[guest post by JVW]

Somehow I guess I have turned into the regular correspondent for all things concerning the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT). I have been reporting on their lawsuit against United States Soccer, which was settled late last month. The USWNT has been quite successful on the field over the past couple of generations, winning four World Cup titles (more than any other country) including the last two. At the same time, the team metaphorically did a Triple Lindy off of the ten-meter platform straight into the fetid pool of trendy social justice matters, moving beyond their long-standing equal pay/equal treatment with the men’s team argument to becoming advocates for Black Lives Matter, assorted LGBTQ issues, issues of “equity” and “representation,” and whatever woke nonsense was percolating in left-wing political circles at any given time. This made them the darling of progressive sportswriters in national media, who showered the team — especially the leading activist, forward Megan Rapinoe — with plenty of adulation.

But it turns out that not only were there members of the team who were not on board with the various causes so quickly adopted by the USWNT, there actually were team members who felt bullied into going along with ostentatious displays of virtue signaling with which they did not agree. Star forward Carli Lloyd, the heroine of the 2015 World Cup Final who retired from soccer at the end of last year, appeared on the brand-new podcast of retired USWNT goalie Hope Solo and acknowledged that she did not have a good experience playing during the period which roughly coincided with the team’s turn to vigorous activism:

“Within our squad, the culture has changed. It was really tough and challenging to play these last several years. To be quite honest, I hated it,” Lloyd said. “It wasn’t fun going in, and it was only for love of the game for me. I wanted to win, and I wanted to help the team, but the culture within the team was the worst I had ever seen it.”

When the majority of team members (at the urging of Rapinoe) began kneeling during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick five years ago, Lloyd was one of the team members who remained standing, perhaps the only who who consistently did so. The team would eventually drop the kneeling during the anthem and would instead silently take a knee just before the commencement of play, yet Lloyd eschewed that grandstanding — er, grandkneeling — as well. On a podcast with former U.S. Men’s National Team player Alexi Lalas on Wednesday, Lloyd reiterated to the host what she had said on Solo’s podcast days earlier:

LLOYD: I know that experience matters and I know that veteran leadership matters. But what we had in the last several years was not a good culture. And the mentality changed, and it became toxic, and it wasn’t good. [. . .]

LALAS: Can you put your finger on what made it toxic?

LLOYD: A lot of different things. You know, I think what made this team so successful throughout the years is we stepped in-between the lines and we fought for one another. [. . .] And it didn’t matter what you looked like, it didn’t matter what you stood for [. . .] and in 2015, winning a World Cup obviously put us on a really, really big stage. And endorsements starting coming and the spotlight started coming, and I just saw a shift in people’s mindsets. It became more about “what can I do to build my brand off the field.” [. . .] And I don’t think that the respect of wearing the crest and playing for your country and doing everything in your power to fight for your teammates was there. And you saw that on the field.

Her words were couched in just enough soft ambiguity, but given her pegging the post-2015 World Cup as the beginning of the decline in team chemistry and given that this was the very moment when Megan Rapinoe emerged as the undisputed leader of the social justice squad, it’s hard not to see this as a direct indictment of the player who became the media’s embodiment of the woke and hip athlete. This has to be absolutely infuriating to all those sportswriters who spilled gallons and gallons of ink assuring all of us that the team spoke with one voice, one mind. Turns out that the single unwelcome aspect of diversity was present all along: the diversity of thought and opinion. It’s a reminder of how insular the world of journalism has become, and how intent they are on forcing their preferred narrative upon us.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Might as well do it this way.

Item One: Keep It in Your Pants, Pal
I, as many of you know, have been assigned by the newsdesk at Patterico’s Pontifications to provide unstinting coverage of women’s soccer, the fiendishly stupid bullet train, My Little Aloha Sweetie, and, of course, sex deviants. So I found this story to be right up my alley (wait, not the idiom I ought to be using):

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow, who was axed over the adult videos he created with his wife, said he was shocked that board members weren’t a “little more understanding” — but maintained that he had no regrets about filming the content.

Gow, 63 — who was fired from his long-term position by the Board of Regents on Wednesday — has argued that he shouldn’t have been given the pink slip because his videos should be protected by the First Amendment.

