The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  The per-roster payment structure is common for national teams around the world—particularly for men’s national teams—so why did the women push for a salary structure? Because given how the women’s game lagged behind the men’s game globally and how women’s leagues were still playing catch-up, the women’s national team didn’t have much of a choice. Male players make their livings from their clubs, not from their national teams, but when John Langel negotiated the earliest contracts for the U.S. women, the women had no professional league to play in and no way to earn a living as soccer players. They couldn’t fully commit themselves to the national team if the federation didn’t offer year-round financial stability.

  The lack of viable women’s leagues that could pay salaries wasn’t due to lack of trying. The slower development of leagues for women around the world has been reflective, to some extent, of a landscape where decision-makers haven’t wanted women taking over the sport. Women were up until relatively recently banned from playing soccer in two of the world’s most famous soccer countries: England, until 1971, and Brazil, until 1979. Globally, women’s soccer and the institutions around it were still young and growing compared to the male version of the sport.

  The U.S. men’s team, meanwhile, didn’t have to worry about having a league to play in for at least the last several decades. Whether it was stateside in MLS or a bevy of top-tier leagues around the world, the men had hundreds of clubs that could pay them a steady paycheck. In other words: The men’s national team simply didn’t need to rely on the federation for a guaranteed salary.

  But even with the different salary structures, both teams were eligible for performance bonuses. It was those bonuses that created the biggest discrepancy in compensation and became the heart of the players’ wage-discrimination complaint. If a female player won a game, she earned a $1,350 win bonus. If a male player won a game, depending on the opponent, he could earn a bonus ranging from $6,250 to $17,625.

  It was the huge discrepancy in performance bonuses that allowed the women to earn a fraction of every dollar a male player made. Even though the men and women were paid differently, the bottom line was that the federation had been paying more compensation overall to the men’s player pool.

  In eight years, from 2008 to 2015, the federation’s five top-paid male players made more money than the five top-paid female players. Going down the list of the federation’s highest-paid players, the advantage flipped and the female players earned slightly more than the men through the rest of the top 20. But after that point, the men earned far more than the women straight down the line. For instance, the 25th highest-paid man earned almost double the 25th highest-paid woman. The 50th highest-paid man earned nearly 10 times the 50th highest-paid woman.

  The question posed to the EEOC was whether the discrepancy in compensation was justifiable. The players say that because the discrepancy came from performance bonuses—whether or not a team wins—a revenue-based justification wasn’t valid.

  On the conference call the day the EEOC complaint was filed, Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated asked U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati directly: “Do you think the U.S. women deserve to be paid equally to the U.S. men by U.S. Soccer and, if not, why not?”

  Gulati replied: “I don’t know if I want to use the word deserve in any of this. I guess I’d reverse the question, Grant. Do you think revenue should matter at all in determination of compensation in a market economy?”

  Part of the difference in compensation was based on revenue, he said. Another part of it was how successful each team had been and how much in incentives each team needed to perform well. The implication was, of course, that the No. 1–ranked women needed fewer incentives to win than the perennially mid-tier men’s team.

  Then, Matthew Futterman of the Wall Street Journal followed up on the conference call. There’s no other federation the women can play for—they can’t shop around for a better employer in international soccer—so how, he asked, is a “market economy” argument fair?

  Gulati, an economics professor at Columbia University, replied: “Happy to have you sit in on a class up here, Matt. You’re right, in terms of their national team performance, there’s only one employer. That’s why you have a collective bargaining agreement that’s fairly negotiated between the two parties.”

  U.S. Soccer would stick to its talking point that the players negotiated the compensation structure they received, and thus, the federation didn’t understand why the players were now complaining about wage discrimination. But the legal team backing the players’ EEOC complaint disagreed—they argued the individual players who filed the claim could never collectively bargain away their rights not to be discriminated against.

  One of U.S. Soccer’s key arguments—if not in a legal sense, then for public relations—was that it had invested far more in its women’s program than any other country in the world. That was the argument Hank Steinbrecher made back in 1996 when the national team threatened to boycott the Olympics over bonus pay, and it remained an argument 20 years later. Neither side disputes that it’s true: U.S. Soccer does invest more in its women’s program than any other nation in the world. The federation had also set up a league for the women to play in.

  But for the players, who see themselves as offering guidance and leadership to other women’s teams around the world, that didn’t matter. Just because U.S. Soccer hadn’t treated them worse didn’t mean the players should stop pushing for equal treatment.

  For the EEOC, investigating the complicated financial comparisons between teams and determining whether there was legal basis for discrepancies would be a long, arduous task. Noneconomic factors, like the disparity in grass versus turf for the men and women, could be considered too, and it would take years to determine if U.S. Soccer had, in fact, discriminated against the players.

  The court of public opinion wouldn’t take that long, though. The women were winning straight out of the gate.

  The Today show appearance spread like wildfire, and the story was featured by major outlets around the world in no time. Fresh off having just watched the women win a World Cup in dominating fashion, pundits and opinion columnists lined up to take their side in the public fight. The U.S. Senate, which rarely agreed on much, unanimously voted to pass a nonbinding resolution asking U.S. Soccer to pay the women equally to the men.

