At its heart, the question the USWNT was asking was simple: Does U.S. Soccer value its women players equally to the men? But, if you wanted to make it more complicated, you could go back to '99. On the heels of a second World Cup title, players like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, and Chastain were wondering if their side’s total dominance in the tournament and crowd-drawing theatrics might entitle them to basic needs as professional athletes.
“We weren't even asking back then for equal pay,” former USWNT player, National Hall of Famer, and WBD sports analyst Julie Foudy tells UPROXX. “We were asking for equitable treatment, support, and funding. It was, ‘How are you investing in the women's side of the game because that's your obligation as a federation?’”
The turnout proved the audience was there.
“For so long, you tell them there's all this potential you're not tapping into,” Foudy says. “'99 was so big because it showed what was possible. That was the power of that moment. It gave us a ton of leverage for what the next contract looked like, what the next ask was, what we wanted the future of our sport to look like in our country.”
Their asks weren’t outrageous. Daycare for moms on the team to travel with their young children. A livable wage. More games on the schedule. More money spent marketing those games so they could avoid bussing into town, grabbing a post-game bite at a diner, and having the locals wonder why they were there. But the process was grueling, the negotiations sometimes dehumanizing.
“You get you a little and then you're fighting for something else, you get a little and then you're fighting for something else. And then sometimes you go back a couple steps, and that's where it's so punishing,” former USWNT player, Hall of Famer, and WBD sports analyst Shannon Boxx tells UPROXX. “We were like, ‘We’re playing well. We're winning. What else can we do?”
"99 was so big because it showed what was possible. That was the power of that moment. It gave us a ton of leverage for what the next ask was, what we wanted the future of our sport to look like in our country"
It's easy to celebrate the wins in women’s sports – the trophies raised and ticker-tape parades, the sold-out crowds and magazine covers – but it’s more important to remember the hard work that led there. The grit, the resolve, the unyielding belief that things will get better. It's what fuels tired legs and broken spirits when no one’s watching. These serve as the game plan for change.
One could mark the beginning of the fight for equality in women’s soccer from the moment Brandi Chastain buried a penalty, ripped off her jersey, and raised her arms as she secured a second World Cup trophy for the USWNT in 1999. Or maybe the groundwork was laid in 1991 at the inaugural tournament which FIFA, still unsure if people would even care about women's sports, refused to call it a World Cup — the event was cumbersomely referred to as the "1st FIFA World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup." The goal scoring prowess of Michelle Akers-Stahl helped lead the U.S. Women's team to a title in China, which beget little fanfare back home.
Either way, victory in the fight for equal pay has been a long time coming. And to finally reach the end of the long road to it, fans and players would have to wait another 20 years for a star-studded dream team with unrivaled dominance in the game and the confidence to match.
On International Women’s Day in March 2019, the United States Women’s National Team announced they were suing their employers, the U.S. Soccer Federation, for discrimination. They wanted equal pay and equal treatment comparable to their male counterparts. In just a few months, they’d be off to France, set to defend the World Cup. They now have four while the men’s side has none. It was a bold, never-been-done-in-the-history-of-women’s-sports move, a career-risking one that would set off a firestorm in the wider world of sports.
BY: Jessica toomer
WRITER
“Billie Jean King used to say to us, ‘What do you want?’” Foudy remembers. “'You have to imagine there's a blank canvas in front of you. What do you want for the next generation? What do you want their world and life to look like? It's not about you. You're not going to reap the rewards of this. What do you want to leave for them?’"
So much of the work female athletes do, especially at the national level, will never benefit them. To see change in their lifetime is rare. But, they do it anyway.
“When you play for the national team, you're playing for your country. You're playing for the game, to grow the game. There's always this legacy,” Boxx says.
That forward-thinking mentality is what helped the current USWNT find success, on the field and off. When USWNT players signed the hard-earned CBA on the field after a 2-1 win over Nigeria in September 2022, they weren’t just surrounded by members of Congress, U.S. Soccer representatives, and their teammates. Lilly and Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper in 1999, were there with them, proving this had been generations in the making.
“I think the secret to our success is, as the older generation was aging out, you always made sure you had younger players in the meetings, listening,” Foudy explains. “So, we'd bring Abby [Wambach] into meetings, we'd bring younger kids in so that they were hearing and seeing the process -- these are some of the things we're fighting for, this is why this matters so that when the older veterans step away, you have this younger group that could take that baton and keep sprinting.”