“I did not expect that we’d end up where we are now,” Gow told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in the aftermath.

“I thought the board, given their staunch support of free speech, would be a little more understanding. But clearly, that’s not the case.”

When I reported on the candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates who made sex videos with her husband for a paid audience, some of the comments were along the lines of “Hey, consenting adults, and all that.” I get that attitude, and I want my inner libertarian to be cool with what a couple chooses to do behind closed doors. But when they then open up those doors and invite us to peek in, my inner conservative reserves the right to call them perverts. Joe Gow had previously been criticized by the UW board for having invited porn actress Nina Hartley to lecture on campus and paying her an honorarium, so rather than being some sort of First Amendment crusader I’m sort of thinking that Mr. Gow is simply a pornography addict.

Item Two: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
This probably won’t end well:

The national governing body for amateur/Olympic-style boxing recently codified a rule permitting male participation in the women’s division in its 2024 rulebook.

USA Boxing added a ‘Transgender Policy,” written in August 2022, into its 2024 rulebook, declaring that male boxers who transition to female are eligible to compete in the female category under certain conditions. To qualify for the female division, a man must declare his gender identity as female, have undergone gender reassignment surgery, have done hormone testing for a minimum of four years after such procedures, and have met testosterone limits set by USA Boxing.

“The athlete’s total testosterone level in serum must remain below 5 nmol/L throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category,” the 2022 rule said. Male boxers must demonstrate a total testosterone level in serum that is below 5 nmol/L for at least 48 months before first competition.

Minor boxers under the age of 18 must compete in the category aligned with their biological sex, but adult boxers can switch to the category of their preferred gender if they meet the requirements.

Raise your hand if you expected boxing to be a woke sport. I appreciate that they are now requiring four-years of hormone testing after gender reassignment (previous athletic policies required as brief a duration as one year). But according to this conversion app, a level of 5 nmol/L is equivalent to 144 ng/dL, which is roughly six times the testosterone level of the average woman under age 50 even if it is also apparently the same limit that the International Association of Athletics Federation adopted five years ago.

Parents, would you want your daughter in the ring with a competitor who just barely met these requirements?

Item Three: How Can Claudine Gay Possibly Survive?
It simply has to be that the walls are closing in on Claudine Gay. It is inarguable that she has, on several occasions, failed to properly cite sources in academic articles and papers that she has written. It is inarguable that Harvard has bent over backwards trying to find flimsy rationale why this is not a dismissible offense, and has run a slipshod investigation into her acts of plagiarism. It is furthermore inarguable that Harvard students are held to a far more rigorous definition of academic misconduct than their president is, and this is an ongoing problem in West Cambridge. We are reminded that Claudine Gay failed to support fellow black colleagues when the baying woke mobs came for them, so she should not expect her race and gender to bail her out of this predicament.

It’s actually quite sad that Ms. Gay lacks the dignity to simply step down and spare Harvard this ordeal, but the higher education establishment has spent the last half-century choosing political posturing over maintaining principles and standards, so I guess the reckoning is long overdue. Veritas my ass, Harvard.

I’m going to wrap it up here, gang. Happy New Year. I may try to sneak in one more post tomorrow that is already a few weeks overdue.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

With both guest bloggers on super-secret missions on behalf of brand awareness for Patterico’s Pontifications, this Weekend Open Thread might end up being somewhat slapdash and haphazard. I’m starting this on Tuesday night in the hopes of getting a little bit up every day, but the final product will be what it’s gonna be. With that, it’s rosin on the bow and here we go:

Item 1 – Nicholas Kristof, Affirmative Action Kid
The Chronicle of Higher Education asks why our old friend Nicholas Kristof is claiming to have been the beneficiary of affirmative action, believing that growing up in rural Oregon made him exotic and thus and interesting candidate in the eyes of Harvard’s Admissions Office, when in fact his background was fairly straightforward by Harvard’s standards:

In a recent column, The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof explained that he had been a beneficiary of affirmative action: “Elite colleges were looking for farm kids from low-income areas to provide diversity. So a school that I had never visited, Harvard, took an enormous risk and accepted me, and I became a token country bumpkin to round out a class of polished overachievers. In time, Harvard gave me a wonderful education, transformed my life and set me on a path to becoming a columnist — which is why you’re stuck reading this.”

