Joe Biden Receives Custom U.S. Women’s Soccer Jersey

Joe Biden
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Daniel Leberfeld

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is running for President, received a custom jersey from the World Cup champion U.S. Women’s National Team.

He posed with the jersey on Twitter, along with a message thanking the team for the gift and praising the women’s team for their “talent, heart, and advocacy for equal pay (which) represents the best of America and serves as an inspiration for all.”

The women’s team, which won the World Cup on Sunday with a win over Holland, is pushing for equal pay with the U.S. Men’s National Team.

And based on this tweet, clearly Biden is an advocate for the Women’s World Cup players getting equal pay.

The challenge will be monetizing the mission for soccer egalitarianism.

The Women’s World Cup doesn’t come close to the revenue and TV ratings of the Men’s World Cup.

The last Men’s World Cup in 2018 brought in around $6 billion, and the 2015 Women’s World Cup around $73 million, so this contributes to the pay gap. And the women’s teams actually get a higher percentage of the revenue than the men’s teams. The men get 9 percent and the women receive 13 percent.

To pay the women the same as the men, the women would likely exceed the revenue stream of the tournament.

But nonetheless, women’s players like U.S. star Megan Rapinoe are calling for equal pay.

And have support from numerous politicians including Presidential candidates Biden, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

Warren tweeted, “They bring home the ratings, the revenue, and the wins. But even if they didn’t, the players of the @USWNT deserve equal pay.”

“This also has to be a moment we finally break through on pay equity, and this country’s lagging far behind” De Blasio said on CNN. “The fact that our women are paid so much less than men, they’re champions, they bring in a huge amount of revenue for U.S. Soccer. So let me say, it’s time to change that. I’ll tell you what I would do, and you know, I’m running for president. If I were president of the United States, I would insist that Congress pass an amendment to the Amateur Sports Act requiring — requiring equal pay for men and women in all of our national sports teams.”

New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went even further, and tweeted women should be paid more than men.

“At this point we shouldn’t even be asking for #EqualPay for the #USWMNT — we should demand they be paid at least twice as much,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

What is President Donald J. Trump’s position on this issue?”

“I think a lot of it also has to do with the economics,” Trump said to The Hill. “I mean who draws more, where is the money coming in. I know that when you have the great stars like [Portugal’s Cristiano] Ronaldo and some of these stars that get paid a lot of money, but they draw hundreds of thousands of people. But I haven’t taken a position on that at all. I’d have to look at it.”

It’s well-documented, Rapinoe isn’t a fan of the President, and said she’s not going to the “F-in White House” to be honored by Trump.

But she’s clearly a fan of Biden who supports her mission to get women soccer players paid equally.

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