Over the next few days, Solo’s teammates distanced themselves from her sentiment. Megan Rapinoe said when the team loses, “we need to handle that graciously.” Asked pointedly about Solo’s comments, Alex Morgan said: “I saw her comments, but I feel like those are opinions I don’t share.”
Soon enough, Solo got an email from Jill Ellis asking her to come to a meeting with U.S. Soccer CEO Dan Flynn in Seattle on August 24, 2016. When Solo didn’t respond quickly, Ellis texted her.
“When she texted me, that was really weird and I knew something was up,” Solo says. “I wanted to say, No, I’m not going to be there, but I knew something was going on and I had to deal with it. It was important, so I made sure I was in town. When Dan Flynn comes to town, it’s for a hiring or a firing. I knew someone’s being fired.”
On that Wednesday afternoon, Solo went to meet the people who were effectively her boss and her boss’s boss in the conference room of a Seattle-area hotel.
When Solo greeted Flynn, she joked that they couldn’t stop meeting under these circumstances—a nod to her previous run-ins with the federation. They both laughed. But this meeting felt tense and awkward in a way that no other meeting of hers with U.S. Soccer had.
While Flynn got the meeting set up to begin, which included getting U.S. Soccer’s lawyers on speaker phone, Solo sat silently next to Jill Ellis.
“I think she was so uncomfortable with the silence that she finally looked at me and was like, So, you’re going to play in the NWSL game this weekend?” Solo recalls.
Solo’s team, the Seattle Reign, was hosting the Portland Thorns. It was a big rivalry game and her first club game on the schedule since an NWSL break for the Olympics ended.
“I just laughed,” Solo says. “It was like, Jill, you fucking tell me. Here I am in this meeting, I have no idea what it is about or if you’re going to fire me, and you’re asking me if I’m playing? I laughed because it was a really dumb question. She just looked away.”
It was there that Flynn told her that she had effectively been fired, on top of a suspension. He handed her a letter notifying her that her contract was terminated and that she was entitled to three months of severance pay, per her contract.
“That was it. I didn’t say much or ask any questions,” Solo says. “I knew that the decision was made and I wasn’t going to talk my way out of it, nor would I stoop to the level of begging for their mercy or anything like that. I took the paper, I thanked Dan, I thanked Jill, and I walked out.”
Outside of the meeting room, Solo’s husband and her publicist were waiting for her.
“Six months suspension, no pay, terminated contract effective immediately,” she said through tears. “Terminated contract—not just a suspension!” she added as she forcefully tapped on the desk in front of her for emphasis.
“How can it be both?” her husband asked, confused why it was both a suspension and a termination.
Solo threw her arms up: “It’s both!”
U.S. Soccer swiftly issued a press release titled: “HOPE SOLO SUSPENDED FOR SIX MONTHS FROM U.S. WOMEN’S NATIONAL TEAM.” It made no mention of Solo’s contract with U.S. Soccer being terminated—the press statement only said she had been suspended for six months and that she’d be eligible to return to the national team in February 2017. In his statement, Sunil Gulati said Solo’s comments “do not meet the standard of conduct we require,” which he had previously spoken to Solo about privately.
Solo believes U.S. Soccer portrayed the situation as a suspension, not a termination, because otherwise it would’ve looked like an overreaction.
“They didn’t want people to know I was terminated for something so dubious and gray,” Solo says. “U.S. Soccer knew they would look bad if they terminated me and didn’t just suspend me, so they leaked that I was only suspended.”
A federation spokesman says her termination was clarified for reporters, but U.S. Soccer announced only her suspension because a termination alone couldn’t prevent her from being called back in.
Solo, however, alleges Dan Flynn told her in the meeting that if she didn’t share that she had been terminated, she may be allowed back on the team. Instead, Solo shared a photo of the termination letter she received with the media so everyone knew it wasn’t only a suspension.
“They told me if I don’t tell anyone it’s a termination and it’s just a suspension, I might be able to come back,” she says. “I was like, Do you know who I am? I’ve always been honest.”
Before she even knew it, Hope Solo had played her last game of soccer—not just with the national team, but ever. The deadline for her suspension came and went without coach Jill Ellis calling her back in. U.S. Soccer said they would not cancel the NWSL portion of Solo’s contract, but she took a leave of absence from the Seattle Reign. She never returned.
Solo left the national team holding not just the program record for most shutouts but the world record in shutouts, at 102. She was arguably the greatest female goalkeeper the world had ever seen. But, just like that, the Hope Solo era of the national team was over.
CHAPTER 21
“The Power of Collective Bargaining”
With Hope Solo no longer on the team, contract negotiations were about to change again.
Rich Nichols issued a swift reaction to her ouster, telling reporters that it was “excessive, unprecedented, disproportionate, and a violation of Ms. Solo’s First Amendment rights.”
“She was fired for making comments that a man never would have been fired for,” he said.
The timing of Solo’s firing certainly raised a few eyebrows. After all, Hope Solo had always been an outspoken member of the team and never shied away from controversial statements. Amid all her previous controversies, the federation supported her. How was a comment calling Sweden “cowards” the final straw?