Readers were quick to point out that both of Kristof’s parents were professors. His father, Ladis Kristof, was born in a part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire now in Ukraine; he was imprisoned by the Nazis and eventually made it to the United States, where he graduated from Reed College, in Oregon, in 1955. According to Reed’s alumni magazine, Ladis became “a political scientist of international renown; a Fulbright Scholar to Romania, and a visiting professor at universities in India, Moldova, Poland, and Romania.” Nicholas’s mother, Jane McWilliams, was also a professor; she retired emerita at Portland State.

So Kristof was a double-professor brat with exactly the kind of advantages that might make one unusually competitive when applying for college — no first-generation college student here. Far from taking “an enormous risk,” Harvard was making a very safe bet. Why does Kristof work so hard to imply otherwise?

Mr. Kristof no doubt wrote a stirring essay about getting up at dawn to feed the chickens, milk the cows, bale the hay, hitch up the family’s one ox to the rusty old plow and make a pass at the north field, and then walk the four miles to his one-room schoolhouse where the room was illuminated with kerosene and heated with a coal stove. But maybe he really is onto something. We’ve pointed out before that affirmative action as practiced by Harvard was far more beneficial to middle-class and upper-class minorities than it was to kids from the mean streets, so it’s only fair that Mr. Kristof sees himself as an extension of that phony-baloney program.

Item 10 – Not Looking So Great for the USWNT
The United States Women’s National Team has thus far been incredibly underwhelming at the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament being jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. After a rather pedestrian 3-0 victory over Vietnam, a team the U.S. women were expected to trounce by somewhere around twice that margin, the team played absolutely uninspired tie games with Holland, ranked ninth in the world, and then Portugal, ranked twenty-first. Their record of one victory versus two draws places the U.S., who entered the tournament as the world’s number one ranked team, into the elimination round as the second finisher in their group, placing them in a win-or-go-home game on Sunday morning against Sweden, ranked as the world’s number three team. Should they survive that match, their next opponent would be either Japan, ranked eleventh, or Norway, ranked twelfth, and it would only get harder from there.

Item 11 – Third Time Is the Charm
This ultra-tolerant attitude towards criminality is really paying off in the Bay Area:

CNN senior national correspondent Kyung Lah said her rental car was broken into while she was on assignment in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, marking the third time in the last year her car has been broken into while she was on assignment in the Bay Area.

Lah said in a series of posts on X that she was in Oakland shooting a story about crime when her “completely empty” car was broken into.

“We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” she said, adding in a second post that “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk.”

[. . .]

Back in March, Lah shared that she and CNN producer Jason Kravarik had their bags stolen out of their rental car while on assignment at San Francisco’s city hall for a story about the city’s rampant crime.

While the pair were conducting an interview at city hall, thieves broke into their car and snatched their bags “in under 4 seconds,” despite the crew having hired private security to keep watch.

[. . .]

This time around, an employee for the rental-car company told Lah that of the 250 cars returned to the lot yesterday, 27 had been broken into — more than 10 percent of returned cars.

How long until the first politician complains about the rising cost of rental car rentals and car insurance in the Bay Area, and blames greedy corporations for gouging the hard-working citizen?

Item 100 – Suing College Accreditation Cartels
Florida pushes the anti-woke agenda further by suing the Southern Associations of Colleges and Schools. George Leef has the details:

College accreditation used to be the most soporific of topics. Almost nobody was interested in it because accreditation meant so little. Accrediting agencies had their standards that kept degree mills from fooling people into thinking they were real colleges. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t a matter of national concern.

In recent years, however, accreditation has become highly controversial. The reason is that the accrediting agencies have ceased to be neutral parties who apply reasonable standards to ensure that students are not squandering their federal student-aid funds on dodgy schools that are just interested in cashing in on easy money. Instead, the accreditors have become activists who want to direct how colleges and universities will be run. They have badly overstepped their boundaries, and that has now triggered a lawsuit against the Department of Education.

You can see where the rest of the story is going, but click through to the article for full details.

