Nothing and Everything Has Changed for the USWNT
Twenty years after Brandi Chastain and the ’99 squad lifted the World Cup trophy, the women’s team has grown more famous and successful than their male counterparts—yet their battle for equal pay continuesNothing and Everything Has Changed for the USWNT
Twenty years after Brandi Chastain and the ’99 squad lifted the World Cup trophy, the women’s team has grown more famous and successful than their male counterparts—yet their battle for equal pay continues
The story never gets old. In the 1999 World Cup final, Brandi Chastain lined up the ball at the Rose Bowl for the decisive penalty kick in a tense shoot-out against China after receiving a peculiar instruction from U.S. women’s national team head coach Tony DiCicco: use your weak foot. With her left boot, Chastain blasted the ball to the top-right corner of the net, well beyond the reach of diving Chinese keeper Gao Hong, sealing the win for the USWNT in a watershed moment not only for the team, but also for women’s sports in the United States.
In the more immediate aftermath, Chastain tore off her shirt and fell to her knees in her black Nike sports bra before her teammates mobbed her, as Pasadena’s cheers grew deafening.
It’s a thousand-word image that radiates jubilance: hers, her team’s, her country’s, her sport’s. But it’s also an image we likely never would have sensationalized were Chastain not a woman, for whom taking off a shirt is a radical act. Days after the match, The Washington Post ran a story cheekily headlined, “Chastain Lifts Sports Apparel Market,” in which Chastain denied that she choreographed the moment to showcase her bra on Nike’s behalf. The article continued:
But whether spontaneous ebullience or planned product placement, the star’s move has exposed, in addition to her rippling abs, a whole set of issues related to female athletes and body image and earning power. And it has brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and practical – not a traditional bra of shine and lace and cleavage, but a sturdy compression garment. The sports bra is the cloth symbol of Title IX’s success.
That’s a lot of significance resting on one woman’s chest. At the time, the Post noted, only about a dozen women athletes even had “significant” endorsement contracts (ranging from a mere $75,000 to $350,000), which partially explains the to-do over a single garment.
Twenty years later, so much and so little has changed. There are many more than 12 considerably famous female athletes, many of whom play for the USWNT. And yet, for all the symbolic progress and abstract fame, the gender inequality issues that plagued the ’99 squad persist. On Tuesday, they’ll begin the defense of their 2015 World Cup title against Thailand in France, seeking a record fourth trophy. But just three months ago, the U.S. women’s soccer players found themselves in a familiar position off the pitch: fighting. All eyes were on them because of their pay, not their play. On International Women’s Day, 28 players signed onto a lawsuit against their governing body, the U.S. Soccer Federation, for institutionalized gender discrimination. They’re asking to be paid equally to their male counterparts, a longtime point of contention.
“It’s 2019. Why are we talking about this? It should be equality,” Chastain tells The Ringer. “It’s such a foregone conclusion that yes, men and women doing the same job should be paid the same amount.”
The USWNT itself hasn’t necessarily changed; the squad has always featured players who are hard-working, outspoken, and aggressively fun-loving. Rather, it’s that there’s more—and more thoughtful—commentary and coverage to consume about the team’s triumphs and tribulations both on and off the pitch. In 1999, there was no espnW site; no beat writer assigned to cover the USWNT and women’s pro soccer. There were thousands and thousands of fans in the U.S. with few mainstream avenues to regularly access substantive information about the squad.
What’s changed is how the country sees the USWNT. People finally not only know they exist and can name individual players, but also see a clearer picture of each individual woman’s soccer chops, activist work, and personality quirks. So the USWNT is more famous than ever—but that doesn’t mean they’re now actually getting paid anything near what they’re worth.
The players should already have an airtight case for equal pay without this résumé, but they’re the winningest team in the sport and are more successful on bigger stages than their male counterparts, who missed last year’s World Cup entirely. And “success” isn’t just defined by the women’s record three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals: In 2016, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint noted, the women brought in nearly $20 million more in revenue than the men the previous year but earned a quarter of their pay. Also, according to the latest lawsuit, were a woman to play in and win 20 national team games in a year, she’d net $99,000, 38 percent of the $263,320 a man would earn in bonuses for the same feat. And, as European club salaries for women continue to rise, as Andrew Helms pointed out for The Ringer, elite U.S. talent will essentially be forced to remain in the NWSL and potentially earn lower wages to maintain the right to play for USWNT, where they earn a fraction of their value.
