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U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Sues U.S. Soccer for Gender Discrimination

By Andrew Das

· March 8, 2019

All 28 members of the world champion United States women’s national team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation on Friday, a sudden and significant escalation of a long-running fight over pay equity and working conditions that comes only months before the team will begin defense of its Women’s World Cup title.

In  the lawsuit , filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles, the 28 players accused the federation — their employer and the governing body for soccer in the United States — of years of what they labeled “institutionalized gender discrimination.” The issues, the athletes said, affected not only their paychecks but also where they played and how often, how they trained, the medical treatment and coaching they received, and even how they traveled to matches.

The lawsuit’s points mirrored many issues raised in a wage-discrimination complaint  filed by five United States players  with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016. The lack of a resolution, or even any noticeable action, on that now three-year-old complaint led the players to seek, and receive, a right-to-sue letter from the E.E.O.C. in February. The decision to take their case to federal court effectively ends the E.E.O.C. complaint.

U.S. Soccer, which had not seen the complaint, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The players’ action is the latest flash point in a yearslong fight for pay equity and equal treatment by the national team, which has long chafed — first privately but, more recently, increasingly publicly — about its compensation, support and working conditions while representing U.S. Soccer. The women’s players argue that they are required to play more games than the men’s team, win more of them, and yet still receive lesser pay from the federation.

The American soccer players who filed the suit are some of the most well-known female athletes in the world and their prominence and willingness to leverage their profiles and their enormous social media followings to their cause has paid dividends already: the team has not played a match on artificial turf, a surface many players dislike,  since 2017 , for example, and its union holds biweekly meetings with U.S. Soccer to keep the team informed of everything from upcoming opponents and training camps to hotels and travel plans.

Direct comparisons between the compensation of the men’s and women’s teams can be complicated, however. Each team has its own collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer, and among the major differences are pay structure: the men receive higher bonuses when they play for the United States, but are paid only when they make the team, while the women receive guaranteed salaries supplemented by smaller match bonuses.

One of the biggest differences in compensation is the multimillion-dollar bonuses the teams receive for participating in the World Cup, but those bonuses — a pool of $400 million for 32 men’s teams versus $30 million for 24 women’s teams — are determined by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, not U.S. Soccer.