Item 101 – The Summer of Strikes Roils the Golden State
In addition to the Writers Guild of America strike, joined in solidarity by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the hotel workers strikes ongoing throughout Southern California, comes word that some pretty high-paid state workers might also take to the picket lines:

The union representing doctors and psychiatrists working in California correctional facilities said that 91% of voting members authorized a strike Monday. Non-competitive salaries, strenuous working conditions and an overreliance on higher-paid contracted doctors, make it difficult to hire staff physicians, said Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the umbrella Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

[. . .]

The biggest sticking point is salaries. Though doctors and psychiatrists pull down between $285,000 and $343,000 annually, according to California Correctional Health Care Services, temporary contracted workers make twice as much, said Dr. Nader Wassef, psychiatrist and chief of staff at Napa State Hospital.

“I am not going to claim poverty. What I’m trying to say is if we plan on getting trained, qualified psychiatrists to treat these patients, we are not going to get any because we are not competitive,” Wassef said.

The vacancy rate among on-site psychiatrists exceeded 50% in June, according to court documents filed by the state in an ongoing lawsuit over prison conditions and prisoner safety. Among all psychiatrists, including telehealth providers, the vacancy rate was 35%.

More than 20% of primary care doctor positions are vacant, California Correctional Health Care Services told CalMatters in an unsigned statement Tuesday. The agency did not respond to questions about contractor pay.

Lucky we have a state dominated by the union-friendly political party, right? But of course that same party receives massive donations from both sides in the Hollywood and the hotel strikes, and they have the challenge of finding the budget money to help pay for all of those prison sawbones and shrinks. Good luck to them.

Item 110 – More on Strike-mania in Southern California
Taylor Swift brings her “Eras” tour to Los Angeles tonight [this is being drafted on Thursday] for the first of six sold-out concerts at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Some 400,000+ tickets have been sold for the shows. Estimates are that Ms. Swift herself realizes a net profit of about $5 million for every show she plays (there are other claims it is closer to three times that amount), and some studies suggest that her 46 shows in 17 U.S. cities this summer will bring $4.6 billion dollars in economic activity over a five month period.

So naturally the aforementioned striking hotel workers want Ms. Swift to cancel her Los Angeles shows in solidarity with their cause. The workers are demanding an immediate raise of $5 per hour, followed by guaranteed raises of $3 per hour each year over the next two years. They also want healthcare, pensions, and no immigration checks via the eVerify system. The union, Unite Here Local 11, even got some of the more dopey and economically-illiterate California politicians such as hypocritical Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis; Patterico’s and my County Supervisor, Janice Hahn; and a whole host of other pandering Democrats to sign on to a letter asking Ms. Swift to postpone her Los Angeles concerts until the strike is settled, as if tens of thousands of young Swifties and their angry parents would then force those mean old hotels to immediately pay up. The delusion of labor-owned Democrats knows no bounds, even if Ms. Swift has recently outed herself as a typical entertainment leftie with all of the right political beliefs. Here’s wishing her a successful run at SoFi this extended weekend anyway.

Item 111 – Dianne Feinstein: Too Far Gone to Manage Her Own Affairs But Still Able to Serve in the Senate
The ending to Dianne Feinstein’s grossly overrated career keeps getting more and more sad. Last week we had the spectacle of her yet again acting bewildered in a Defense Committee hearing and having to be stage-managed by her colleagues. Now news comes that her daughter is exercising power of attorney to take care of the Senators personal legal affairs:

The daughter of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been given power of attorney over the sitting senator and is handling the 90-year-old’s legal affairs.

Katherine Feinstein, 66, has filed two lawsuits on her mother’s behalf in an effort to gain access to the estate of the senator’s late husband. The senator’s decision to delegate management of her affairs comes as Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill argue whether Feinstein is no longer fit for office.

Katherine’s first lawsuit on her mother’s behalf relates to a California beach house owned by the senator’s late husband, Richard Blum. The lawsuit argues that Feinstein is seeking to sell the house in order to raise funds for her ongoing medical treatments.

The second lawsuit challenges the appointment of two other trustees in Blum’s estate: Michael Klein, a longtime lawyer for Blum, and Marc Scholvinck, a business partner of Blum’s, according to The New York Times.

It’s a sad reflection on the broken one-party political system in California which kept electing her long after it was apparent that she was not up to the job, and it’s a sad reflection on her party which keeps her in place in order to hold down an important spot on the Judiciary Committee, where her usefulness is in rubber-stamping President Biden’s nominees. A sad way for her to cement her (at best) mediocre legacy.