Rapinoe acknowledged that hard work, telling the crowd of reporters, “We wouldn’t be here without all the players that came before. It feels like a very full circle moment.”
The CBA could be seen as a tidy bow wrapping up a decades-long fight that’s had a rollercoaster’s share of ups and downs, inspiring sparks of progress and nasty setbacks. It ensures that for the first time, true pay equity has been achieved in the sport on a national level. The men’s and women’s sides will receive equal appearance fees and match bonuses, equal revenue from ticket sales and merchandise, equal playing conditions, travel arrangements, training facilities, and, most notably, they’ll split their FIFA World Cup prize money equally. They are the first national teams to do something like this in the history of the sport.
If Stranger Things went on any longer than five, I would say it would be ridiculous I think the Duffer brothers figured out, I would imagine, a perfect ending in five
If this were a movie, the end credits might be scrolling right about now. But the second act of this fight for equal pay is just beginning. Other teams around the world are taking the USWNT’s blueprint and remodeling it to fit their federation’s needs.
During the 2023 SheBelieves Cup, Canada’s Women’s National Team, fresh off a gold medal at the Olympics, was forced to represent their country on the field despite plans to boycott the event in protest of unequal and unfair playing conditions and pay between their men and women’s sides. When threatened with legal action by their federation, players took the field donning purple t-shirts that read “Enough Is Enough.” After their loss to the USWNT, both sides joined together at half-field, embracing each other and standing in solidarity.
Canada’s most successful footballer regardless of gender, Christine Sinclair, credited Saubraunn, her Portland Thorns teammate, for inspiring her to enter the equal pay fight on behalf of her fellow national players. Forward Janine Beckie tweeted out a thank you to the USWNT for “fighting the fight before us.”
“I love that when Canada is going through this battle, the U.S. team is wearing purple for gender equity in solidarity,” Foudy says. “You see Japan doing it, England doing the same thing. There's a real movement where you know that you've got a global village of people behind you.”
Still, the first steps in Canada’s battle feel painfully familiar to the USWNT veteran who recently invited Sinclair on her podcast, Laughter Permitted, to give insight into the group’s campaign.
“It honestly brings back a lot of PTSD. It's all the same stuff we dealt with back in the '90s and they're dealing with it now,” Foudy says. “It irks the hell out of me. We're now 20 years beyond 1999, and you still see so many federations where the players are having to be the chief catalyst behind all of this by threatening to end their careers or not play. Why does the burden always fall on female athletes to have to move this conversation along? Why do we have to threaten to boycott or quit a team? You're seeing it in Spain, you're seeing it in France, you're seeing it all over. Why does it always fall on the player?”
Boxx, who’s served on multiple World Cup rosters, could relate to the feeling of defeat that plagued the Canadian team’s on-field play as a result of their equal pay negotiations.
“You could see it on the faces of the Canadian National Team, it just takes such a toll,” she says. “It feels like you're fighting for your life just to do something that you love, and it's not a safe space. The love of the game is there, but you can't love something so much if [it] is not loving you back.”
In early March, Canada Soccer blindsided its women’s national team by releasing details of a private bargaining agreement to the public without notifying the players ahead of time. The federation claimed it wanted to be transparent with fans and work towards equal pay for the men's and women’s sides, but the players alleged that certain terms and agreements in the released documents were never communicated to them.
Elsewhere, in Spain and France, players are suffering for speaking out, stepping away from the game because of terrible working conditions, and threatening boycotts to move the needle in terms of fair treatment before major tournaments, like the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup happening later this year.
“Breaking that cycle takes a while,” Foudy admits. “It takes women in there. It takes reminding the sports centers, ABC, ESPN, and everyone why this should be on TV. If you put it in a bigger stadium, people will come, if you promote it, they'll come. You’ve got to break this cultural mindset that doesn't wake up thinking, ‘How am I going to promote women's sports?’”
But even with the setbacks, the game is moving forward. More teams will compete in this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup than any before. Players like Rapinoe, Morgan, Mallory Swanson, and Rose Lavelle are some of the most recognized names in the sport. Europe’s women’s league is exploding, fronted by big-name clubs like Chelsea, Man United, and Barcelona investing in their women’s side. And beyond the pitch, the USWNT is inspiring other athletes in other sports to know their worth.