Other issues on the table in the lawsuit include equal playing and travel conditions, promotion, and development. For example, women often play on artificial turf, which is considered less safe, while the men do not; women say the men get chartered flights more often, while women fly commercial. In May, U.S. Soccer denied discrimination. The USWNT players responded simply to U.S. Soccer’s denial: “We look forward to a trial next year after the World Cup.” (U.S. Soccer did not respond to a Ringer request for comment.)
It’s 2019. Why are we talking about this? It should be equality.Brandi Chastain
“I really hope U.S. Soccer comes to the table with them and is honest and open and legitimately has talks, not just ‘Well, let’s placate them until after the World Cup and then forget about it,’” says Briana Scurry, the decorated U.S. goalkeeper who guarded the net in ’99. It’d be about time to come to the table: The women’s labor rights issues are far from new. This iteration of their public fight dates back to 2016, when five players—then-keeper Hope Solo, an outspoken activist, plus four other starters, Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, and Becky Sauerbrunn—filed the EEOC complaint. But the overarching inequality dates back as far as the 1985 formation of the team itself. In 1988, in the first FIFA women’s soccer tournament, the U.S. wore the men’s hand-me-down kits. Due to a dispute over low pay in a new contract they were offered for the following year, nine prominent players, including Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Scurry, boycotted training before the 1996 Olympics. Then, in the aftermath of their unforgettable ’99 World Cup win, all 20 members of the winning squad boycotted the January 2000 Australia Cup after being offered just $6,300 per player and no per-game bonuses for a couple of months of friendlies. That’s all to say nothing of the ongoing, arduous battle for maternity leave and child care.
On top of all that, players in the ’90s sometimes had to alert the public to their very existence—and this was before social media allowed them to broadcast themselves and their concerns online. “We would show up to the city about four days, five days before [a match],” says Mia Hamm, a two-time FIFA World Player of the Year who ranks third on the USWNT all-time list for caps and second in goals scored. “Pretty much the marketing that was put into place was with local clubs. We would go on radio and television and tell people we were playing a game in four or five days. People would be like, ‘We didn’t even know you guys were coming.’”
In an effort to raise awareness of the team’s brand, the late DiCicco and longtime former USWNT mental skills coach Colleen Hacker fostered an environment that prioritized activism, allowing players to decide how they wanted to juggle their responsibilities. So Chastain’s appearance on Letterman or Hamm’s attending the dedication of a building in her name on Nike’s campus had had the same goal: up media coverage of women’s soccer, draw people to games, and secure treatment equal to that of male soccer players. (The men were, Foudy says, totally supportive of the women’s fight.)
With limited resources but much support from their coaches, the ’99ers fought hard for the support they knew they deserved—and still do deserve. “Where now, one tweet can get retweeted tens of thousands of times and accomplish at the speed of light, these guys at that moment did it one appearance at a time, and they did it over and over,” Hacker says. “They were the retweet.”
There’s an old, grating dichotomy in the sport, and most sports: There’s soccer, and then there’s women’s soccer. This applies to everything from club football to the international game, and it also applies to what happens off the pitch. Men, it seems, are awarded the freedom to be who they want to be, to stand for something or for nothing at all. Men have personalities; women have platforms.
Reading Gemma Clarke’s recently published SoccerWomen, which profiles famous soccer players from the 1890s through today, it’s easy to see a clear transition in the slant of the bios: Naturally, a host of ’99ers have chapters, which zero in on their advocacy efforts. But later on, increasingly, players are granted personality-driven writeups, with notes on their practice antics and social media presences. “I just think with social media today you have much more access,” says Julie “Loudy” Foudy, self-appointed goofball and prankster of the ’99 team. “Even if you’re not necessarily watching games, you’re following that athlete, you can find out more about who she is and what she stands for.”
We’re increasingly seeing the players for who they’ve always been. The ’99 World Cup–winning, Hamm-starring team eventually gave way to a bridge generation of sorts, featuring star forward Abby Wambach and then names like Rapinoe and Ali Krieger, and now the younger cohort, who are well-known off the pitch too. The current stars, just like the past ones, are distinct, fun, and engaging—everyone from players like Mallory Pugh and Rose Lavelle up through the older guard, led by Rapinoe, the veteran fireball winger with 44 international goals who was instrumental in the 2015 World Cup win. “I think they’re fun and goofy,” Clarke says. “I think that’s one of the good things about social media is they can connect with fans and build their presence and build icon status that way.”
It’s tough to focus on crafting celebrity image when you’re caught up in trying to show people that your team even exists.
