potentially tens of thousands of male players better than the best female player.
I’ve always thought the confusion on this stems from conflating college and pro sports.
Women’s professional basketball doesn’t make nearly as much money as the NBA does. That’s show biz. The example noted above of male models earning less than their female counterparts is illustrative.
On the other hand, female college athletes, it can be argued, deserve access to sports that don’t draw the crowds of the men’s teams because they’re amateurs, and the sports are part of the education which colleges which provide. This has civil rights implications that the male-female earnings disparity in pro sports does not. (It also tests the fault line separating big-time college sports from professional sports).
An instance which straddled this divide: IIRC, female tennis pros in the 1960s-70s experienced discrimination in pay irrespective of their drawing power because of the widespread belief that men deserved more because they were better players than the women. (Billie Jean King was a pioneer in publicizing and protesting this). If professional sports claim the right to pay women less because they’re in business solely to make money, it’s harder for them to defend discrimination in men’s favor.
While I don’t think the “women need to be paid just as much as men even if they bring in less revenue” argument is valid, there is also something problematic with the “If you don’t like it you can work somewhere else” argument as well. That kind of argument can be used to excuse a lot of discrimination.
(I.e., “Sorry, we don’t hire black people, if you don’t like it, there are thousands of other employers who do hire black people,” etc. etc.)
Of course. They’re owned by the United States Soccer Federation - as you’ll very quickly discover if you attempt to establish a rival US national soccer team of your own.
To add to the above - the USSF is a not-for-profit body whose objectives include the promotion of soccer in the US (specifically, “soccer for women and men”).
So here’s the thing. Although the governing body includes representatives of professional soccer in the US, it’s not the business of the USSF to increase the profits of professional soccer team or the dividends they pay to their owners; it’s their business to promote the game, including (and perhaps predominantly) at the amateur level. (Their bye-laws are larded with reference to amateur players, amateur organisations, etc.) And it’s their business to promote it to men and women alike.
So there’s a tension here. Do we more effectively promote the game by (a) maximising our revenue (that we will spend on promoting the game) and paying male representative players more than female representative players if this tends to maximise revenue, or (b) showing that we value female players as much as male, thereby encouraging participation by girls and women?
Irrespective of this, a large part of the pay disparity is still constituted by fees outside of the USSF’s control - i.e the very large compensation for participation in FIFA-organized tournaments.
It can be debated whether the USSF should be paying the female players a higher per-match salary, certainly, but suggesting women should receive the same tournament compensation from FIFA when their tournaments draw barely a quarter of the TV viewership (and far less media attention, far fewer physically attending spectators, etc) and consequently far less revenue is a naive pipe dream.
I will also opine as a life-long player and follower of association football that for whatever reason the skill disparity across genders is far larger than in many other sports. The difference, particularly in technical abilities, between the best female players and the likes of Lionel Messi/CR7 is at current orders of magnitude larger than the gap between corresponding figures in, say, tennis.
The difference between women’s and men’s soccer pay sources need to be examined. For the ladies, playing for the national team is pretty much their bread and butter. For the men, they earn money from their clubs, playing for their countries is an honour and the pay is actually quite limited. Admittedly being capped for your country can indirectly lead to greater payouts through endorsements and greater marketability and attraction for clubs, but Philip Lahm earned most of his playing money from Bayern Munich while Abby Wambach did for playing for the US.
Yep, for comparison the 2014 World Cup generated just under $5 billion in revenue for FIFA, whereas the 2011 Women’s World Cup generated just over $5 million dollars. Figures aren’t available 2015 WWC was almost certainly more lucrative than the 2011 incarnation, however the men’s tournament tournament is still clearly several orders of magnitude more lucrative.
To give more perspective the revenue from the Men’s World Cup virtually supports FIFA as an organisation, whereas much more money is spent on the WWC is generated. For further comparison in 2011 the prize money pool for the Women’s World Cup was almost twice as much as the revenue generated, whereas in 2014 WC the prize money pool was 1/8 of the revenue generated.
FIFA as an organization cannot afford to have the same prize money in the WWC as the WC without diverting huge amounts of money away from core parts of its mission such as grass roots development.
However it still needs to divert portions of its profit to players to maintain itself and it does not have unlimited resources. For example the current deal the USMNT have was the result of a strike which IIRC meant that the core of the Men’s team did not play in some matches. Also its worth noting that even within the Men’s team the pay is not equal - Clint Dempsey and Tim Howard got paid far more than most other players (hardly unfair as between them they did far more to propel the USMNT into the 2nd round).
Really? You think? I don’t follow much tennis, but I suspect that the best male tennis players would have little trouble dispatching the best female players. It’s true of almost every sport, at almost every level. I personally would feel hard-pressed to rank the relative gaps by sport. Generally speaking, they’re substantial, and favor men.
