Rapinoe, Megan

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      From Equal Pay to Ending Abuse, Soccer’s Fight for Fairness Spreads

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      The success of the U.S. women’s soccer team on the field and at the negotiating table has been a model for players elsewhere. In other countries, those battles are heating up.LONDON — There is always something to shoulder, the world’s best women’s soccer players know. Second-class facilities. Failed leadership. The persistent fight for equal opportunities. The glacial battle for equal pay.Just last week, a comprehensive report revealing systemic abuse across American women’s soccer left players devastated, but not surprised.“It’s really sad to say, but in a way, I think we’re used to having to deal with one thing or another,” United States forward Megan Rapinoe said of the report’s findings before her team played England on Friday. “It seems to bring us closer.”It is that sense of collective struggle that has repeatedly galvanized the United States women’s team in its battles with U.S. Soccer. It’s also what has made them leaders to colleagues and rivals around the world, players and teams with their own struggles, their own priorities, their own goals on and off the field.England’s players, for example, said this week that they would use their next match to raise awareness of a campaign for girls to have equal access to soccer at school. In Spain, the team that will take the field against the United States on Tuesday will be without 15 key players who have been exiled for demanding that their federation engage with concerns about the team’s coach.And in Canada, the women’s team — the biggest regional rival to the U.S. and a leading contender to win next summer’s Women’s World Cup — has drawn a line in the sand with its federation, saying it will not accept any new contract that does not guarantee equal pay between men and women.“A lot of it has to do with respect and being seen and valued for what we’re providing to our federations,” the United States captain Becky Sauerbrunn said in a recent interview about her team’s equal pay campaign. “We’re doing the same work that the men are doing. We’re playing on the same pitch. We’re traveling and training and playing games, usually the same amount, if not more. Why would they get paid more than us?”In Washington last month, Sauerbrunn sat at a table alongside several teammates after a match and signed the equal pay deal. It was, for her, a moment worth savoring.“What’s so frustrating for us sometimes,” she said of that moment of triumph and celebration, “is that we feel like this should have been given so long ago.”It is an issue that a growing number of federations are continuing to work to address, either through proactive agreements or after pressure from their players. Since 2017, when Norway’s federation became the first to announce an equal pay agreement between its national teams, a host of nations have followed suit, including federations in New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, England, Ireland and — just this summer — Spain and the Netherlands.Still, nearly all of those deals shade the definition of equal pay by offering men’s and women’s players equal match bonuses but only equivalent percentages of the vastly different prize money on offer from FIFA at competitions like the World Cup. The prize pool for the men’s tournament in Qatar next month will be $440 million — multiples more than what will be available to women at their next championship.The new U.S. Soccer agreement is different: The American teams will be paid the same, dollar for dollar, for competing for their country because they have agreed to pool their World Cup prize money. Over the lifetime of the deal, that is expected to shift millions of dollars that would have gone to the men in previous years to the members of the women’s team.Players in other nations still have far to go. But they have been taking notes.In June, the Canadian women rebelled against their federation — just over a year before the next World Cup — over the cause of equal pay. “The women’s national team does not view equal FIFA percentages as between our respective teams as equal pay,” said its players in an open letter in which the team indicated its ambition to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. women’s team.The team, the Canadian players said, “will not accept an agreement that does not guarantee equal pay.”That spirit of equal reward, and equal opportunity, is spreading.“The younger generation now will believe that they all should be having the same opportunities, and they all should be having the same chances,” said Vivianne Miedema, the Arsenal and Netherlands star, who worked with her federation and alongside her Dutch teammates to achieve their equal pay deal.“It’s not just a money thing,” Miedema added. “It’s a movement that’s been created. I just don’t really think women and men should be treated in a different way.”In Spain, a dispute involving a group of 15 national team players is about more day-to-day concerns. They have refused to play for their country until their federation addresses the methods and management of their coach, Jorge Vilda, whom some members of the team want removed.The Spanish federation responded by not only refusing to engage with the complaints but also exiling the 15 players who went public with their demands. Instead, the federation will field an understrength squad in Tuesday’s high-profile friendly against the United States, one of Spain’s most important opportunities to test itself against a World Cup rival before the tournament next summer.“If 15 of the best players in the world wanted to share feedback I’d respect them enough as people and players to take their concerns seriously,” Sauerbrunn wrote on Twitter.The Spain team that will face the United States on Tuesday will have a different look after more than a dozen players were dropped after raising concerns about the coach, Jorge Vilda, at top.Juanjo Martin/EPA, via ShutterstockRapinoe echoed that sense of solidarity, saying, “It’s uncomfortable to know the just general level of disrespect for women’s teams and women’s players around the world.”That is why, for Miedema and other top players, the fight isn’t only about pay. Resources are just as important, from the fields teams play on to equal access to equipment and medical personnel to the quality of coaching.“One of the most important things that we’ve been continuously fighting for over the last couple of years is that we’ve got the same facilities, we’ve got the same opportunities, starting at a young age,” Miedema said. “Because that’s how the level of women’s soccer will increase.”But alongside progress in the women’s game — record attendances, unprecedented television ratings, record salaries and rising transfer fees — the scathing inequalities players continue to face were being laid bare. The abuse scandal, documented in excruciating detail in a report by the former Justice Department official Sally Q. Yates last week, was just the latest example.Miedema, in an interview before the Yates report was published, suggested oversight was just as important as pay and other working conditions. But the issue of the huge gap in prize money was too big, and too widespread, she said, to be left to individual federations to resolve.“I think that’s something that needs to be led by FIFA and UEFA,” she said, a reference to European soccer’s governing body.Lise Klaveness, the president of Norway’s soccer federation, has committed her federation to that kind of top-down equality. But she also has urged UEFA and FIFA to make a similar commitment.“Soccer is the biggest sport in the world and in Norway,” said Klaveness, a former national team player. “We’re everywhere, in every schoolyard, everywhere. So, it’s very important for us to look at ourselves as something that meets all girls and all boys, and that you should feel the same value.”Sauerbrunn’s advice to other teams, including the Spanish side she and her teammates will face on Tuesday? Keep fighting. Keep asking. Keep trying.“When you’re negotiating, sometimes you’re going to have to be creative, you’re going to have to persevere because you’re going to hear ‘no’ a lot,” she said. “We had to keep making ground slowly.“But you’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t ask. And I would definitely say that the collective voice is so much stronger than just a few individuals.” More