Solo is convinced it is because of her role in fighting for equal pay, even though the federation has adamantly denied that.
“When I filed the EEOC claim, I knew these things could happen,” Solo says. “U.S. Soccer praised me for so many years and they celebrated my strong personality, and as soon as I started to go after the money, I saw things flip and change with U.S. Soccer.”
After all, she was the one who had brought in Rich Nichols. She voted in favor of striking. She demanded the appearance bonuses after the World Cup. She was one of the players who filed the wage-discrimination claim. She was often the loudest voice pushing back against U.S. Soccer.
Even her teammate Megan Rapinoe had a similar thought. Rapinoe was being filmed as part of a documentary during and after the Olympics, and she told the camera: “As a member of the team and of the CBA group and of the PA [Players Association], I’m pretty unhappy with a sort of arbitrary six-month suspension for calling someone a coward. I think that there’s probably some legal strategy going on with it all.”
Whether there was a legal strategy or not, once Hope Solo was out of the way, Rich Nichols soon followed.
“There was no doubt in my mind then and there’s no doubt in my mind now that Hope getting fired was the federation’s way of taking the strength away from the team,” Nichols says.
“When you’re in a CBA negotiation, management is always trying to find a way to dilute the power and authority of the executive director of the union,” he adds. “It happens all the time. It’s a question of when it’s going to start happening. So, how do you do that? You find a couple of employees who are vulnerable and you pressure them. You get rid of the internal leader of the union, and that was Hope.”
By now, it was late 2016, and negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement were at the same standstill they’d been in since 2015. The federation and the national team weren’t just failing to see eye to eye in negotiations—it was as if they were each on different planets.
While the wage-discrimination complaint sat with the EEOC, the players of the national team had one of two choices: they could either just stop playing until the equal-pay d
ispute was solved, which could take years, or they could somehow end the standstill and get a deal done that offered some progress, even if it didn’t include equal pay.
They chose the option that allowed them to keep playing soccer.
With three days left before the national team’s collective bargaining agreement was set to expire on December 31, 2016, the players voted to fire Rich Nichols as their legal counsel and head of their players union.
“The way negotiations had transpired to that point, it was too far gone,” says Becky Sauerbrunn. “There was no way to turn the tone of it around to get to a place where it could be more collaborative rather than a win-lose situation.”
While players don’t speak negatively about their former general counsel, Nichols had clearly been a thorn in U.S. Soccer’s side because of his obstinate, pugnacious negotiation style.
One U.S. Soccer official, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, feels the players had been ill advised by Nichols and their legal team. The official regrets the federation didn’t directly communicate with the players earlier in the process before it devolved into legal fights, adding that negotiations had “ugly moments.”
Another anonymous source, a U.S. Soccer board member who sat in some negotiation sessions, adds: “They were some of weirdest negotiations I’d ever been in in my life, and I’ve been in a lot. Only when a player was in the room did they halfway behave themselves. It wasn’t a hard-nosed negotiation—it was like they didn’t understand what we were talking about.”
Regardless of whatever had gone wrong in negotiations, the players set out to make things right.
* * *
The players decided they wanted to be more involved in everything—negotiating the new contract with the federation, running the players association, understanding the business side of being athletes, everything. Part of that meant determining they had left too much control to the likes of John Langel and Rich Nichols. The players of the national team were plenty capable of taking on these issues themselves.
They restructured the players association to reflect that. They already had an existing CBA committee led by Becky Sauerbrunn, Christen Press, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe and one for finance led by Meghan Klingenberg, Heather O’Reilly, Whitney Engen, and Morgan Brian, but they got more players involved with new subcommittees on various topics they cared about, including alumni engagement, the NWSL, member relations, commercial business, and the social impact of soccer.
“Our big goal is to have as many of the players cued in, and involved, and invested, as possible,” Megan Rapinoe said after the changes were announced. “That’s something that can be really special about this.”
The players also brought in a management consultant, Becca Roux, to be their new players association director. Roux had previously volunteered to help the players find ways to improve their commercial revenue after the 2015 World Cup. Instead, once she saw how their players association was being operated, she suggested the players association itself needed to be restructured to lay the groundwork for the team to capitalize on commercial opportunities.
Once the players decided to start restructuring, after looking at other candidates for the job, they asked Roux to lead the association. Roux, who holds degrees in both law and business administration from Northwestern University, came aboard in February 2017.
With the end date for their CBA having passed at the end of December, the players were now operating on an expired contract. That meant the no-strike clause had officially expired and the players were ready to wield that power. They weren’t shy about publicly hinting at the possibility.
“To force a change sometimes you need to stand up,” Alex Morgan said when asked about striking. “You know what you’re worth, rather than what your employer is paying you. We’re not scared. To move the women’s game ahead we need to do what’s necessary. I feel other national teams are looking at us for that guidance.”