It’s obviously hard to quantify accurately, but note that I’m specifically speaking in terms of raw technical abilities, which I do not think are generally as impacted by physical limitations as overall ability. To speak in terms of tennis, for example, I think the very best female tennis players over the last few decades (players like Justine Henin, for example) were not far removed from their male counterparts in terms of purely technical abilities and were simply completely physically outmatched, while even the most technically accomplished female footballers I have seen look uncomfortable on the ball relative even to male ones of middling technical skill. The goalkeepers in particular are severely deficient, and not for reasons that can simply be chalked down to slower reflexes or poorer strength/jumping power.
It may simply be that professional football is not a viable full-time job for all but a select very few women (if any), whereas making a living off football for males and tennis for both genders is at least somewhat within the realm of the realistically achievable, and as such the “time invested” gap between the top players of each gender is markedly larger in association football than in tennis, but my WAG is as good as any.
There are 50K+ male pro soccer players in the World, yet the best women’s team in the World has consistently lost to male youth teams who are of an age and pedigree that you would expect they themselves to be easy work for any male professional teams.
Women’s soccer obviously cannot close the physical gap between men and women, but it has done quite a decent amount of work in the last decade plus to close the technical gap. However it is still at the stage where getting itself to the level of the technical gap between men’s and women’s tennis (i.e. the level where it is debatable whether such a gap exists) is a distant dream.
Women’s soccer skill levels are sometimes painful to watch. Charli LLoyds World Cup final goal, keeper was off her line and she took the shot… I repeat the keeper was off her line with the ball in the other half and no threat in a World Cup final.
I think it has a high level of “ra ra girl power”, in coaching because many of the women at the supposedly highest level retain some very bad habits which even 11-year-old boys playing in school have coached out of them. Too much how awesome you are for playing and not enough “what the fuck was that”? The Americans (and Germans) ladies seemed an exception.
Women tennis players don’t retain bad habits at such a level. Since I suspect the game is popular on its own merits.
I agree to some extent with your middle paragraph, and I agree to a large extent that a dearth of coaching talent is also a likely issue, but I will remark multiple things about the others:
While it is obviously the fault of the keeper when he/she is beaten by a lob, the modern keeper in association football is often expected to fulfill the role of a “sweeper keeper” on teams that play with a high defensive line whilst in possession. Essentially, the idea is to preempt 1-on-1 situations created via through balls over the defensive line by intercepting them before an attacking player can latch on to them. See Manuel Neuer (almost inarguably the most complete male goalkeeper in the world right now) for an example of a goalkeeper who will at times venture almost to the middle circle when his team is in possession far up the pitch. A keeper should generally not be beaten by a lob, no, but the days of a keeper never venturing outside the penalty box are long dead and gone and deriding it as an error by default is a misunderstanding of the modern keeper role. When I speak of deficiencies I am thinking moreso in terms of positioning on the goalline relative to the ball - female goalkeepers simply appear to be worse at playing the angles appropriately, in my experience.
Female tennis players overall very much maintain awful habits. There are clear exceptions such as Henin, Mauresmo, Serena Williams, etc, but the vast majority of current professional female players cannot serve with reliability under pressure (and contrary to popular belief a reliable second serve is not height-dependent), do not comfortably slice or volley, and have poor overall point construction relative to male players. The difference is that there are exceptions such as Henin and Williams who essentially play like a physically weaker and slower male, whereas I have seen no such exceptions among female footballers.
Its actually worse than I remember it, the GK was out of position and flailing like a dead fish. Though to be fair, she was probably affected by the ball coming out of the shadows.
The problem is comparing specific instances doesn’t mean much as even the top male players make bad mistakes sometimes. The problem is more that there are frequent technical issues in the Women’s game, which strongly suggest the players on not technically on the level of men.
One thing that serves to disguise the technical issues in the women’s game, but is in itself is a fairly big technical issue is the amount of space the women get on the ball. On one hand you just would not see that amount of space given to male players even at a fairly low semi-pro level, on the other hand it also serves to make the women’s game more of a spectacle as space encourages creativity and allows skillful players to shine.
Male athletes have been suiting owners for a fair share of the vast pot of cash that pro sports generate for decades. It’s about time the women got started. If the women’s soccer team brings in the money then the owners will bend under the right pressure rather than kill the gold goose but they aren’t giving it away if nobody asks.
Portraying this as a men vs women issue is a mistake IMO. These athletes exist in a meritocracy, that kind of comparison doesn’t help them.
Serena Williams would be positively annihilated by the world’s 100th-ranked men’s tennis player, Albert Montanes. M But Williams had made vastly more dough than Montanes ever has, because she sells tickets. She’s worth more, the market says so.
Mike Trout makes more than a hundred times what Willie Mays made (even accounting for inflation.) He is not actually one hundred times better a center fielder than Willie Mays, though. He makes more in large part because he is worth more. In Mays’s time, baseball teams did not draw as many fans, and did not make nearly as much money. So the players were not worth as much.
We don’t pay people according to how talented they are, we pay them according to what we believe their labor is worth.
Olympic athletes don’t get a salary and this is not a debate about them. it’s specifically about women’s soccer leagues and they get paid like any other entertainment venture which is by their ability to fill seats.