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      England Beats U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, Ending a Win Streak

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      The U.S. and England can be expected to enter next year’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Friday’s friendly was a chance to establish which team would occupy which role.LONDON — For now, at least, Vlatko Andonovski remains unbowed. Just a few minutes after watching his United States team defeated, 2-1, for the first time in more than a year, he was happily casting his mind forward to next summer’s World Cup final.The best measure of his confidence was not his insistence that he would not mind running into England there — it was that his working assumption was that his side’s presence is not far off certain.He was not, though, the only one whose mind was wandering. The mind of Sarina Wiegman, the England coach, was doing it, too.“You do not win a World Cup in October,” she said. “It is not July yet. But it is really good to have this moment now, in our preparation for it. It is good to have a test against the United States, because they have won so many things for years and years. It was very good to see where we are. We showed to ourselves that we can do it.”Strictly speaking, of course, there was nothing riding on this meeting of the longstanding world champion and the recently crowned European champion at Wembley Stadium. There was no glittering prize for victory, no lasting pain for defeat.It was, instead, intended as a showpiece and a showcase: a chance for England, fresh from winning its maiden international honor, to enjoy a celebratory homecoming and an opportunity for the United States to stretch its legs on European soil. Though neither set of players would have wished it, it became a chance, too, to display solidarity in the aftermath of the Yates Report, which detailed systemic abuse of players in women’s soccer in the United States.Meaning, though, is established by consensus. And, deep down, both sides knew that the idea that this was a friendly, an exhibition, was a lie. It is the United States and England, after all, who have “stretched clear” of the pack, as Megan Rapinoe put it, and who stand as the two undisputed powerhouses of women’s soccer. It is the United States and England who can be expected to go into next year’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Wembley was the chance to establish which team would occupy which role.It is too simplistic, though, to say that England’s victory establishes its primacy. That it is the more settled, the more cogent of the two at this stage — still 10 months out from the finals — is a fair assessment; that it is the beneficiary of a swelling momentum, built during its golden summer and nourished by overcoming the United States, the sport’s historical hegemon, is not in doubt.For considerable stretches of the game, England looked every inch the coming force: crisper, slicker, more inventive in possession than its visitor, more capable of controlling and varying the speed of the game, more ruthless on the counterattack, more purposeful in its press. It deserved its early lead, secured through Lauren Hemp, and it deserved to wrestle it back, too. Georgia Stanway atoned for gifting Sophia Smith an equalizer by converting a penalty soon after.Andonovski’s counterargument, though, would be no less compelling. Nobody would pretend this has been an easy week for any of his players, regardless of their professionalism, their determination to focus on the game or the old and flawed cliché that the game itself, the sport around which an entire rotten industry has been built, can provide solace and sanctuary and momentary escape. They have all been forced to confront others’ trauma and relive their own.Trinity Rodman had an exquisitely crafted goal ruled out after a video-assistant-referee check.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressEven had they been able to focus as they would have wished — as they deserved to — they could reasonably point out that their squad was not at full strength. Alex Morgan, Mallory Pugh and Sam Mewis were among those absent. Andonovski, too, is still finessing the incorporation of a new generation of talent, led by the likes of Smith and Trinity Rodman. This team is a work in progress, and its construction is not scheduled to be finished until Sydney next year.And yet, despite all of that, it only lost to the European champion — the very best the rest of the world has to offer, on home turf and backed by a highly partisan crowd — by the finest of margins.Rodman had an exquisitely crafted goal ruled out for the sort of cruel, infinitesimal offside that is enough to turn anyone against the very concept of technology. Rapinoe was denied the chance to convert a late penalty, to extend a win streak that had grown to 13 games, by a rather more obvious intervention by the video assistant referee.More significantly still, Smith was the outstanding player on the field — other than, perhaps, the fearless Keira Walsh — a constant source of terror to England’s back line. Andonovski might have no objections to seeing England in the World Cup final next year; the English, you suspect, would rather not run into Smith again any time soon.That both Andonovski and Wiegman felt comfortable enough to bring up the World Cup — to dispense with the bromide that this was just a friendly, just an exhibition, almost as soon as the final whistle had gone — can be traced, perhaps, to the fact that both would have seen enough in this game to confirm their beliefs.England knows now that it can beat the United States, that it can meet the sport’s gold standard; the United States, in turn, can feel that at full strength things might have been very different. Both can make it mean what they want it to mean.And that consensus can hold, now, for a few more months, right up until they meet again, on a stage still grander than this one, when there will be something at stake, when the pretense can be safely abandoned, and when there are prizes for the victors and pain for the defeated. Wiegman is right, of course: The World Cup is not concluded in October. But both she and Andonovski, as their minds wandered, saw Wembley as the moment that it started. More

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      The Yates Report Isn’t the End. It’s Just the Start.

