The U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) drew on the largely bipartisan support of most of the country in their quest to achieve World Cup glory. However, the team’s other major goal, equal pay with the U.S. Men’s National Team, is getting support from groups affiliated with those most commonly known for supporting political causes.
The George Soros-funded liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, has launched a petition seeking equal pay between the U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Teams. According the Guardian, USWNT players can only receive a maximum payout of $260,869 for advancing to and winning the World CUp. Meanwhile. a player for the men’s squad can earn $1,114,429 for doing the same.
To date, the women’s team has won four World Cup championships, while the men have never won.
Though, the reasoning for that pay disparity has a lot less to do with gender discrimination and a lot more to do with simple economics.
As Mike Oznian reported in Forbes:
As Dwight Jaynes pointed out four years ago after the U.S. women beat Japanto capture the World Cup in Vancouver, there is a big difference in the revenue available to pay the teams. The Women’s World Cup brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players.
The men still pull the World Cup money wagon. The men’s World Cup in Russia generated over $6 billion in revenue, with the participating teams sharing $400 million, less than 7% of revenue. Meanwhile, the Women’s World Cup is expected to earn $131 million for the full four-year cycle 2019-22 and dole out $30 million to the participating teams.
In other words, the women’s payout will be more than 20 percent of total revenues during the 2019-2022 window, more than three times that of the men.
So, while the USWNT has earned more money than the men’s side — $50.8 million opposed to $49.9 million from 2016 -2018 — the difference in payout has a lot more to do with the wide disparity between how much the two World Cups make. The fact that the USWNT has earned only $900,000 more while being vastly more successful than the men’s side, only reinforces the point about how much more popular the men’s game is.
The MoveOn.org petition seeks 75,000 signatures. As of the time of this writing, the petition had earned 61,433 signatures.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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