Item 1000 – Is this DeSantis-Newsom Thing on, or What?
Unannounced Presidential candidate Gavin Newsom has been out on the hustings challenging announced Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis to a debate over which state model — Newsom’s California vs. DeSantis’s Florida — is more stable and sane. After (rightly) ignoring his West Coast antagonist, the governor of America’s Penis now seems to be poised for a fight. Noah Rothman, for one, believes this might be a fine and necessary thing:

The California model and the Florida model are wildly distinct theories of how to balance economic optimization against the need to maximize human happiness. They are in competition already, and it would be valuable to hash out those distinctions in plain terms on a debate stage. If these two governors can respectfully advocate their respective philosophical approaches to governance, it would greatly clarify the stakes of the coming presidential contest. Indeed, such an engagement would likely prove vastly more informational than one defined by two aged, cantankerous bloviators whose highest aspirations for the country are to ensure that it doesn’t put them or their loved ones in jail.

He also recognizes that this could just turn into a pointless shitshow:

Of course, a DeSantis–Newsom debate could also devolve into bickering, point-scoring, and competing one-liners. If this debate becomes a contest of personalities, DeSantis’s deficiencies in that area could prove fatal. But if Hannity could keep the participants in this deliberation focused on arguing their competing theories of societal organization, it wouldn’t just be a far healthier political exercise than any to which Americans have been privy for many years; it would also showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance. And it might go a long way toward convincing the voting public that Florida’s state-level experiments deserve to go national.

In any case, I would sooner tune into this debate than any involving you-know-who. If the majority of Americans look at the California model versus the Florida model and determine that they like better the way the Golden State is managing things, then at least we can drop the pretense that the United States is still (barely) a center-right nation.

Enjoy the weekend. The summer is winding down and the kids will be back to school soon.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

I figured I should comment on the most recent, and perhaps final, development in the matter of the United States Women National Soccer Team (USWNT) and United States Soccer (USS) which we have discussed first in 2019 and then updated the following year. Please refer back to those posts for an overview of the issues, as I am too pressed for time right now to recap.

This past week, the sides settled their dispute with USS agreeing to pay $24 million to the USWNT, with 11/12 of that sum going as back-wages to players and the remaining $2 million set aside for a fund which players can tap for post-career initiatives or for charitable purposes. The settlement is contingent upon USWNT agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement which is expected to happen within the next few months. USS also has committed to providing equal pay to both the women’s and men’s team going forward, including player bonuses which are paid by USS for participation in tournaments such as the quadrennial World Cup. (Presumably this commitment does not encompass prize money paid to players by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, seeing as how the men’s World Cup revenue is nearly fifty times larger than the women’s World Cup revenue.)

This is being seen as a win for the USWNT, and rightfully so. Coming off of yet another World Cup title (if, to be sure, coupled with yet another underwhelming Olympics performance), the women not only are receiving the back-pay they had been fighting for, but they are also forcing USS to admit in deed if not in fact that the former collective bargaining agreement — which the USWNT’s represented had agreed to back in 2017 — was unfair. This argument had been rejected by U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner almost two years ago. Yet USS decided to give in and settle anyway, and even though the national governing body insists this is a justifiable compromise (the $24 million settlement is indeed far less than the $67 million the USWNT had originally demanded), there is no way that ever-woke sports media wasn’t going to spin this as an acknowledgement that the women were unfairly paid in relation to the men, even though neither Judge Klausner nor I was convinced of that fact. Yes, USS gets this distraction off of their daily agenda, and they say that this will save them an estimated $9 million in legal fees going forward (being a sports labor lawyer must be a ka-ching! profession), so I suppose it is entirely up to them and their legal counsel to determine whether or not this step makes sense.

Not everyone is pleased with the result, though. Former USWNT goalie Hope Solo, who was one of the first players to sue for higher pay (and a separate suit she has against USWNT is still in the court system), believes that the settlement’s dependence upon CBA ratification is actually a trap and could cause the women’s player association to settle for a lesser deal in order to unlock the back wages. An article in The Athletic (restricted to subscribers) points out that in order to align their CBA with that of the men’s team, the men’s player association is going to have to cooperate, and the fellas will certainly have their own opinions on what “equity” entails.