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      Women’s soccer players tried to raise the alarm about abuse for years. When they say there’s more, people should listen.Somehow, at the end, Megan Rapinoe could still sound enthusiastic. She had spent the previous 20 minutes answering question after question about the “devastating” findings of the Yates Report, trying to explain how it feels to know that the sport to which you have devoted your life has permitted a culture of “systemic abuse” to fester, finding a way to put into words how painful it can be to read, in stark black and white, that which you have always known.Rapinoe had met each and every one of the questions, as she always does, with the habitual, measured candor that has become her hallmark. Not once did she intimate that she had said all she had to say. Not once did she try to change the subject, to guide the conversation onto ground less harrowing, less bleak. She was asked, again and again, to describe and to parse and to relive her trauma, and the trauma of so many of her colleagues and friends, and she did so, until there were no more questions left.Her anger — her tone pitched both to convey and control it — was clear, but so too was her fatigue. Rapinoe and her teammates have had to “shoulder a lot” over the years, as she put it. The struggle to free the sport, their sport, of both abusers and the individuals and the structures that have both harbored and nourished them is not their first battle. This team has fought for equal pay and for social justice, too. “We have a lot of experience,” Rapinoe said.At that point, for just a moment, she sounded tired. But then, almost as an afterthought, someone pointed out where she was, what was about to happen: Rapinoe was sitting inside London’s Wembley Stadium, preparing for a game on Friday night that will match the United States, the reigning world champion, against England, now officially ensconced as Europe’s premier team.Every single seat at the stadium was sold, snapped up almost as soon as they went on sale: 90,000 or so fans would be coming to watch a game that, to many, has the air of a sneak preview of next year’s World Cup final. And, in an instant, Rapinoe’s enthusiasm was clear. “I am so excited for this game,” she said. “This is a really special moment for our sport.”The U.S. captain, Becky Sauerbrunn, and several of her teammates spoke this week of the need to find joy in their sport anywhere they could. Friday’s game against England at Wembley is a start.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThe Yates Report is, in effect, more than 300 pages of tragedy: personal tragedies compounded by the tragedy of chronic institutional failure, each one of them part of a mosaic that has left an open wound, an aching scar in the heart of women’s soccer. Given some of the revelations, it would be glib in the extreme to highlight one aspect that is more upsetting, more harrowing than any other. Much of it, as Rapinoe said, is “hard to read.”But there is a particular, keening sorrow in knowing that, so often, it was the same enthusiasm that so animated Rapinoe — even as a veteran, even after all she has achieved and, most significantly, all that she has endured — that was so often weaponized by those in power to silence those trying to safeguard the game and to protect those damaging it.The teams of the N.W.S.L., the league itself and even U.S. Soccer, the Yates report found, “gave little thought or attention to basic player protections.” Instead, investigators concluded, “the focus was on keeping eight teams on the field to ensure the league’s survival.”Those reporting abuse, in other words, were either ignored or discouraged by leveraging their passion for soccer against them, while those committing it were indulged — ushered into new jobs with hearty farewells — because, it seems, of an unwillingness to rock the boat in case everyone ended up submerged. The players believed in their mission to grow women’s soccer as a sport; they had a responsibility not just to themselves, but to the sport, too. And that, too often, was used against them.The Yates Report, it is to be hoped, will explode that enforced omertà. “I think this was kind of the nail in the coffin,” as Rapinoe’s United States teammate, Crystal Dunn, put it this week.What she referred to as “accountability,” but might better be described as “overdue bloodletting,” has already begun: Merritt Paulson, the owner of the Portland Thorns, has stepped away from the team’s decision-making process. Arnim Whisler, the owner of the Chicago Red Stars, has been removed from that club’s board. Neither has, as yet, been forced to sell his team, but the writing is on the wall.“Every owner and executive and U.S. Soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players and failed to protect the players, who have hidden behind legalities and have not participated in these investigations, should be gone,” said Becky Sauerbrunn, the U.S. captain, earlier this week. Rapinoe went a little further. She did not bother with euphemism when she declared that, from this point on, neither Paulson nor Whisler fit to be involved in women’s soccer at all. She has reached the stage where she is prepared to name names.N.W.S.L. players and fans are demanding accountability, even from their own teams.via ReutersBut that does not mean either the report itself, or the handful of senior figures scorched by their sudden exposure to sunlight, represents a conclusion. Publication is not enough. The fall of Paulson and Whisler, if and when it comes, is not enough.Here, too, there is a tragedy: The “horrific” details of the Yates report are not, and should not be mistaken for, the sum total of the problem. The investigators themselves note that they received several credible accusations of sexual harassment that they could not corroborate sufficiently for inclusion. And the players themselves know there is more to find.“This is not just in the N.W.S.L,” said Lindsey Horan, the United States midfielder, now playing for the French team Lyon. “This is women’s soccer, this is women in general. We have these problems all over the world. I sit here and I’m like: It’s not done. This is all over the world. Being a player in Europe right now, I know that.”Rapinoe has the same sense. “This report has come out in our country,” she said. “But the reality is it could be any country in the world.”There is more to be done, they know. They are angry and they are disappointed and they are tired, too. “Emotionally exhausted,” Rapinoe said. But — in a sport full of athletes finding their voices — that is the thing about this team, in particular. No matter how tired they are, no matter how bleak it is, they have never lost their enthusiasm for the fight.Let’s Blue Sky ThisTodd Boehly has, it seems, started something. It is little more than a month since the Chelsea owner — unprompted and ill-advisedly — suggested that the Premier League might like to consider staging its own version of an all-star game, and the idea has already mutated into something even bigger, even more unwieldy, and even more likely to be derided on talk radio.Various unnamed Premier League executives have, according to The Times of London, floated the possibility of staging a series of showpiece games across the world between teams comprising the best players from the top flights of England, Italy, Spain and Germany — sorry, France, you don’t make the cut, apparently — in order to expand soccer’s appeal to “emerging markets.”There are several red flags here. The fact the executives are unnamed, for example. As a rule, if someone thinks they have a good idea, a real winner, they cannot wait to put their name to it. If, on the other hand, they are engaged in what might be described as a craven money grab, they tend to decide that they are “not authorized to speak on the matter.”So, too, the justification for the project. Does soccer really need to expand into emerging markets? What possible territory remains virgin to the great sports industrial complex? There are farmers in wild corners of Mongolia who will spend hours online screaming that Cristiano Ronaldo only scores penalties; seeing Sandro Tonali and Declan Rice in Shanghai will not add to their ardor for the sport.But putting that entirely understandable queasiness aside — and parking, just for a moment, the valid complaint that elite players do too much soccer-playing as it is — we must consider the unlikely possibility that this is, in fact, quite a good idea. Particularly, say, if these fixtures replaced preseason tours, and if the money they generated was weighted so that the smaller teams in each league got rather more of it.That does not mean it is not a craven money grab, of course. It is very obviously a craven money grab. If something is being suggested by a major soccer team, it goes without saying that it is because they think they have spotted an untapped revenue stream. But that does not mean it is necessarily devoid of merit.The Context of RecordsErling Haaland makes scoring look easy. It’s not.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesErling Haaland’s first goal on Tuesday night took him past Edin Dzeko and Mario Gomez. His second, not quite half an hour later, lifted him above Rivaldo and Luis Suárez. The Manchester City striker has now scored as many times in the Champions League as Ryan Giggs did. In 15.17 percent of the time.The speed with which Haaland — at age 22 — is rising up the list of the competition’s all-time goal scorers is blistering. He needs six more to overtake not just Wayne Rooney and Kaka and Samuel Eto’o, but Gerd Müller. There is no reason to believe, at his current rate of progress, that he will not have done that by the end of this season’s group phase.A decent run in the knockout stage should see him break into the top 20. Given that he has now scored 19 goals in only 12 games since joining City, that may not be the limit of his ambitions. He is a young man going places extremely fast.As breathtaking and as stirring as his achievements are, it is necessary to place them within just a small piece of context. Over the last decade or so, as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have broken almost every record available to them, each landmark has been greeted as proof of their wondrous talent. That, of course, is only right. The same applies to Haaland.But it is also the case that all of them are products, to some extent, of their eras. Messi and Ronaldo were playing, at the peak of their careers, for teams that had far greater financial resources than the vast majority of teams they faced until the latter stages of the Champions League. The competition was far more unbalanced, far less equal, than it had been even 10 or 15 years earlier.The same, once again, applies to Haaland, both at Manchester City and — to some extent — in his last stop at Borussia Dortmund. He is playing, for the most part, against teams that are hopelessly overmatched, in a way that the likes of Filippo Inzaghi, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Raúl Gonzalez, all above him in the list, were not.That does not diminish Haaland’s talent. Nor does it devalue his goals, or discredit his achievements. But it is important to remember, in an era in which records seem to fall with dread frequency, that they do so because the game is set up now to make them more attainable than ever for the precious few to have them in their grasp.CorrespondenceA curious question to open this week, from Lloyd Mallison. Curious not because it is bad — it is not; it’s a good question — but curious because it’s strange what catches each of our eyes. “Do you have any insight into the rehabilitation of Saúl at Atlético Madrid?” Lloyd asked. “After his pretty limp time at Chelsea, I didn’t expect to see him back starting again so soon.”I have no particular insight, sadly, other than to suggest that it is a welcome reminder of this column’s motto: There is no such thing as a bad (professional) soccer player. There are only players in the wrong systems, or working with the wrong coaches, or in the wrong context. Chelsea was not right for Saúl. That doesn’t mean Saúl cannot be right somewhere else.We had a couple of emails on the travails of Juventus, too, which act as a neat couplet. Joseph Blanco sent in some perceptive thoughts on the dangers of what we have come to call “philosophy,” pointing out that the game is “turning a generation of players into robots.” He is, in that sense, what we might call an Allegrista.Massimiliano Allegri, calmly pondering the merits of philosophy vs. culture.Massimo Pinca/ReutersHe disagrees, though, that Massimiliano Allegri’s anti-philosophy approach can be equated to Juventus’s scatter-gun approach to team-building. “I don’t think it’s fair to say the struggles of the team are the same as the organization’s shortcomings,” he wrote.That dovetails neatly with this observation from Tory Amorello: “I couldn’t help but think about how it would feel if you exchanged the word philosophy for culture. I think the way that managers talk about philosophy is somewhat limited to announcing a defined style of play. Take that concept away from the field, and it’s called culture.”That, perhaps, sums up the bind Juventus finds itself in far more succinctly than I managed: It is not a failing of philosophy, but of broader culture. I shall take that, repeat it on various broadcast media and do my level best, Tory, not to present it as entirely my own work. More

