Women, Money, Power, Soccer
As we tune in to watch some of the world’s most decorated athletes this summer, let’s not forget that—despite progress in some places, including in the U.S.—the fight is far from over.
Happy July 4th to those who celebrate. And welcome to the scorching core of summer in much of the northern hemisphere.
For readers who—like me—are in New York City, we’ve moved into that sweltering, oppressive time of year; a time when everything seems to slow down and every street corner smells a little bit questionable.
One silver lining for sports fans, is that the FIFA Women’s World Cup is just around the corner. On July 20th, co-host New Zealand will play Norway in the opening match at Eden Park in Auckland. For four weeks, athletes for 32 teams will duke it out across ten venues, culminating in an August 20 final in Sydney’s Olympic Stadium.
Back in 2020, I had the pleasure of striking up a friendship with Brooke Elby. She had recently retired from professional soccer, and—like me—was pursuing an MBA at Columbia Business School. By that point, I’d spent a few years covering gender inequality in the workplace, but I’d neglected some workplaces: I’d not spent any significant time considering the unequal playing fields of women’s professional sports.
Getting to know Brooke inspired me to learn more about the double standards, gender-based challenges, and uphill battles that women in soccer face every day. I was taking a narrative writing class at Columbia Journalism School at the time, and the final project was a long feature, several thousand words with a strong narrative arc.
The rational part of my brain told me to research something I already knew about—corporate injustice or discrimination in finance—but the world of women’s soccer had gripped me by this point, so I threw myself into the unknown, deciphering unfamiliar terminology, court documents, and shocking research reports.
The hard paid off. In February 2021, Forbes published my piece: ‘Illusory Level Playing Fields: The Off-Pitch Battles Facing Women’s Soccer’. It charts Elby’s last few years as a career athlete, and the injustices she encountered that eventually led her to quit professional soccer. It also delves into the extent to which women’s soccer in the U.S. is still very much a two-faced institution.
As I wrote at the time, the picture of women’s soccer painted by the media tends to feature the 2019 national team storming to World Cup victory against the Netherlands in a strapping display of female prowess.
“Team co-captain Megan Rapinoe’s trademark shock of purple hair has been hailed a symbol of a promising new era for women athletes everywhere,” I wrote in the piece, “but the playing field so many seem determined to level is still painfully uneven.”
I published the article about a year after the U.S. women’s soccer team had filed a lawsuit seeking compensation equal to that of their male counterparts. That suit claimed that, at the highest level of the sport, female players made $4,950 a game compared to the $13,166 a game that men pocketed. It also stated that women players earned just $15,000 for making the World Cup team, while men got $55,000 for making the roster in 2014. As a result, the women demanded $66 million in damages under the Equal Pay Act.
A few months later, though—in a stinging defeat—a district court judge dismissed key parts of the suit. He argued that the female players had actually been paid more on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis than their male counterparts over recent years. The women I spoke to vehemently disputed it and from my own research the conclusion I reached was that it was all very, very complicated.
It was unquestionably a setback. As it turned out, however, in the long run, it didn’t curb the momentum that had been building behind a much broader push for equality across women’s soccer in the U.S.
And in 2022, members of the women’s team and their bosses at U.S. Soccer signed a settlement that included a multimillion-dollar payment to the players and a guarantee by their federation to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams.
The women — a group of a few dozen current and former players—received $24 million in payments from U.S. Soccer under the terms of the agreement. The majority of that sum was back pay. “A tacit admission,” the New York Times reported at the time, “that compensation for the men’s and women’s teams had been unequal for years.”
U.S. Soccer at the time also pledged to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams across all competitions, including the World Cup, in the next round of collective bargaining agreements.
‘Gendered Power Dynamics’
Of course that was a victory of sorts, but as we tune in to watch some of the world’s most decorated athletes this summer, let’s not forget that—despite progress in some places, including in the U.S.—the fight is not over. Far from it.
A 2017 research report published by the University of Manchester in the U.K., found that a shocking 90% of female players said that they would consider retiring early, most because of low pay.
The report also found that most salaries for female players globally fell short of $2,000 a month, forcing women to take on extra work around training and matches. According to the report, almost two thirds of professional female players with children said that they received absolutely no childcare support. One statistic in the report that particularly disgusted me: in the UK’s Premier League, which is the highest division of professional soccer, average pay was 99 times higher than what the top-paid female player received at the time.
Obviously, it’s certainly not all about money.
As recently as April 2019, U.S. Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro quit over language in a court filing that suggested women possess less ability than men when it comes to playing soccer. That incident prompted on-field player protest, during which the women wore their warm-up jerseys inside out to hide the U.S. soccer logo prior to playing.
FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, has in recent years been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct against some of its highest-ranking officials. In June 2019, the Association launched an internal investigation into Ahmad Ahmad, the president of Africa’s soccer confederation, after he was accused of laying off an employee in 2017 when she rejected his romantic advances. Hope Solo, who served as goalkeeper for the U.S. women's national team from 2000 to 2016, once accused Sepp Blatter, who was FIFA’s president at the time, of groping her at an awards ceremony. (For more stranger-than-fiction insights into the toxic world of FIFA, check out ‘FIFA Uncovered’, an incredible documentary that started streaming on Netflix last year)
During the course of my reporting I spoke to several current and former players who told me, anonymously, about the harassment and discrimination they had experienced during the course of their careers. One woman, who spoke on the record, was Kelly Conheeney, who played for the New Jersey team Sky Blue FC in the NWSL league from 2016 until 2018, and retired in 2020 at the age of 28, after a season at the Swedish club Hammarby.
Here’s Conheeney’s story as I reported it for Forbes at the time:
Money did not drive her out of the game - an injury did - but she acknowledges that the pay was “absurdly low”. For one season, which lasted from March to November, she was making $16,000 or less than $2,000 a month, she tells me over the phone from California, where she now works in sales for a sports media company. And there were other problems too.
Conheeney started playing soccer when she was eight for her local club team in New Jersey. In 2004, when she was 12 , her coach, Keith Ildefonso, began molesting her between training sessions and games. “It was an awful and very confusing time in my life because I knew what was happening was wrong but I didn’t know how to make it stop.”
Eventually, when Conheeney was 14, she told her sister and then her parents about the abuse. Ildefonso was arrested and spent five years in prison. Since then, Conheeney says, she’s been fortunate enough not to have experienced any more blatant transgressions or abuse through sport, but the post-traumatic effects follow her to this day and she insists that a gendered power dynamic exists in women’s soccer that, if left unchecked, can quickly turn toxic.
“The culture of men still widely being in charge of women, and making decisions on behalf of women, is problematic,” she says.
My hope is that this gendered power dynamic is shifting.
Money and power frequently move in tandem. I’m hopefully that equal pay agreements are a precursor for a world in which all female athletes—not just soccer players—can play without fear of threat, danger, or repercussion.
In one interview I did with Brooke Elby for the piece, she made the salient point that the lack of equality is most visible at the very top, but it’s just as worrying at the club level and further down.
“We need to safeguard a pipeline of emerging talent,” she said as she reflected on how powerless and lost she felt at times during her soccer career. “Elite athletes should never have to feel like that. We’ve got to sort out the system. The future of our sport truly depends on it.”
Thanks for reading. As ever, comments, questions and criticism are always welcome. And please feel free to share this newsletter with others who you think might enjoy it!
Great eye opening read!