“I mean you talk to basketball players, you talk to other sports, they're all very aware of what's happened and what they need to be doing,” Foudy says. “I mean, our story is not new, sadly. In every sport, every female athlete across the board, whether it's team or individual, they're all fighting for the same things.”
The USWNT is used to winning. Female athletes in every sport are used to fighting. But as fans, we’re more familiar with believing that the accomplishments of women on the pitch, the court, and beyond, are equal to men. And they deserved to be paid as such.
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"We were like, ‘We’re playing well. We're winning. What else can we do?"
Twenty years later, players like Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, and Becky Sauerbrunn were asking the same thing. Their fight for equal pay on behalf of the women’s national team laid bare the hypocritical reasoning for the disparity in the sport. After filing a wage discrimination suit in 2016, the USWNT made a hard-to-argue case. Their success at the World Cup and at the Olympics, another event they've won four times to the men's zero, is undeniable. They generated more revenue than the men. They played in worse conditions but won more games than the men.
The men’s side got more money to show up for games, more money for winning games, more money when they qualify for the World Cup, and more money once they got there. Men also got five-star hotels, charter flights, marketing, training, and better fields. Put simply, men got more just for being men.
“It's crazy the work that they put in, and yet they're treated like second-class citizens,” Boxx says.
Sauerbrunn, a team captain and a main player in the fight for equal pay, echoed that sentiment when discussing the lawsuit in the press.
“A lot of it has to do with respect,” she told reporters. “We were doing the same work that the men are doing. We were playing on the same pitch, traveling, training, and playing games, usually the same amount, if not more. Why would they get paid more than us?”
Their fight would last years. They'd dump hundreds of hours into reading legal briefs and sitting for depositions and stomaching in-court setbacks. They’d grin and bear arguments made by the legal team representing their employers that stated there was “indisputable science” that female players were inferior to men, even as they hoisted trophies and battled jetlag to win tournaments and built a love for the game in a country that had little investment in soccer before its women started winning.
When they’d ask Foudy – who served as a player’s representative and negotiated her own historic collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) back in the day – for advice, she’d recall words from another pioneer in women’s sports.
"99 was so big because it showed what was possible. That was the power of that moment. It gave us a ton of leverage for what the next ask was, what we wanted the future of our sport to look like in our country"
“Billie Jean King used to say to us, ‘What do you want?’” Foudy remembers. “'You have to imagine there's a blank canvas in front of you. What do you want for the next generation? What do you want their world and life to look like? It's not about you. You're not going to reap the rewards of this. What do you want to leave for them?’"
So much of the work female athletes do, especially at the national level, will never benefit them. To see change in their lifetime is rare. But, they do it anyway.
“When you play for the national team, you're playing for your country. You're playing for the game, to grow the game. There's always this legacy,” Boxx says.
That forward-thinking mentality is what helped the current USWNT find success, on the field and off. When USWNT players signed the hard-earned CBA on the field after a 2-1 win over Nigeria in September 2022, they weren’t just surrounded by members of Congress, U.S. Soccer representatives, and their teammates. Lilly and Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper in 1999, were there with them, proving this had been generations in the making.
“I think the secret to our success is, as the older generation was aging out, you always made sure you had younger players in the meetings, listening,” Foudy explains. “So, we'd bring Abby [Wambach] into meetings, we'd bring younger kids in so that they were hearing and seeing the process -- these are some of the things we're fighting for, this is why this matters so that when the older veterans step away, you have this younger group that could take that baton and keep sprinting.”
Rapinoe acknowledged that hard work, telling the crowd of reporters, “We wouldn’t be here without all the players that came before. It feels like a very full circle moment.”
The CBA could be seen as a tidy bow wrapping up a decades-long fight that’s had a rollercoaster’s share of ups and downs, inspiring sparks of progress and nasty setbacks. It ensures that for the first time, true pay equity has been achieved in the sport on a national level. The men’s and women’s sides will receive equal appearance fees and match bonuses, equal revenue from ticket sales and merchandise, equal playing conditions, travel arrangements, training facilities, and, most notably, they’ll split their FIFA World Cup prize money equally. They are the first national teams to do something like this in the history of the sport.
Writer: Jessica Toomer | Design: Joe Petrolis & Jason Tabrys | Associate Editor: Bill DiFilippo | Sports Editorial Director: Martin Rickman