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      U.S. Women Beat Haiti to Open Concacaf W Championship

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      The Americans can qualify for the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the 2024 Olympics by winning a regional championship. Their first step was a win over Haiti.The Women’s World Cup is a year away and the Paris Olympics don’t start for more than two, but both tournaments are the primary focus of the United States women’s national team over the next two weeks.The first goal? Qualify for them. The Americans took their first step on that front Monday night by opening play in the new Concacaf women’s championship with a 3-0 victory over Haiti in Monterrey, Mexico.Alex Morgan scored twice in the first half and Midge Purce added a late clincher in a wild game that involved disallowed goals, a missed penalty and an overturned red card.The revamped eight-team tournament, officially branded the Concacaf W Championship, is serving a dual role — as the qualifying tournament for next summer’s Women’s World Cup and for the 2024 Paris Olympics.Under its new format — a group stage followed by a knockout round — the first task should be a simple one for the Americans: The top two finishers in each four-team group qualify automatically for the Women’s World Cup, where the United States is the two-time defending champion.The latter job may be a little more tricky. Only the champion in Mexico will claim an automatic place in the 2024 Summer Games, while the runner-up and third-place nations will have to contest a Concacaf Olympic playoff in September 2023. That would be a bit more jeopardy than Coach Vlatko Andonovski and his world-beating and well-paid players might want at this current moment in their evolution.Coach Vlatko Andonovski is trying to balance past success with his team’s future.Daniel Becerril/ReutersAndonovski has made no secret that he is managing a team in transition, and that has made these games — every game, really — an important chance for players to impress the coaching staff, and ensure they are in his plans for the next year or more. It is another opportunity for rising players to force their way into the mix, and for veteran players to defend their positions. Not all have succeeded.The future of the U.S. team, regardless of what happens in Mexico, remains a bit of an incomplete picture. Morgan, who scored twice on Monday, and Megan Rapinoe both received their first call-ups to the team since October for the Concacaf event. But Morgan, 33, is already defending her position from rising stars like Catarino Macario, who is currently out with a knee injury. And young forwards like Mallory Pugh, Sophia Smith and Trinity Rodman all play the same position as Rapinoe, who turned 37 on Tuesday.“It’s not easy being a forward in the United States right now,” Andonovski said when he announced his roster for the Concacaf championship. “Obviously, it’s great, but it’s not easy because the competition is getting bigger and bigger.”Similar battles are playing out across the field in every position, in every roster decision, as the United States transitions from a roster that led it to two straight World Cup titles to one that might carry it to a third against regional rivals like Canada, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, and European contenders like Sweden, Germany, Spain, the Netherland and England — among others — who are contending the European championship this month.The Americans’ remaining group-stage schedule includes games against Jamaica (on Thursday) and host Mexico (on Monday). Canada leads Group B, which features Trinidad & Tobago, Costa Rica and Panama. The final is July 18.To get there, Andonovski will rely on a blend of the experience, the talent and the generations at his disposal: Of the 23 players on the U.S. roster, seven are in their 30s but eight are 25 or younger. And for now, he has been making no promises to anyone.“It doesn’t mean that all these players that have done well in the past are just going to come back here in the next camp because they’ve done well a year ago or two years ago,” Andonovski said in February, when an earlier roster also omitted several accomplished veterans.“There’s a reason why we’re not calling Mia Hamm or Julie Foudy in camp, right? So the same goes here: They need to perform.” More

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      The USWNT vs. U.S. Soccer: an Equal Pay Timeline