The problem with striking, however, was that its impact on the NWSL wasn’t clear. Playing in the U.S. Soccer–backed NWSL was part of the players’ duties as employees of the federation, even if it was a different job than playing for the national team. Could they boycott the national team and still play in the NWSL? Legal experts gave them differing opinions.
“We weren’t sure how it was going to affect the NWSL,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “If the league folded because of this, we could be responsible for putting so many of our fellow teammates out of a job. We had to weigh that. We weren’t just fighting for the players in the national team pool, we were also potentially affecting NWSL players.”
The best-case scenario for everyone was that a new deal would be worked out with U.S. Soccer. So, on February 4, 2017, more than one month after their existing CBA expired, the players resumed negotiations. Becky Sauerbrunn, Christen Press, and their new players association director, Becca Roux, presented a new proposal to U.S. Soccer outlining their broad goals.
The overarching theme of the proposal was respect—or, more specifically, the same level of respect the men’s team has gotten over the years. The players wanted a collaborative relationship with U.S. Soccer, one where the federation and the national team were partners and communicated about decisions regularly.
In the interest of getting a deal done, the players shifted their focus from equal pay to equitable pay. Initially, based on the strong projected revenue growth of the team, they proposed a revenue-sharing model that U.S. Soccer rejected. Even if the tone of negotiations had improved, progress was still difficult.
“We were in the room, across the table from each other for weeks straight, every day for hours, fighting over every little thing and seeing real-time responses to our proposals,” Sauerbrunn says. “It was quite draining. Not least of all because we’re professional soccer players and we were training, too. So, they were long days.”
Within the second week of resumed negotiations, the federation still refused to offer compensation near what the players wanted. Then, on February 10, 2017, with negotiations stuck, the national team let U.S. Soccer know they had made a decision: All the players’ licensing and sponsorship rights that U.S. Soccer controlled in previous contracts were now off the table. The national team players were taking all of them back for themselves to monetize how they saw fit.
“When we did that, U.S. Soccer seemed stunned,” Roux says. “They called off the rest of bargaining that night. They made us come back the next morning and then delayed the session.”
At first, U.S. Soccer told the players that the value of those rights was already part of the salaries the federation paid them. But the players didn’t buy it—they believed their salaries were for playing soccer and the federation just took the additional commercial rights for granted.
Under the previous CBA, any licensing agreements involving the players—things like featuring the players in the popular video game FIFA 16 or on collectible Panini stickers—were mostly split down the middle between the players and U.S. Soccer. Whoever initiated the deal got a 10 percent bonus of the revenue as a finder’s fee, but otherwise proceeds were split in half.
What ended up actually happening, however, was most of these deals went through the federation, because that was who companies contacted. The federation could negotiate whatever terms they wanted, and the players felt the federation wasn’t valuing them highly enough.
The players had never had full control of these sorts of commercial rights before or the ability to try to capture the full value of them on their own. But with the federation unwilling to budge on compensation, it became a key bargaining chip. While the team’s lead negotiators, defender Becky Sauerbrunn and striker Christen Press, pushed for those rights, defender Meghan Klingenberg worked behind the scenes to lay the groundwork so the players association would be ready to capitalize.
“It’s a very hard thing to be across the table and be fighting for something the other side doesn’t think you should get,” Sauerbrunn says. “We had to get c
reative and progressive and think of new ways to generate revenue. We fought for sponsorships and licensing—we had to fight to take things back that we hadn’t had before so we could find different revenue routes than straight-up salary.”
In the end, the national team granted some group-image rights that both the federation and the NWSL could use for promotion—group photos of players for marketing materials, for instance. But the national team took back exclusive control of licensing rights, which covers any merchandise sold featuring national team players. For the rights to commercial uses, such as advertisements for a U.S. Soccer sponsor, the federation agreed to pay the team $350,000 annually.
With compensation a sticking point in negotiations, the players were willing to reevaluate the contracted salary structure that had been in place for years. For many years, those guaranteed salaries were the financial security players needed to even be part of the national team, but the new contract negotiations marked an evolution away from that.
The federation sought to lower the number of contracts, and the players wanted to keep the minimum at the level Langel had negotiated, 24 contracts. Instead, the two sides reached a compromise that changed the compensation structure dramatically. While the potential for more money overall ended up on the table, it was going to be spread more evenly amongst the players, and less of it would be guaranteed.
The number of national team contracts was cut significantly to 20 contracts in 2017, and the number drops by one every year to hit 16 contracts by 2021. The core of the team will shrink over time, but the rest of the player pool will benefit from significantly higher bonuses that can be earned by any player who makes a roster, veteran or not.
The friendly win bonus increased from $1,350 per player in the previous contract to bonuses of at least $5,250 and as high as $8,500, depending on the quality of the opponent. Players never used to receive bonuses just for making a friendly roster, but now noncontracted players will get $3,500 per game until 2021, when it goes up to $3,750—it’s closer to what the men’s team earns ($5,000 per player), though still not equal. Contracted players won’t get game-appearance fees because they will instead earn a $100,000 base salary.
The National Team Page 30