The Solution to Our National Soccer Problem? Bring Back Inequality.

With the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team embarrassing its country early yesterday morning by exiting the World Cup at the same stage where the men usually exit, it’s time we revisit the subject of equal pay.

A brief refresher:

Prior to 2022, the U.S. Women’s National Team players made less money than their male counterparts. The reasons for this were varied, but the core reason was that more people are interested in men’s soccer than women’s soccer. Even in the United States.

It’s baffling, given how routinely terrible the U.S. Men’s National Team is, but more people watch them than watch the women. In 2021, an average of about 750,000 viewers watched each USMNT game on English-speaking television in the U.S. In 2022—the same year if you normalize for the different World Cup timing—the USWNT drew only about 360,000 viewers for an average match. Even without including Spanish-language television, the USMNT’s games were more than twice as popular as the USWNT’s, and that was before the USMNT overachieved and the USWNT flopped by reaching the exact same stage of the tournament.

Globally, it’s a bigger divide. The U.S. is presently and historically more supportive of women’s sports than the rest of the world, and I’m even talking about in countries with universal healthcare (Angel City FC, an NWSL team, brought in roughly $20M last year from ticket sales and sponsorship deals alone while the entire Women’s Super League, England’s women’s equivalent of the EPL, brought in only $41M). Payouts for teams in the men’s World Cup are somewhere in the neighborhood of nine times those paid to women, a number reflective of that global interest disparity. It’s not necessarily a 1:1 conversion between revenue and fan interest, but fan interest does drive revenue. More people like to watch men’s soccer. Especially, evidently, when they don’t have to watch the USMNT.

Worldwide, this worked…well it didn’t work great but it made more sense. Sexist? Oh yeah, definitely sexist, at least to a degree. But you try telling a Brazilian that Marta should be paid the same as Ronaldinho was. In the U.S., though, again more friendly to women’s sports than almost the entire rest of the world, inequal pay was a really bad look, especially because while the TV numbers for men’s soccer are better, women’s soccer has had the bigger American household names throughout the years. Mia Hamm was and is a bigger deal than Clint Dempsey or Landon Donovan or whoever the preeminent historical American male soccer player was and is. (Part of the men’s TV numbers might tie back to immigrants with ties to their former country’s national team, part might be fans wanting to watch the players on the USMNT’s opponents, I don’t really know. Like we’ve been saying: It’s weird.)

So, after six years of litigation, U.S. Soccer changed their financial model, basically reducing their own profits so that the women’s team—objectively better performers in their respective sphere than their male counterparts—would be paid at roughly the same rate as the men’s team. It’s not the exact same—there are technicalities—but American women’s soccer players successfully leveraged their economic value to get financial payouts equivalent to those of their male peers.

Then, they went out and stunk. Played terrible. Looked lazy, too, at least against Vietnam (I missed the last three matches, partially because two happened while I, like the American strikers, was asleep.) The USWNT, now paid like the USMNT, went out and played like the USMNT. Big problem.

The solution?

We need to cut pay again.

But!

We’ve learned a valuable lesson here.

If the USWNT was good when it was being paid less than the USMNT and is bad when paid the same amount, we clearly need to be paying each team less at times when we want them to win. It doesn’t have to be every year, but when the World Cup rolls around and we’re paying attention? Cut that pay. Bring the edge back. Everyone knows that performance improves when pay goes down. That’s why I haven’t put ads on The Barking Crow yet. To keep my own edge. Once we’ve got those sponsors? Kiss our quality goodbye. Raises are a curse!

The best part is that this should theoretically work with the men’s team too. When *their* World Cup comes up on the calendar, or qualification if they’re struggling with that (as they’ve been known to do), cut their pay. Here’s a handy table illustrating the concept. Please note that the next men’s World Cups are in 2026 and 2030 and the next women’s one are probably in 2027 and 2031, I don’t know, I didn’t look. By the time I looked up Angel City FC’s revenue, I was done on the research front for today.

*If the men are struggling with qualification in 2029, switch to the 2026/2030 model.

I know, I know. I would also prefer we just pay the USMNT to stop playing at all. Or imprison them. Or exile them! Whatever the method, I too would prefer mass societal action stating clearly and unequivocally that we don’t care about men’s soccer. Do we care? Kind of. But we can’t tell the rest of the world that! “Why does America suck at men’s soccer when it’s so big and has so much money?” How do you answer? It would be a lot easier to just say we don’t care. But, alas, I keep suggesting this to U.S. Soccer and they keep ignoring me or sending letters to my various aliases asking that said aliases cease and desist. (I comply—hence the aliases.)

Equal pay for equal performance is great. But. The equal performance evidently amounts to getting eliminated in the Round of 16. That can’t be what we’re about.