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      A six-year legal fight that saw victories on the field and losses in federal court ended with a multimillion-dollar settlement. Here’s how the sides got here.A settlement announced on Tuesday abruptly ended a six-year legal fight between dozens of members of the United States women’s national team and U.S. Soccer, an often bitter and contentious dispute that had placed some of the world’s most popular and high-profile athletes at the forefront of the fight for equal pay for women.What was the fight about? That was complicated from the start. A simple slogan — equal pay — faded into shades of gray upon deeper review of different contracts, different schedules and different values placed on women’s soccer by the sport’s global leadership and its U.S. federation.The timeline of the fight, which started with a wage discrimination complaint filed by five top players in March 2016, is much more easily explained. That single filing set off years of twists and turns, court arguments and public statements, hard feelings, hard-won victories and at least one humbling defeat for the athletes.Here’s a review of how we got from the initial complaint to this settlement, told through reporting by The New York Times.March 2016: The shot across the bow.Hope Solo at the Rio Olympics in 2016. An original complainant but long retired from the team, she continues to wage her own separate equal pay fight against U.S. Soccer.Eugenio Savio/Associated PressThe equal pay fight began with five star players and a claim of wage discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. agency that enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination.“The numbers speak for themselves,” said goalkeeper Hope Solo, one of the players who signed the complaint. Solo said the men’s players “get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships.”Solo was joined in the complaint by the co-captains Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn, forward Alex Morgan and midfielder Megan Rapinoe. As The Times noted that day:In their complaint, the five players cited recent U.S. Soccer financial reports as proof that they have become the federation’s main economic engine even as, they said, they often earned only half as much — or less — than their male counterparts.At the same time, the players said, they exceeded revenue projections by as much as $16 million in 2015, when their World Cup triumph set television viewership records and a nine-game victory tour in packed stadiums produced record gate receipts and attendance figures.Wounded by the accusation they were treating the women’s players unfairly, U.S. Soccer — which had for years been a global leader in advancing women’s soccer — pushed back forcefully by citing figures that it said showed the men’s national team produced revenue and attendance about double that of the women’s team, and television ratings that were “a multiple” of what the women attracted. The federation accused the players and their lawyers of cherry-picking figures from an extraordinarily successful year for the women — they had won the World Cup in 2015 — and a U.S. Soccer spokesman called their math “inaccurate, misleading or both.”Offended by the suggestion that their games, and their successes, were worth less to the federation than those of the men’s team, the women and their teammates dug in for a fight.Few knew then how long it would last.Early 2017: An education and a new contract.Becky Sauerbrunn in a match against France in 2017.Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire, via Getty ImagesWithin a year, the players had taken control of their collective fate, firing their union chief and reorganizing their players’ association in ways that gave them a more active role in the issues affecting them.“It was always the plan,” Sauerbrunn, the team captain, said at the time, “to have a players’ association that listens to all the voices of its members and then can take that, and elevate that, and try to make that a reality.”Receiving a high-speed education in topics like labor law and public relations, the players voted one another onto negotiating teams and subcommittees and — between camps and full-time jobs as professional athletes — threw themselves into the task of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer.Uniting disparate teammates through text messages, overnight emails and anonymous player surveys, they determined priorities for a new contract and then made their cases personally in negotiating sessions with the federation and its lawyers.Within a few months, they had a deal.The agreement includes a sizable increase in base pay for the players — more than 30 percent, initially — and improved match bonuses that could double some of their incomes, to $200,000 to $300,000 in any given year, and even more in a year that includes a World Cup or Olympic campaign.The agreement largely sidestepped the broader equal pay fight that the women had made the cornerstone of their cause. The players were able to not only take pride in gains on salaries and bonuses, but also in having won control over some licensing and marketing rights that the union saw as an opening to test the team’s value on the open market.March 2019: Same fight, new forum.Labor peace did little to move the sides closer to an equal pay agreement, so in March 2019 the players withdrew their E.E.O.C. complaint and significantly raised the stakes by suing U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination.In their filing and a statement released by the team, the 28 players described “institutionalized 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 suit brought the fight to a new forum but also presented new hurdles. The players now not only had to prove that their team and the men’s national team did the same work, they also had to overcome questions about the differences in their pay structures and their negotiated collective bargaining agreements. And the C.B.A. they fought so hard to win suddenly left them without one bit of leverage: The players were forbidden by its terms to strike at least until it expired at the end of 2021.July 2019: Stadium chants and parade taunts.Fans cheered at a parade for the U.S. women’s team as they celebrated their World Cup victory in 2019.Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn the summer of 2019, a fight that had played out in public statements, social media hashtags and white T-shirts for more than three years moved to its biggest stage to date: the Women’s World Cup in France.By then, the U.S. national team’s stars were fighting not only their federation and others opposed to their equal pay claims, but also a sitting U.S. president, critics of their victory margins and those who didn’t appreciate their goal celebrations. When it lifted the trophy, though, all the team had was friends.The chant was faint at first, bubbling up from the northern stands inside the Stade de Lyon. Gradually it grew louder. Soon it was deafening.“Equal pay!” it went, over and over, until thousands were joining in, filling the stadium with noise. “Equal pay! Equal pay!”A few days later, fans repeated the chant as the U.S. Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro feted the team after its victory parade in New York.February 2020: The price of peace? $67 million.Among the voluminous filings before the women’s case was heard in federal court last year were two notable ones seeking to end it outright.In separate requests for summary judgment — the process in which each side claims its case is so strong that the judge should rule in its favor — U.S. Soccer and the players showed just how far apart the players and the federation remained not only in what they considered a fair outcome, but also in their basic concepts of what constituted equal pay, despite years of litigation, depositions and public relations campaigns.U.S. Soccer asked for a simple declaration that the players’ claims were without merit; simultaneously, the players finally put a price tag on what they considered a fair outcome:The federation sought to avoid a looming gender discrimination trial by asking the judge to dismiss the players’ claim. The women’s players also asked for a pretrial decision, but on far different terms: They are seeking almost $67 million — and potentially millions more — in back pay and damages.March 2020: The fight gets ugly.While Rapinoe had offered an olive branch at the victory parade, hinting at the idea of a settlement on points on which the two sides agreed, that hope was gone months later.The spark was a court filing in which U.S. Soccer, through its lawyers, argued that “indisputable science” proved that the players on its World Cup-winning women’s national team were inferior to men.Carlos Cordeiro resigned after U.S. Soccer argued through its lawyers that women’s players were inferior to their men’s counterparts.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press“I know that we’re in a contentious fight,” Rapinoe said, “but that crossed a line completely.”U.S. Soccer fired its lawyers, but the damage was done. After unsuccessfully trying to manage the fallout, Cordeiro resigned. Talks of a settlement that might have headed off the march to federal court fell apart.April 2020: A crushing defeat for the players.The ruling in the lawsuit, when it came, was devastating for the players. The judge, R. Gary Klausner of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, granted the federation’s motion for summary judgment. But he went further: He declared that the women’s core argument — that they had been paid less than players on the men’s national team — was factually wrong.In his ruling, the judge dismissed the players’ arguments that they were systematically underpaid by U.S. Soccer in comparison with the men’s national team. In fact, Klausner wrote, U.S. Soccer had substantiated its argument that the women’s team had actually earned more “on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis” than the men’s team during the years at issue in the lawsuit.The brutal irony, of course, was that in going to court against U.S. Soccer while they were at the peak of their powers, the women’s team had also picked the absolute worst time to line up a few years of their salaries against a few years of the men’s pay.Since February 2015, the agreed-upon start of the class-action period in the case, the women’s team had won two World Cup titles (and millions in bonus payments for those triumphs) and other major salary gains by negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. During the same period, the men’s team had plumbed new lows, with its failures serving to cripple the women’s case.By failing to qualify for the only men’s World Cup played during the class window, the men became ineligible for millions of dollars in performance bonuses of their own. Those payments would have swelled their paydays from U.S. Soccer far beyond what the women could ever have earned.A chance to salvage something from defeat?It was, a day later, hard to overstate the weight of the court decision. Judge Klausner had not only ruled against the players’ arguments; in effect, he had said they could never win. Yet even though U.S. Soccer’s victory in court was complete, and the players immediately announced their intention to appeal, the federation signaled just as quickly that it was still happy to discuss a way out.“We look forward to working with the women’s national team to chart a positive path forward to grow the game both here at home and around the world,” it said in the briefest of statements after the ruling.Cindy Parlow Cone, who replaced Cordeiro as president of U.S. Soccer, signaled a willingness to continue negotiations with the players.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressThe federation’s words seemed carefully chosen. The seemingly endless battles with its most popular players have unquestionably damaged — and continue to damage — U.S. Soccer’s reputation. The dispute has even brought it into conflict with its own sponsors.But much has changed since the equal pay war began: U.S. Soccer has a new president, the former women’s player Cindy Cone, and a new chief executive, and neither of them could reasonably be tied to past missteps and injustices.For them, and for U.S. Soccer, rebuilding a functional relationship with the women’s team — the federation’s most valuable asset and a critical moneymaker in troubled economic times — should be a top priority. If that means eating some crow and cutting a check to signal an eagerness to move forward, it might even work.November 2021: A small victory, and a new start.In November of last year, U.S. Soccer and the players reached an agreement that resolved claims about unequal working conditions. The deal, a rare moment of détente in the yearslong fight, formalized an effort the federation had already begun to remove differences in areas like staffing, travel, hotel accommodations and venue choices related to men’s and women’s national team matches. But it was a necessary step for the players before they could appeal their larger defeat in federal court.For the players and their lawyers, the agreement brings opportunity: In settling their issues related to working conditions, the women’s stars cleared the way to appealing a judge’s decision in May that had rejected most of their equal pay claims. For the federation, removing one of the last unresolved items in the team’s wage-discrimination lawsuit allowed its new leadership team to rid itself of one more point of contention in a dispute they would prefer to see end, and to signal that U.S. Soccer is open to more accommodations.U.S. Soccer’s president, Cindy Parlow Cone, hailed the agreement, saying it signaled the federation’s efforts “to find a new way forward” with the women’s team and, hopefully, a way out of the rest of the litigation.“This settlement is good news for everyone,” Cone said, “and I believe will serve as a springboard for continued progress.”Tuesday: The fight ends at last.Tuesday’s settlement between the women’s players and U.S. Soccer includes $24 million in compensation for the athletes — largely back pay for dozens of players who were included once the plaintiffs were granted class-action status, and several million dollars in seed money for a fund that will be available to players for post-career plans and initiatives to grow the women’s game.It also includes a pledge from U.S. Soccer to equalize pay, appearance fees and match bonuses for the women’s and men’s national teams for all games, including the World Cup, in the teams’ next collective bargaining agreements.That last bit is the stage for the next fight: Both the men’s and women’s teams are playing under expired — and separate — agreements. Negotiations on new ones are ongoing. It’s not clear when a deal will be struck. More

