A federal judge’s rejection of the players’ equal pay claims cost the team their leverage, but it is in the federation’s interests to find a settlement both sides can embrace.
After a federal judge dismissed the equal pay claims of the World Cup-winning women’s national team on Friday night, it was not the words in the United States Soccer Federation’s response that stuck out. It was the ones that weren’t there.
Nowhere in its two-sentence statement did U. S. Soccer say it was happy with the decision.
The federation, which the women’s national team began battling legally four years ago, had every reason to celebrate, of course. After a protracted fight that had pummeled the federation’s reputation, embarrassed its leaders, angered its sponsors and threatened its financial future, the judge’s ruling granting summary judgment in its favor in relation to equal pay arguments was not a mere triumph over the players. It was a devastating rejection of the core argument of the women’s case.
For years, the players have argued that they are paid less than their counterparts on the men’s national team. Over and over, they made the case that they deserved equal pay. They repeated that rallying cry in hashtags and on T-shirts and in news conferences, and they heard their fans chant it at friendly matches, World Cup finals and victory parades.
And then in one crushing paragraph in Friday’s ruling, the judge in their lawsuit, R. Gary Klausner of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, told them they were wrong.
Not only had U. S. Soccer not paid the players less than the men, Judge Klausner wrote, it had convinced him that “the WNT has been paid more on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis than the MNT” over the years covered in the case. The evidence the players’ lawyers presented to counter the federation’s math, he concluded, “is insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact for trial.”
In effect, he said, they could never win.