  But part of what made the “equal pay” argument so compelling were some of the smaller disparities that seemed impossible to justify.

  If U.S. Soccer asked a player to appear at an event for a sponsor and that player was male, he got paid $3,750. If the player was female, she got $3,000. For every ticket sold to a women’s game, $1.20 went into the team’s coffers. For the men, it was $1.50 of every ticket.

  The women got a domestic per diem of $50, while the men got $62.50. When traveling internationally, the women got $60, while the men got $75. In a New York Times op-ed, Carli Lloyd quipped: “Maybe they figure that women are smaller and thus eat less.”

  The federation seemed particularly embarrassed about the difference in per diem and appearance fees. Though they said it was due to the men and women negotiating their CBAs at different times, they vowed that the next women’s CBA would include language that guaranteed the women would get the same payment in those situations as the men.

  Sources at the federation now say if John Langel had still been the team’s attorney, he would’ve just called up Sunil Gulati and asked that the women get whatever was in the new men’s contract. It would’ve been an easy sell, they say: the discrepancy in per diems, for instance, was worth only about $40,000 per year, a drop in the bucket. The issue would’ve never been part of a public fight. But John Langel wasn’t the team’s attorney anymore, and the discrepancies in favor of the men were powerful ammo in the equal pay campaign.

  * * *

  The players were still under contract with U.S. Soccer while all of this was going on and they still had to go back to the negotiation table to try to get a
new deal done.

  “It made the negotiations way more public—probably more public than U.S. Soccer wanted them to be,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “In that respect, the public leaned toward us, and it put more pressure on U.S. Soccer.”

  But the tone of negotiations didn’t change after the EEOC claim. The wide gulf between the two sides that was there before still remained and they weren’t any closer to getting a deal done. On top of that, the leverage the players were hoping for—the threat of boycotting the Olympics—soon disappeared.

  On June 3, 2016, a judge ruled in favor of U.S. Soccer over the question of whether the memorandum of understanding bound the players to their previous collective bargaining agreement and its no-strike clause. Testimony and old emails from John Langel convinced the judge that the MOU was intended all along to keep the CBA in effect until December 31, 2016, and the players had approved it. The ruling meant the players could not strike heading into the Olympics.

  If the national team was going to compel U.S. Soccer to give them a new contract with equal pay, a threat to boycott wasn’t going to do it. The best leverage they could find would be in the form of a gold medal in Rio.

  CHAPTER 20

  “We Played a Bunch of Cowards”

  Since the national team had just won the 2015 World Cup, picking a roster for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro should be easy, right? Not quite.

  Before Jill Ellis selected her final roster, she chatted with U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati about her plans. There was one of two ways she could approach the Olympics, she told him. Either she could treat it as an extension of the World Cup cycle and bring in largely the same team that won the 2015 World Cup. Or, she could start preparing for the 2019 World Cup immediately, even as she tried to win in Rio.

  Ellis, who had earned a multiyear contract extension after her World Cup win, wanted to take a long-term approach. She wanted to set up the team not just for the upcoming Olympics but for the next World Cup, too.

  “You’re not going to cost us a medal, are you?” Gulati asked.

  “I don’t plan on it,” Ellis told him.

  In some ways, the roster was going to change because there was no other choice. For certain players who had made the squad for the World Cup a year earlier, it was never expected that they would return for the Olympics.

  Shannon Boxx, Abby Wambach, Lori Chalupny, and Lauren Holiday all retired after the World Cup. That created some roster spots, but not too many. The rosters for the Olympics had five fewer players than those for the World Cup. There was no room for luxury players—everyone would need to be able to contribute.

  Mallory Pugh, then just 18 years old, was in great form, but she didn’t have any experience in a big tournament. Nevertheless, she figured to be an important part of the team for years to come and made the roster. Crystal Dunn was lighting it up in the NWSL and earned a spot for her first major tournament, too.

  For Ellis, the biggest roster decision came down to whether she should take Megan Rapinoe or Heather O’Reilly. Both were wingers. Both were veterans. Both had delivered memorable, game-changing, last-gasp crosses on the world stage.

  But Rapinoe hadn’t played a game since December, eight months before, when she tore her ACL in Hawaii. She was only just starting to return to full-contact training, and she wasn’t fully fit.

  On a roster as small as the one for an Olympics—just 18 players, two of them goalkeepers—every single field player would need to be able to contribute. The question wasn’t whether Rapinoe was good enough—it was whether she could really make her return in the middle of a major tournament.

  Taking Rapinoe was risky, but something told Ellis that Rapinoe was too special of a player to leave at home.

  Rapinoe, a native of Northern California who settled in the Pacific Northwest, was the type of player who could change a game. She sparked the first bit of momentum for the Americans at the 2015 World Cup, scoring the team’s first goal in Canada. She could create magic out of nothing, and when she was having a good game, defenders were helpless to stop her. She was also an effervescent personality who kept the mood light, even amid the rigor of a major tournament.

  “With Rapinoe, it obviously was not her form, because she hasn’t been playing,” Ellis told reporters after she had selected her roster. “But she’s got set pieces, crossing—the pieces where, I think, late in a game or against a certain team we have to break down, she can help us with.”

