According to USA Today, U.S. Soccer announced that the new contracts would pay women’s and men’s teams the same amount as national teams. This landmark deal also includes a split of World Cup bonus money. The federation has reached landmark agreements to pay the two groups equally, making the American national governing body the first in sports to guarantee both genders equal money for matches. The terms of the agreement required that the United States Soccer Federation negotiate labour contracts equating salaries and bonuses for their men’s and women’s teams. In February, U.S. Soccer and the women’s national team announced that they had reached an agreement that resolved the long-running wage dispute, with the federation agreeing to pay the men’s national team in the United States the same amount under its next union contract as well as giving $22 million to the women’s national team as a refund.
The United States Soccer Federation has also committed to providing an equal wage for the women’s and men’s national teams, including bonuses from World Cups. Still, all this is conditional upon both players’ unions passing a new collective bargaining agreement. In February, the most successful women’s national team ended six years of equal-pay litigation with an agreement calling for USSF to pay $24 million. The arrangement was conditional upon reaching new collective bargaining agreements.
The United States women’s national soccer team fought for years to win equal compensation, hire lawyers, make public statements, and have discussions with the USFA. A group of leading female players sued U.S. Soccer in 2019 over alleged gender discrimination, citing disparities in treatment and compensation relative to men’s teams, and won their suit three months ago, The New York Times reported. Thanks to the landmark Equal Pay Agreement, the women’s U.S. soccer team will now make equal amounts of money with their men’s counterparts.
In the first-of-its-kind deal, the United States Soccer Federation has agreed with both the USWNTPA and the USNSTPA to combine and share part of the bonus money paid to teams competing at the 2022 men’s World Cup and the 2023 women’s World Cup. Under these two CBAs, US Soccer became the first federation in the world to match FIFA World Cup prize money awarded to the U.S. women’s national team (USWNT) and U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) for participation in the respective World Cups.
U.S. Soccer said that the two new labour agreements are the first in the FIFA framework that will level World Cup prize money between men’s and women’s teams, and the teams will be among the highest-paid national soccer teams in the world, although the exact wage scales have not been disclosed. The labour agreements, which will run through the end of 2028, bring an end to more than six years of fighting over pay equity, which began with a federal civil rights complaint filed in March 2016 by members of the teams, claiming wage discrimination, and grew into a 2019 lawsuit filed by members of the women’s national teams members of U.S. Soccer.