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      The League of Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan Deserves Respect

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      Players in the National Women’s Soccer League are demanding the respect all female athletes deserve but rarely get. When will we stop treating women in sports as second-class citizens?That question needs pondering, once again, in light of the horrifying stories of male coaches accused of abusing and harassing players in the National Women’s Soccer League.It turns out that the premier league for women’s soccer in the United States — where stars from the World Cup-winning national team like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan play — treats the legions of less-renowned players like pawns in a male-controlled game of exploitation and moneymaking.Rather than a celebration of female empowerment, revelations in recent days show the league as yet another example of the low regard society holds for female athletes. And in this case, it appears the athletes tolerated and suffered abuse because they feared complaining would doom the only U.S. league they have.“Burn it all down,” Rapinoe said in a tweet.She’s right.This league needs an overhaul in leadership. The change has already begun with the resignation of its commissioner, Lisa Baird. And there is hope that a new generation of female athletes — coming up in this age of reckoning and bold energy among the marginalized, connected to one another and to the world by social media — will not remain quiet.They are no longer afraid of the consequences, no longer shy about speaking truth to power.They have as a North Star the many female gymnasts — including one of the most powerful stars in sports, Simone Biles — who have shown that coming forward and speaking up can bring about change. Doing so can even send perpetrators who once would have continued lurking in the shadows off to prison.This was a turbulent, searingly painful week for women’s sports, but it also pointed the way to the future.Women’s pro soccer players will not continue to accept the status quo.No more tolerating coaches like Richie Burke, the former manager of the Washington Spirit, who unleashed a “torrent of threats, criticism and personal insults” on his players, according to The Washington Post.No more condoning men like Christy Holly, the Racing Louisville coach, fired in August amid a swirl of accusations about the toxic environment he had fostered.No more space for the likes of Farid Benstiti, former coach of the Seattle area’s OL Reign, who we now know was forced to leave after abusive comments.In an investigation published this week by The Athletic, current and former players accused North Carolina Courage manager Paul Riley of emotionally abusing players and coercing them into sex. Though he denied the allegations, Riley was fired by the Courage.The league’s players aren’t buying his denials. They are also disgusted with how the league was less than forthright about the behavior of these coaches. This weekend’s games were canceled when the players rose in unison, demanding reform.“Men, protecting men, who are abusing women,” wrote Rapinoe, the biggest American star in women’s soccer and one of the league’s few household names. “I’ll say it again, men, protecting men, who are ABUSING WOMEN. Burn it all down.”This statement needs some context. Baird, the N.W.S.L. commissioner, resigned on Friday after it became clear that she had done more to protect the men who run the league than the women who put it all on the line in competition.Sometimes it’s not just men protecting men. Sometimes it’s power protecting power.We all know who has the real clout — who stands at the top of the hierarchy. In the N.W.S.L., a vast majority of the team owners who own controlling stakes are men, as are a vast majority of the team executives and coaches.As is true in the rest of society, the sports world rests firmly on a simple, troubling dynamic: Outside of a few exceptions, professional tennis being one, women in sports take a back seat to their male counterparts.They receive far less media coverage, far less corporate backing, and far less love and respect from fans.The W.N.B.A. playoffs are on, full of great story lines and stunning play. As my recent column showed, good luck finding a jersey from your favorite breakout star.And good luck, as well, to the women’s teams who are crisscrossing the country on commercial airlines, scrambling to find flights where they do not have to cram their tired bodies into middle seats.The players in major American men’s sports almost always fly on chartered jets. Female professionals almost never do.The N.W.S.L. is far from a well-established league. Outside of a few cities, particularly Portland, Oregon, where Riley coached for years, its teams struggle for acceptance. The league’s nationally televised 2021 championship game is slated to take place in Portland on Nov. 20, and set to start at 9 a.m. local time. Before one of the biggest games of their lives, the players vying for the title will be waking up in the morning darkness and warming up on a cold field as the sun begins to rise.It isn’t easy to make inroads in the public consciousness in a culture set up so completely to favor men.Still, the N.W.S.L. has lasted longer and forged deeper roots than any American women’s professional soccer league ever has. The league is powerful because of what it represents: a future in which women are taken seriously and treated with full respect.Female athletes are boldly standing up for that kind of transformative change. But this week proves that their battle to be treated equally is far from over. In many ways, it is just beginning. 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      N.W.S.L. Cancels Schedule Amid Coaching Abuse Scandal