The old guard of the current USWNT has set a strong example for the younger generations, and no one more than Rapinoe, 33. I asked four current and former players about public image, and all four—including Hamm and Foudy—mention her. There’s a corn maze of her face. Her image plasters the largest of several World Cup–hyping billboards clustered on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. She graces a Nike commercial, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and a “Body Issue” featuring her and her famous girlfriend, WNBA great Sue Bird. She’s also helped spearhead the USWNT equal pay battle since 2016. “I feel like I’m a walking protest,” Rapinoe recently told Yahoo Sports, which called her “the most courageous, open-minded social justice warrior American soccer has ever known.” It’s activism coupled with playfulness to boost her platform.
The shift toward more visible athlete activism ties into a broader cultural moment. “Athlete activism is sort of taking more of a front stage,” says Nicole LaVoi, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. “We have Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, and you see athlete activism sort of front and center because of Colin Kaepernick. It’s now becoming a little bit easier for athletes to be activists.” Paradoxically, although Kaepernick was forced to sacrifice his own career for his cause, activism has been normalized enough that it can often comfortably exist alongside other key characteristics of an athlete’s brand. Players like Rapinoe, the first white athlete to kneel in solidarity with Kaepernick, are encouraged to stand for something—when they’re not being scolded to “stick to sports,” at least—and it’s now easier than ever to stand for something without that defining their identity in the public imagination.
Leaning into celebrity is a premeditated choice on Krieger’s part. “Football doesn’t define me,” says the 34-year-old right back who just notched her 100th cap. Krieger’s engagement to teammate Ashlyn Harris this spring was reported by the likes of People, New York magazine, and more. “I have an excellent life outside of soccer and I have other things that I want to do with my life. I also understand that I have a platform to really help change the way people think about football.” It’s a level of responsibility she now considers ordinary.
Pugh, a vibrant forward likely to provide energy off the bench in France, has her own Teen Vogue profile at 21, with rumors of a book on the way. The youngest player to debut for USWNT since Heather O’Reilly in 2002, she’s known by her teammates for singing loudly and often. She and her friends on the team “speak in Vines,” she says. Lavelle, a 24-year-old midfielder entering her first World Cup, brings the same lightheartedness to her online brand—and even that of her bulldog, Wilma Jean Wrinkles. It’s a far cry in appearance from the ’99ers, who had their fun all the same when Pugh was an infant, but never with so much public attention or approval. It’s tough to focus on crafting celebrity image when you’re caught up in trying to show people that your team even exists.
The ’99ers were neither the first nor the last among female athletes in the fight for recognition as legitimate athletes owed fair pay. See: WNBA players, along with legends like Billie Jean King, who herself advised the soccer players. In turn, the ’99ers have personally supported U.S. women’s hockey in their own equal pay fight. None of those athletes are household names on the level of Hamm or Rapinoe—but maybe one day they too will be allotted freedom to be themselves and still be treated fairly and taken seriously on and off the ice.
Even if USWNT does complete their quest for equal pay, as their Norwegian counterparts have, their causes for activism won’t just disappear (just as their Norwegian counterparts’ haven’t). Many players still push for greater access to the sport for kids of all races and socioeconomic classes, among other things. Despite this constant, aggressive push in women’s soccer, media coverage of women’s sports either dropped or, at best, held steady in some outlets from 1999 to 2014, according to a 2015 study in Communication & Sport. As much progress as ’99ers made off the pitch, the struggle for equal rights was only just beginning.
On the club level, the NWSL—the third such domestic league since ’99—is still rife with issues; Sky Blue FC famously doesn’t even have showers in their locker rooms, at least as of last season. And although promotion and branding beyond the players’ own efforts have come a long way since ’99, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “Ad time, connecting with the community, getting players to call into radio stations beyond TV, researching what’s the best outside the players putting on their Facebook, Twitter account,” says Hamm, rattling off opportunities she wished the team’s governing body supplied more consistently. “You have to invest the time and the resources to build the product, to build the excitement.” But their concerns coexist in the public imagination alongside Teen Vogue–worthy moments and, oh yeah, an unrivaled on-field track record.
“These women get to wake up knowing that women’s soccer exists,” Chastain says, reflecting on the new generation. “Their fight is now a next-level fight because ours was just, ‘Can we build the platform? We’re gonna put the seed in, we’re gonna pour the water.’ And now all of a sudden you see the fruit come out from that lid.” You can, indeed, and it’s more colorful than ever before—hopefully the money follows.