  After more than a decade of Heather O’Reilly serving as a key cog in the national team’s system, it was hard to imagine the team without her. Though she wasn’t the type of creative flair player who dazzles, like Rapinoe, she covered a ton of ground, she ran harder than anyone on the field, and she had a way of producing special moments through brute force.

  Rapinoe made the final roster and O’Reilly was named an alternate, a player who could be added to the roster in case of a tournament-ending injury, but who would really just be there to train with the Olympic team in Brazil.

  “In the 230 games that I have played for the USWNT so far,” O’Reilly wrote on social media after the roster was announced, “I have done it with my whole heart, with every ounce of me, regardless of the role, to help us win. Whether I was a starter, or a substitute, or even the times that I did not see the field. . . . And next month, I will travel to Rio with the team as an alternate. Once again, whatever I need to do to help the U.S. win, I will do with my whole heart.”

  * * *

  Before the tournament even started, Hope Solo had already unwittingly managed to turn Brazilian fans against the Americans.

  Worries about the Zika virus had led some athletes to pull out of the Olympics, and others expressed concerns. Soccer teams would play most of their games outside of Rio de Janeiro, including in far-flung Manaus, where Zika cases via mosquitos had been reported.

  Before the national team left for the tournament, Solo posted pictures on social media of the mosquito repellant and mosquito nets she planned to bring to Brazil with her, with the hashtag #ZikaProof. The posts offended soccer fans in Brazil, who were already upset with how American media had portrayed their country.

  Much of the Brazilians’ bitterness toward Americans wasn’t Solo’s fault, but she became the target of it. From her first goal kick in the USA’s opening match versus New Zealand in the group stage, fans shouted “Oooooh,” holding the sound as Solo prepared to strike the dead ball. Then, at the moment Solo’s foot hit the ball, they shouted “Ziiikaaa!” Anytime she touched the ball, the stadium filled with boos.

  But if the Brazilians hoped to get into Solo’s head or the heads of her teammates, it didn’t appear to be working. The national team started the 2016 Olympics in the dominant fashion everyone expected. The Americans comfortably rolled past New Zealand, and afterward, there wasn’t much of a story for the media to cover. The Americans were winning again—same old, same old. So, the focus turned to the Zika chants and Solo. She was diplomatic and unfazed.

  “It’s the Brazilians—they love soccer, they love football, it’s part of the culture, so I expect it, but they’re having fun,” Solo told reporters. “I mean, at least it’s loud in the stadium—I’d rather have that than hear a needle drop.”

  The Americans faced France next, and again Solo was the storyline—but this time it was because she had a spectacular game in goal. She denied a header from towering French defender Wendie Renard with a full-stretch, fingertip save. Later, she made a point-blank save on Marie-Laure Delie, who had a breakaway. Solo denied two other good Delie shots.

  With a goal scored by Carli Lloyd, the Americans beat France, 1–0, but Hope Solo was the hero, despite the loud boos from the crowd.

  “Hope is ice,” Lloyd said afterward. “Nothing can rattle her. She had a fantastic game tonight—huge saves and came up really big.”

  Solo was arguably the national team’s most consistent and reliable player. But then, the match against Colombia happened.

  Heading into the
final match of the group stage, there was little reason to think anything other than a win was ahead for the Americans. In their previous meetings, Colombia had never even scored a goal and the U.S. always won by multiple goals.

  But after 25 minutes, it became clear that everything the U.S. counted on—the precedents set with Solo and against Colombia—had turned on its head. Megan Rapinoe fouled Liana Salazar, conceding a free kick, and Catalina Usme stood behind the ball just outside the box. A wall of six American players shielded Solo on the near-post side. Usme struck the ball around the wall at the center of the goal. Solo only had to take one step to be in perfect position—it was an easy catch—so, she crouched, ready for the ball. But the shot dropped right before it reached her hands and bounced off the grass, through her legs, and into the net.

  It was a shocking misjudgment of the ball’s flight from the world’s best goalkeeper. Such a hard-to-watch goalkeeper error is called a “howler” in soccer lingo—and it was definitely a howler.

  Becky Sauerbrunn, the team’s leading centerback and cocaptain, turned to Solo and told her not to worry.

  “We’re good,” she told Solo.

  “We’ll get it back.”

  They did eventually get it back. Carli Lloyd fired a long-range shot that was blocked, but Crystal Dunn tapped it in for the equalizer. Later, Mallory Pugh became the youngest-ever goal-scorer for the national team in an Olympics at 18 years old with a lovely dribbled run and strike.

  The clock ticked past the 90th minute and the Americans held a 2–1 lead, but there was enough stoppage time left for a surprise from Colombia—or rather, a surprise from Hope Solo. On another free kick outside the box, again Catalina Usme stepped up behind the ball. Christen Press and Crystal Dunn formed a two-woman wall while the rest of the Americans tried to man-mark in the box. Usme wasn’t looking for her teammates, though—she had an eye for goal. She struck the ball and Solo rose into the air to punch it away with her left fist. But Solo missed. The ball fell into the back of the net. The match ended, 2–2.