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

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.

The players — a group that includes stars like Carli Lloyd, Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan but also reserve players — have requested class action status. They are seeking to represent any current or former players who have represented the women’s national team since Feb. 4, 2015 — a cohort that could grow to include dozens more players — and are requesting back pay and damages and other relief: a potential award that could reach into the millions of dollars.

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.

Still, the American women have made significant gains at the negotiating table in recent years. In 2017, after more than a year of acrimonious negotiations and a lawsuit by U.S. Soccer that blocked a potential players strike on the eve of the Rio Olympics, the team forged a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer. The players opted to surrender on their push for absolutely equal pay, though, in exchange for a deal that included not only better compensation and changes to working conditions but also carveouts that now allow the players to pursue commercial opportunities through their union.

Their effort has been part of a broader fight for equality in women’s sports, a discussion in which the American players have emerged as leaders. They also have become a resource to athletes in other sports and others countries seeking similar gains: players from other soccer federations and even sports like the W.N.B.A. regularly reach out to members of the American team for advice, and guidance, as did the gold-medal-winning United States Olympic hockey team when it was embroiled in a pay dispute with its governing body before the 2018 Winter Olympics.

For decades, U.S. Soccer has been a leader in its support for women’s soccer; its investment of time and resources has made the United States, a three-time world champion and four-time Olympic gold medalist, the dominant power in the women’s game. But throughout that same period, generations of women’s national team players have complained that the federation’s financial support and logistical infrastructure has lagged behind that of the more high-profile men’s national team.

Those grievances have never been far from the surface; an earlier generation of top women’s players angry about their pay boycotted a tournament in Australia in January 2000, only months after a World Cup victory had made them the toast of American sports. They burst into the open more recently, however, as an increasingly emboldened and activist women’s team took on U.S. Soccer and FIFA over everything from artificial turf fields to World Cup bonus payments to refereeing standards.

But improvements have not resolved the fundamental issues of gender equity to the American players’ satisfaction, and with the three-year-old E.E.O.C. complaint going nowhere and a C.B.A. that does not come up for renewal until the end of 2021, the team will try its luck in federal court instead.

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