But let’s tip our caps to the women’s team who played their match in the Court of Public Opinion far better than they played it in United States District Court.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

I thought I might follow-up on a post I wrote last summer, regarding the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) and their lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation alleging violations in equal pay protection and civil rights laws. The USWNT’s complaints boiled down to the following:

* The men were compensated more for appearance and performance in international showcase events such as the World Cup.

* The men were given more money for appearance fees when representing the United States in international matches.

* The men were treated to more luxurious travel and enjoyed better training and playing facilities.

The matter, which spent about a year in arbitration before heading into court, is now before a federal judge here in Los Angeles. Yesterday, Judge R. Gary Klausner (appointed by George W. Bush), chucked part of the USWNT’s suit:

The team filed a motion in February asking for $67 million in damages in lieu of a trial. Female players claimed they had not been paid equally to the men’s national team, citing the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner issued a 32-page decision Friday partially granting the federation’s request for summary judgment, according to The Associated Press.

He threw out the Equal Pay Act portion of the lawsuit but left in the Civil Rights Act claims regarding the federation’s use of charter flights, hotel accommodations, medical support services and training support services.

Judge Klausner is clearly a reader of Patterico’s Pontifications, as yesterday he agreed with my conclusion last summer that a contract mutually agreed upon pursuant to collective bargaining by the USWNT’s players’ association and U.S. Soccer shouldn’t casually be abrogated because one side now feels that it has a stronger bargaining position:

In the summary decision, the judge cited the women’s team’s collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer that prioritized guaranteed money over a “pay-to-play” structure favored by the men’s team. According to the summary, the sides had negotiated for a pay-to-play structure for the women’s team beginning in May 2016, and reached a compromise in 2017 that meant the women’s team would have 20 contracted players for the year, each receiving a base salary of $100,000. The deal also included bonuses for friendlies.

“The history of negotiations between the parties demonstrates that the WNT rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT [men’s national team], and that the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for other benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players,” the summary reads. “Accordingly, Plaintiffs cannot now retroactively deem their CBA worse than the MNT CBA by reference to what they would have made had they been paid under the MNT’s pay-to-play structure when they themselves rejected such a structure.”

The matter next goes to trial on June 16, to determine if the differences in training and travel for the two squads is a civil rights violation, through given the fact that the U.S. Soccer Federation has already pledged to take steps to equalize these two items for both teams, there might not be much for the women to gain by going forward.

In any case, the USWNT still has the satisfaction of knowing they are far more celebrated in their on-field efforts than the USMNT.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

As we celebrate the victory of our United States Soccer Women’s National Team (USWNT), and their curb-stomping of every single Eurotrash nation who once thought they could colonize our lands (Did anyone else notice that we beat, in order: Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands? Ok, ok, we’re missing Russia.), talk has turned to the women’s demand for what in unhelpful shorthand is being referred to as “equal pay.” Because much of this debate seems to be arguing from premises that are not shared by each combatant, I thought it might be helpful to outline the two athlete compensation streams that are being discussed.

World Cup Revenue
Those who seek to dismiss the USWNT’s complaints out of hand are quick to point out the obvious fact that the revenue for the men’s World Cup dwarfs the revenue for the women’s event. Total revenues for the 2018 World Cup (for men) in Russia were estimated at $6 billion dollars, which includes event sponsorships, ticket sales, television rights, merchandising, and whatever else is sold under the auspices of FIFA, a corrupt international body of sleazy bankers, corrupt lawyers, and assorted louche princes and counts from defunct royal courts. The women’s event held the past several weeks in France, by contrast, is believed to have brought in $131 million, or about 2.2% of the haul of the men’s event. As such, the members of the French team which won the men’s title split $38 million in prize money, while the American women must make do with a pot of only $4 million, though it should be noted that the women share a much higher percentage of the total revenue than the men do. Short of socializing the funding for both events in order to even out the payoffs, I don’t see that there is a lot which can be done here.

National Team Pay
This is where the women’s team has their strongest argument that they are being treated unfairly. The USWNT is currently in mediation with U.S. Soccer, seeking to be paid stipends commensurate with the men’s team. They have also filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and filed suit against U.S. Soccer in U.S. District Court in Central California. Additionally, former USWNT goalie Hope Solo has separately filed suit against U.S. Soccer, also alleging pay discrimination.

