The suit, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, comes only three months before the team will begin defense of its Women’s World Cup title at this summer’s tournament in France.
In their filing and a statement released by the team, the 28 players described “institutionalised gender discrimination” that they say has existed for years.
The discrimination, the athletes said, affects not only their paychecks but also where they play and how often, how they train, the medical treatment and coaching they receive, and even how they travel to matches.
The players involved — stars like Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd and their teammates — include some of the most accomplished and best-known female athletes in the world, and a team that has been a leading force in women’s sports for more than a generation.
Their continuing battle with US Soccer — their employer and the federation that governs the sport in America — has thrust them to the forefront of a broader fight for equality in women’s sports.
In recent years, players, teams and even athletes in other sports — American hockey gold medalists, Canadian soccer pros, WNBA players — have turned to the U.S. players and their union for guidance in their efforts to win similar gains in pay and working conditions.
“I think to be on this team is to understand these issues,” Rapinoe said in a telephone interview.
“And I think we’ve always — dating back to forever — been a team that stood up for itself and fought hard for what it felt it deserved and tried to leave the game in a better place.”
Friday’s legal action is the latest flash point in a year long fight for pay equity and equal treatment by the national team, which has long chafed — first privately, but increasingly publicly — about the compensation, support and working conditions it receives while representing US Soccer.
Carli Lloyd, 10, and the United States National Team celebrated after scoring in the World Cup in 2015. Source: Getty Images
The women’s players argue that they are required to play more games than the men’s team, win more of them, and yet still receive lesser pay from the federation.
For decades, US Soccer has been a world leader in its support for women’s football; its investment of time and resources has made the United States, which is a three-time world champion and a four-time Olympic gold medalist, the dominant power in the women’s game.
But throughout that period, generations of women’s national team players have complained that the federation’s financial support and logistical infrastructure have lagged behind that of the more high-profile men’s team.
Megan Rapinoe in October. Source: Getty Images
Those grievances have never been far from the surface; an earlier generation of top women’s players angry about their pay boycotted a tournament in Australia in January 2000, only months after a World Cup victory had made them the toast of US sports.
The dispute between the team and the federation burst into the open more recently, however, as an increasingly emboldened and activist women’s team took on US Soccer and FIFA, football's global governing body, over everything from artificial turf fields to World Cup bonus payments to refereeing standards.
The players’ prominence and willingness to leverage their profiles and enormous social media followings in support of their cause have paid dividends: FIFA doubled the prize money pool for this summer’s Women’s World Cup only after the US team’s complaints drew attention to how far it lagged behind the pool for the much richer men’s event, and the team has not played a match on artificial turf, a surface many players disdain, since 2017.
The US women flew on a chartered flight — once an unthinkable luxury for the squad — between matches as recently as last week.
The respect they have won has spread, too: Spain’s national team rose up to demand the ouster of its coach after the last World Cup, and several prominent members of Brazil’s squad quit their team to protest the ouster of a popular female coach in favor of a man.
Players from Argentina and Colombia have gone public about mistreatment and meager pay, and Norway’s players demanded — and won — equal pay with their men’s counterparts.
That, too, several US players said, was part of their motivation to press ahead with their suit only months before they turn their focus to retaining their world championship.
“We very much believe it is our responsibility,” Rapinoe said, “not only for our team and for future US players, but for players around the world — and frankly women all around the world — to feel like they have an ally in standing up for themselves, and fighting for what they believe in, and fighting for what they deserve and for what they feel like they have earned.”
Direct comparisons between the compensation of the men’s and women’s teams can be complicated.
Each team has its own collective bargaining agreement with US Soccer, and among the major differences is pay structure: The men receive higher game bonuses when they play for the United States, but are paid only when they make the team, while the women receive guaranteed salaries supplemented by smaller match bonuses.
One of the biggest differences in compensation is the multimillion-dollar bonuses the teams receive for participating in the World Cup, but those bonuses — a pool of $400 million for 32 men’s teams versus $30 million for 24 women’s teams — are determined by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, not US Soccer.
US Soccer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The points in the suit mirror many of the issues raised in a wage discrimination complaint filed by five US players with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016.
Frustrated by a lack of progress on their complaint, the players received permission from the federal agency in February to sue instead. The decision to take their case to federal court effectively ends the EEOC complaint. (One of the players on the original EEOC complaint, former goalkeeper Hope Solo, filed her own gender discrimination lawsuit against US Soccer in August.)
The current players are represented by Jeffrey Kessler, who has been involved in labor fights in nearly every major American sport. They have requested class-action status in the case, and are seeking to represent any current or former players who have represented the women’s national team since Feb. 4, 2015 — a cohort that could grow to include dozens more players. The suit seeks back pay, damages and other relief: a potential award that could reach into the millions of dollars.
By Andrew Das © 2019 The New York Times
