Equal pay for women’s soccer teams

“We believe that fighting for gender equality in sports is a part of that responsibility. As players, we deserved to be paid equally for our work, regardless of our gender,” female soccer player Alex Morgan said to The Associated Press.

In today’s society, we have the constant problem of unfair pay for women’s soccer teams. The women’s and men’s USA national soccer teams have the same amount of training and play the same number of games. It is expected that if two people do the same work, they will get paid the same amount of money, but this is not the case for the women’s soccer team. The wage gap between men and women is tremendous and not much is being done to get this fixed.

Soccer teams, or any sports team should be paid by how good their stats and wins are compared to other teams. Unfortunately for the women’s national USA team, because of the gender and according to The Frederick News Post they rarely get paid 20% of the salary that the US national men’s soccer team receives. Why should their gender continue to determine how much their wage is when it is clear that they are far better than the USA national men’s soccer team?

In the 2018 Men’s World Cup hosted by Russia, the USA men’s soccer team did not even qualify to enter. Yet the men’s pay continues to be higher than the women. On the other hand, the women’s national USA team who have been champions 3 times before, highly qualified for the World Cup that was hosted this year in France. Not only did the women’s team make it into the World Cup, but they won every single game they played in this tournament until they became the World Champions. Despite this tremendous victory for the women, their salaries are going to stay the same. After so much work and so many victories the women only won a title and trophy. 

The gender discrimination continues to grow. There was a $34 million difference between women’s and men’s World Championship prize. The men’s National French soccer team, received $38 million to divide amongst each other for winning the 2018 World Cup hosted in Russia. The men also take a minimum $8 million per team for only participating in the World Cup, with no games or goals scored. Meanwhile the US Women’s National soccer team who won, only received $4 million as the total prize to divide amongst themselves as well as $3,000 minimum per team for participating in the tournament according to Fox Business. NBC’s reporter Claire Atkinson states, “The match drew 22 percent more viewers than the men’s World Cup final played between France and Croatia last year.”

As it is constantly proven, there needs to be something done for the women’s soccer team wage. It is not right that some women’s teams such as the USA, are far better than most men’s teams, and yet get paid less than the worst qualified men teams that were in the Men’s 2018 World Cup. We need to put a stop to gender discrimination and fight for equal rights, which is what we all deserve. 

There are some changes being made but we should try and do more. The time has come to genuinely reward the women soccer players for all their hard work.