Well, it’s been a mix of comments about professional leagues, and about the national teams.
Do you have a link to the revenue for all 4 years? Would like to see that data to see how much of the take the men’s team gets vs the women’s.
There’s a graph in this article.
Btw, the women have an equal pay clause in their contract already. It says that if they ever are paid a lower percentage of revenue than the men they get a lump sum payment to make up the difference. Why haven’t the women been using that all along? Because they always get paid a higher percentage of revenue than the men do.
Once again, I revert to my Olympics analogy. Lets say that we paid our Olympic athletes. Lets further say that our women’s gymnastics was more popular worldwide and derived more advertising revenue. Based on that should we pay our female gymnasts more than our male gymnasts if our m female gymnasts never make it to the medal round and our male gymnasts have gotten gold the last three olympics? Or is advertising revenue not a proper benchmark for determining how much we pay our national teams.
These are not for profit organizations. Or are not supposed to be. We have a professional soccer league where we can pay people according to how much revenue they generate.
Everything.
That’s why its an analogy.
I didn’t realize that this was about the women’s professional soccer league. I thought it was about the world cup national teams. Do you see no difference between how national teams should be compensated and how professional teams should be compensated?
It has zero to do with it.
They’re paid for their ability to put people in the seats.
We’re not talking about the Olympics. So your analogy doesn’t apply.
The US national soccer teams do participate in the Olympics and they do have different compensation structures that apply during that tournament.
I agree but women tennis players have been very successful demanding equal pay at grand slam tournaments because of the equality argument. If the argument is made to pay athletes based on ticket sales women will not be paid as much since there sports are, with a few exceptions, much less popular than mens. I think most people realize this and so resort to equality arguments for paying women the same. However since the skills gap is so much greater than the pay gap if you treated women equally and paid them according to skill than there probably would not be more than a dozen professional women athletes in the world.
Do you mean sports in general or just the soccer teams in terms of per diems for the olympics?
For being paid to be on the olympic teams, then yes the women should be paid the same as the men.
As for sports in general, there is no way that most women deserve equal pay. My opinion has nothing to do with the amount of work the female athletes put in compared to men, it is simply a free market economics argument. Men bring in hundreds of billions of dollars more than the women when comparing major sports. In real life, I believe women deserve to be paid equally to men because they are producing the same as men.
I’ve asked for an explanation why the US soccer team is more like LA Galaxy or DC United rather than an Olympic team and I don’t think anyone has responded. AFAICT these are national teams representing the nation so ISTM all these arguments about market driven compensation are moot.
And why is the US women’s national soccer team more like DC united rather than the US Olympic soccer team? Oh wait, They ARE the US women’s Olympic soccer team.
While they do represent the country, they also make money. The women did a victory tour after the WC 100% to capitalize on the publicity and milk as much money out of it as possible. The men are playing Puerto Rico next week completely for the money too.
Do you think the USSF should distribute FIFA prize money equally to both teams?
I am not sure it matters much given that the vast majority of money Olympic athletes are paid is from sponsorships, and that money is skewed heavily toward popular Mel athletes. Given the paychecks of Olympic athletes and national soccer teams are largely based on the same forces, what is the point in comparing them?
This is a bad analogy. Professional athletes aren’t comparable to “normal” jobs in this sort of way because the sums of money involved are typically at least an order of magnitude greater. For instance, if you’re a bad ass basketball player in, say, Spain and you’re making a good living, you’re probably happy. But if an NBA team comes in and offers you a $2 Million contract, yes, there’s a barrier and unhappiness with having to move to the US, I’m sure, but most people would take it.
It’s just the nature of the business of professional athletes that they have to go where the work is. Should I feel bad for an athlete who has made a comfortable life for himself in some city for several years but then gets faced with being too expensive and being cut. He can either retire or try to find another team and have to uproot his life and family. If you work as a copier repairman, or most other types of careers, the risk that you will have to move large distances for work is much lower.
And really, another thing that gets me about this sort of talk is the same thing when people complain about how actor A gets paid more than actor B, or musician X gets paid more than musician Y. In general, they’re all already making far more money than the average person and a lot of us seem to get into this discussion that somehow it’s unfair that one person is “only” getting $4 Million when someone else that one might perceive as comparable is making $15 Million. They’re all rich, and once you’re at that kind of level, that money isn’t about what one is worth at some absolute level of overall skill or whatever, it’s based on value added and status. One actor gets paid more than another, even if that first one isn’t all that good of an actor, probably because their name is a bigger draw. For example, was it fair that in the original Superman film, Marlon Brando was hardly in the film and wasn’t even notable for his performance and made $3.7 Million, but Christopher Reeve made only $250k as the star of the film and his performance is considered iconic by many (both numbers unadjusted for inflation). Is that fair? No, it’s not fair, but the former was a world-renowned actor who was a massive box office draw, the latter was an unknown. I think that’s a much more comparable analogy to many women’s sports.
So the problem isn’t about how much female athletes get paid, they’re not struggling to make ends meet, and unfortunately, women’s sports tend to draw smaller crowds and make less money than men’s, and as a result it just doesn’t make business sense to pay them the same amount.
In the end it comes down to money so make the prize money a percentage of the gate, those who attract highest number of spectators get the highest prize money. Male female should not come into it
How much money are they making on these victory tours if they are so concerned about their base salary during the world cup?
If the USSF is interested in promoting soccer (across the board) rather than making a profit by having a men’s team participate in the world cup, then I think they should promote soccer across the board.
The Men’s soccer team is not making money because they are so fucking awesome, they are making money because they are men and more people watch men’s soccer than women’s soccer no matter how shitty the US men’s team happens to be.
Doesn’t it make EXTRA sense to compare them if their paychecks are based on the same forces? The US Olympic Swim Team pays their athletes the same regardless of sex. The men’s team draws a crapload more sponsorship and endorsement.
If the men’s soccer team is getting paid more because they are so fucking worth it then let them earn that in sponsorships and endorsements. Otherwise they should be paid the same as the women.
They do earn it. FIFA earns a shit ton more for mens games and pay the national associations appropriately. The mean draw much higher TV ratings and higher attendance. They absolutely earn a higher paycheck.
People don’t like watching men more just randomly. They like watching it because the level of play is objectively massively better than the women. There are probably a hundred teams in the US that are better than the USWNT. People like watching high skill, it’s not a mystery why the men are more popular.
Is it your contention that pay to the players is the same thing as promoting the game? If so, should it matter that qualification for the women consists of all home matches over two weeks while the men qualify over the course of two years and play in places where spectators throw batteries and bags of piss at them?