The women’s logic is understandable, and it is laid out in an informative article by Michael McCann, a lawyer who writes about legal issues for Sports Illustrated. First and foremost, they have clearly been more successful than the men in international competitions. Documents filed in support of their position show that between 2016 and 2018, the USWNT ticket sales exceeded the men’s team sales, albeit slightly, and with the women’s World Cup victory coupled with the failure of the men’s team to qualify for last summer’s tournament, this could be a year where women’s team merchandise outsells men’s team merchandise. Given the wokedy-woke attitude of corporate America these days, one would assume that sponsorships would at the very worst be even, with the marketability of the women’s team perhaps surpassing that of the men’s team.

So, the thinking goes, why not pay women’s team members a stipend equivalent to that of the men’s team? The last real piece of revenue that hasn’t yet been mentioned is television revenue, and because U.S. Soccer packages both teams together in network deals it is hard to determine which is the more valuable piece of the pie. Traditionally the men have had higher television ratings than the women, but again, the recent success of the USWNT coupled with the on-field egg-laying by the fellas might change the numbers there and bolster the argument for a more equitable division. Olympic sports such as swimming and track & field provide a uniform stipend system irrespective of sex, and in some sports it would seem that it is the men’s team members who are getting shafted while the more popular women’s team members get by. The easy thing to do here is to simply draw up a new deal that dictates the U.S. Soccer Women’s National Team members receive the same organizational pay that U.S. Soccer Men’s National Team members do, right? At least one Presidential candidate believes so:

The @USWNT proved even before their World Cup win yesterday that they have what it takes to succeed. They generate more revenue than the men’s team and now hold the record for most FIFA Women’s World Cup wins. The world is watching — it’s time they were paid what they deserve.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 8, 2019

But hold on; not so fast.

It turns out that the USWNT’s compensation was the product of a a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by their own player’s association with U.S. Soccer. The men’s and the women’s teams have separate player’s associations, and thus each squad reached a different sort of deal. The men’s team pay is highly dependent upon the number of games in which a player appears for the national team; a player who makes ten appearances in a year makes 25% more than a player who makes eight appearances, and a player who is injured and does not appear for the men’s national team gets nothing for a stipend. By contrast, all women’s players in the national team pool are guaranteed a flat sum, and in return they get a smaller per-game appearance fee. This way a player who appears in ten games makes only slightly more than the player who appears in eight games, but the player who sits out the year with an injury (or, perhaps, maternity leave) still makes something. If the women choose a model so that everyone gets at least a little something while the men choose a model where you are paid to play, I don’t see how that violates any equal pay principles.

(To be completely fair, though, I do think the USWNT has a legitimate point when they complain that the men’s team has better training facilities and more luxurious travel. This is something that U.S. Soccer ought to rectify and make equal.)

One would think that a good pro-labor Democrat like Kamala Harris might be a little bit skittish about demanding that a collective bargaining agreement which is in effect for another 30 months be tossed aside just because one side now has a stronger hand to play. Imagine if the USWNT had lost in the round of 16 to Spain, and had thus ignominiously bowed out of the tournament much earlier than expected. Would U.S. Soccer be justified in demanding that the collective bargaining agreement be reopened and the player’s compensation adjusted downward? It’s impossible to see Senator Harris supporting that kind of move, so why should she be in favor of abrogating the agreement now?

It would be a classy move — and justifiable too — if U.S. Soccer would address the disparities in training and travel between the two teams, and provide a better experience for the women players. If they want to reopen the collective bargaining agreement and revisit compensation then I have no problem with that, but I am against the idea that they should somehow be compelled to do so by outside activists. The men’s and women’s player associations could also explore the idea of merging into one organization which would ensure that both sides are treated equally, though the USWNT may find itself having to compromise here and there to keep the men aboard. Who knows, with the success of the women’s team perhaps it would be a smart move for the men to latch on for the ride. But simplistic chants of “equal pay” and turning this into yet another tiresome grudge in the grossly misleading “pay gap” argument will only serve the purposes of the professional activist crew.

– JVW