It’s Wednesday Evening, July 15th, 2015. We’re now 10 days removed from the exhilarating finale of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup, where the United States Women took a mere 16 minutes to dispatch 16 years of World Cup demons. Regardless of your feelings on soccer, it’s impossible to argue that the US Women’s National Team, and all of the participants in the Women’s World Cup are supremely talented. And even if, for United States fans, the group stage and preliminary knockout rounds may not have been as exciting as was desired, the semi-finals, third place game, and the finale were loaded with excitement.
In the days subsequent to the final, social media musings began to be heard about the discrepancy between the prize money that would be received by the United States team for winning the 2015 Cup, and the prize money awarded to the 2014 World Cup Champions, Germany. The prize money awarded to the 2015 German team amounted to $32 million, while the 2015 US Women were allocated only $2 Million. As another data point, the US Men, who lost in the round of 16 in 2014, were awarded $8 million. Now, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced a resolution along the same lines. Don”t the American people pay this guy’s salary? Or at least Vermontonians? Aren’t there better things he can do with his time?
For a moment, let’s assume that FIFA is a well-run, upstanding business, and neglect the fact that the majority of it’s administrators are currently under indictment for corruption by the Swiss and United States governments. For the purposes of this discussion, the alleged corruption is irrelevant. We also must assume that the accounting in the FIFA financial reports over the past 4 years are accurate. The latter assumption might be a bit more of a stretch with what we currently know about the administration. At the very least, these financials give us a starting point for a discussion. Since the numbers aren’t yet available for the 2015 Women’s World Cup, we’ll use the 2011 WWC as a point of reference, keeping in mind that the 2015 should clearly exceed it in terms of revenue, attendance, and possibly viewership and popularity due to the competitiveness of the United States team and the fact that 6 of the 7 US games were essentially home games.
In the period from 2011-2014 FIFA’s total revenue was just over 5.7 billion US dollars. 90% of that revenue was event related, with the largest event, and the only one singularly identified being the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Over 70% of the entire revenue generated by FIFA over the four years came directly from marketing and television rights for the 2014. The total revenue from ALL OTHER FIFA events in the same period is a paltry 105 million, which represents just over 2% of the total FIFA revenue. For simplicity, let’s assume that the entire 105 million was due to the 2011 Women’s World Cup. Consider the ratio of compensation to the champion in comparison to the revenue generated by the overall event. For the 2014 World cup, the first place compensation is just under .8% of overall revenue from the event. For the 2011 Women’s World cup, assuming the same compensation as this year, the radio is 1.9%. This is more than double the figure for the men. So for each dollar that the Women’s world cup earns, their champions get over twice as much compensation as the men do.
Additionally, this is clearly NOT a valid case for an equal pay for equal work issue. These are NOT the same jobs. There is no rule in FIFA, or any other traditionally male sport that prevents a female from competing directly with the men if they are talented enough, Danica Patrick doesn’t have this issue. If Carli Lloyd or Alex Morgan want to try out for Juergen Klinsmann’s squad, there is nothing to prevent that,. And if they’re talented enough to make the team, Klinsmann would be foolish not to take them. There is however, a rule that prevents a male from potentially playing on the Women’s national team. You can’t argue equal pay for equal work if you’re limiting the population of those who can attain these jobs.
Finally, shouldn’t sports be the last frontier where we have congressmen stepping in to fight for compensation equality? There are women who are underpaid in so many traditional jobs. Women who are trying to support families, and getting compensated like a male doing the same job would change both theirs and their kid’s lives. Leahy is focusing on getting 22 women who already make a comfortable middle class living compensated like the men for a job that occurs every 4 years, while he neglects the fact that there are tens of thousands of women, working multiple jobs day and night in order to make ends meet and put food on the table for their kids. In the case of a female CEO or a female fast food employee, there is no separation of competition. A female CEO doesn’t only compete against other female CEOs. Men and women compete directly every day in almost every job. Why all this fuss about income equality in a market where they don’t?
—–just my beef