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      Under pressure for its handling of accusations that multiple coaches abused players, the top U.S. women’s league called off five games set for this weekend.The National Women’s Soccer League on Friday canceled five matches scheduled for this weekend as the league struggled to respond to a widening misconduct scandal in which several coaches were accused of abusing players, and the league faced charges that it had done little to protect its athletes.The league announced the match cancellations in a brief statement that noted “the gravity of the events of the last week” had made it impossible to ask its teams to play.“We have made this decision in collaboration with our players association and this pause will be the first step as we collectively work to transform the culture of this league, something that is long overdue,” Lisa Baird, the league’s commissioner, said in a statement.The NWSL announces an update regarding this weekend’s matches Details ⤵— National Women’s Soccer League (@NWSL) October 1, 2021
      Two head coaches accused of abusive behavior were fired this week alone, a third was dismissed for unspecified misconduct in August, and a fourth was allowed to leave his club amid player complaints about the way he spoke to and about players. The coach who was fired on Thursday, Paul Riley, who coached the North Carolina Courage to league championships in 2018 and 2019, was accused of coercing one of his former players into a sexual relationship.The cancellations of this weekend’s matches were driven by pressure from the union representing the league’s players and public outrage from stars like Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and dozens of other players, who vented their anger about their league to their large social media followings on Thursday.On Thursday morning, the players’ union made a number of demands of the N.W.S.L. that it said had to be addressed by noon Eastern on Friday. Those included that the league begin an independent investigation into Riley; suspend any team or league staff member who had violated the league’s anti-harassment policy or failed to report a violation of it; and explain how Riley had been rehired in the league after being investigated for abusive conduct in 2015. The players’ union said in a statement, that it asked the league on Thursday night to cancel this weekend’s games. The statement acknowledged the fans who would be affected by the cancellations, and added: “As players, we hope that those who read this statement will hear that it is ok to not be ok. It is ok to take space to process, to feel, and to take care of yourself.”Much of the attention paid to women’s soccer in the United States is focused on those who play for the national team and win World Cups, a group of players that includes — in Rapinoe, Morgan, Carli Lloyd and others — some of the most famous women’s athletes in the world. But the N.W.S.L. is mostly made up of their lesser-known club colleagues, players barely eking out a living playing soccer, and the precarity of their situation has made abuse difficult to tackle, players have said.It also complicated any collective action the players wanted to undertake. Members of the women’s national team who play in the N.W.S.L. are not paid by their individual clubs, but by the United States Soccer Federation, and are therefore subject to the collective bargaining agreement signed with U.S. Soccer. According to that agreement, players may not engage in any strike or work stoppage, a clause that would also pertain to their employment in the N.W.S.L.But the players never needed to initiate a formal work stoppage once the league, belatedly recognizing the urgency of the crisis, canceled the games instead.The scandal had been growing for weeks. One N.W.S.L. team fired its coach at the end of August “for cause,” and another dismissed its coach earlier this week after an investigation into his treatment of his players. The incident that led to Friday’s announcement came Thursday morning, when The Athletic published an article that included allegations that Riley coerced a player into having sex with him; forced two players to kiss and then sent them unsolicited sexual pictures; and yelled at and belittled players.The Athletic also reported Riley was let go from his head coaching job with the Portland Thorns, arguably the league’s most popular team, in 2015 in part because of violations of team policy but then did nothing to warn players when another team quickly rehired him.Riley denied most of the allegations to The Athletic and did not respond to a request for comment from The New York Times. Hours after the accusations against him were published on Thursday morning, he was fired.The players’ anger had been growing. On Tuesday, the N.W.S.L. concluded an investigation into another team, the Washington Spirit. The league did not publish a detailed report of its findings but it announced that the Spirit’s coach, Richie Burke, had been fired and would no longer be allowed to work in the N.W.S.L.Only weeks earlier, a third coach, Christy Holly, the head coach for Racing Louisville, was fired for cause, and Alyse LaHue, the Gotham F.C. general manager, was fired for an unspecified violation of league policy. Holly has not spoken publicly about his firing, and LaHue’s lawyer has denied that she violated any league policies.And in a conference call held with media Friday morning Bill Predmore, a minority owner and chief executive of O.L. Reign, the Seattle-area team that employs Rapinoe, discussed his hiring of Farid Benstiti, who had served as the team’s head coach until he resigned early this summer. According to the Washington Post, a formal complaint of verbal abuse was made about Benstiti, who had a history of making inappropriate comments in a previous coaching job. Predmore said he had asked Bensiti to resign after he was “told of the inappropriate comments by a player.”“The decision to hire Farid was mine and I accept responsibility for that and I think in hindsight I got it wrong,” Predmore said. “How people wish to hold me accountable, I don’t think it’s for me to decide.”In the announcement canceling the games, and as she faced pressure to leave or be removed from her post, Baird offered her own apology. “This week, and much of this season, has been incredibly traumatic for our players and staff,” she said, “and I take full responsibility for the role I have played.” More

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      USWNT Falls to Canada, Ending Frustrating Olympic Trip

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      A second-half penalty kick sends Canada to the gold medal game, and leaves the U.S. seeking the bronze, and answers.KASHIMA, Japan — The referee’s whistle had barely finished chirping when the Canadian players sprinted to the middle of the field and unleashed an explosion of exaltation that echoed around an otherwise silent stadium. More