Comparing our Federation to a European federation doesn't really make sense; European/South American Feds aren't used or needed in the same capacity. Our Federation has been needed to grow the sport and support players financially. It is the backbone of soccer in US. This is not the role of the Federation in European countries or South America, where leagues have long been established, with their own development programs, tons of money and influence. The leagues and individual teams within the professional leagues are bigger than each Fed. European Feds do not work in the same capacity. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
I believe that the FA's precise mission is "to grow the game at all levels". What evidence do you have for your assertion that this is not true?
Prove it wrong then. European leagues are more powerful and richer and have better development systems than their Federations. That is not the case in the US. The Federations have different roles. You think i'm here to make your arguments for you, I'm not.
I'm not sure this is correct for most of the continent. England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, maybe The Netherlands for sure. The rest... Debatable. Depends on the club. However, at the national team level, at least two major examples leap to mind where a prominent federation absolutely took the lead in developing success: The FA's huge program to build youth training centers through the country recently, and especially FFF's complete revamp of their system bottom-to-top culminating in their 1998 victory. I honestly don't believe they do, rhetorically or actually.
First I must apologize that I have not followed all the posts closely. But I like to make one point in that I see no reason why the US Soccer Federation should pay the USWNT less than the men. I think the women brought in more money in their matches like the victory tour than the men ever did. So what was the Federation's arguments, I wonder. Maybe we should replace the Federation President.
That has been done quite recently but like most bureaucracies the actual leaders make little difference in the day to day operations. The little bureaucrats keep shuffling their papers in exactly the same way no matter who leads. The USSF is a lot like a "Water Monopoly Empire" for soccer in the US in that it will not change but rather simply rot from the inside and the only way to really change it is to replace it and that is not going to happen. There are currently no external forces that could topple the USSF empire and the internal ones are too weak.
Define less. The USWNT get job security,salary,club salary, benefits, pension, etc. with a lower fee per appearance. The USMNT get a higher appearance fee but none of the other guarantees. The women have fought hard for the contracted system. I suggest you find the work Beau Dure has done on this subject. Your first sentence is not true. The USWNT overwhelmingly supported the new President. Hope Solo claimed it's because the contract system, which these women have fought so hard for, would stay in place.
Not gonna spoon feed you. You're a big boy/girl. Do some reading. Incorporate both sides of the argument. Most importantly, check out Beau Dure's work.
Also not considered in the layman's "equal pay" shouts is that each male player, including the stars, does not appear in every men's game due to club commitments, which pays their primary salaries and are not compelled to release them to their national teams unless it's on FIFA dates. Therefore, Christian Pulisic doesn't max out on USA men's appearance fees. The opposite is true for the women, i.e., the US national team takes precedence over their NWSL teams. Therefore, the top women's players collect nearly 100 percent of the available appearance fees. Moreover, the top women receive a salary plus appearance fees, plus health benefits, since USWNT is their main team.
It's not even necessarily club commitments. Exactly because of the lack of W-2 employees on the USMNT side, the organization is able to call in a variety of players for any of a number of reasons, only one of which could be club commitments (which is mooted when it's inside a FIFA window).
True. Women are mostly W-2 employees, and men are not. Oops, I've already gone over the heads over most "equal pay!" Fans. Throw in many other differences, such as more qualifiers for men, Olympics plus qualifiers for women, and tougher competition level for men. E.G., is it prudent to give equal bonuses for advancing through and winning a world cup, when you are trying to do it as an incentive for the men in a difficult field, while at the same time those bonuses are much more easily attainable for the women and very likely to be paid out? Or consider the Olympics. Obviously there should be a bonus if the women win, but the men's senior team doesn't compete for that, so how do you compare equal pay? Of course these bonuses need to be on equal grounds. But they also need to be realistic within what the non-profit US Soccer, which is trying to promote the game on all levels, can realistically pay out. Then you throw in the argument of FIFA revenues, which are a large pct of US Soccer rev and vastly comes from the men's side. Of course the "equal pay!" shouters say that shouldn't count, but they don't consider that the USWNT wouldn't be able to stand alone as it's own entity. That FIFA money is vital to the whole program's existence.
Also throw in the fact that the women's players union signed a collective bargaining agreement in April 2017, to last four years, that set the terms of their pay, and US Soccer claims the women opted for a salary structure over a more bonus-based structure like the men. It's hard for me to believe a court is going to go against an existing agreed-to CBA, which would set a precedent for all sports CBAs, unless they can prove willful and purposeful attempt by US Soccer to suppress salaries, or they get an extremely feminist jury.
Does anyone have figures on the total cost of the economic package that goes to all the men involved in NT camps/call ups/play and to all the women involved in NT camps/call ups/play?
I don't know. Similar numbers of players get called in for each camp. The number of players over the course of a year is obviously very different, whether or not you have been convinced of that particular fact yet. The guaranteed compensation (TOTAL compensation - which includes all the bennies) really throws a wrench in the calculations. I am relatively certain that a momentary flash point back in the previous iteration of this was that USMNT players get flown to camp in business class whereas USWNT players primarily fly coach. Of course I'm not sure when it was dropped as a serious complaint, but upon even rudimentary examination, the differences can be explained by the fact that almost no USWNT players are being brought in from abroad, whereas a number may be coming for the USMNT. Whether or not (or how often) they fly on USSF's dime in business class is not known (to me). Coupling that with the fact that there is almost never any business class cabin on internal US flights, and that the first class cabin on the overwhelming number of flights is...underwhelming...if it exists at all, and it was a really weird episode that sort of disappeared. Not sure what else other than training facility rental we can come up with.
https://www.ussoccer.com/governance/financial-information Note 11, document-page 23 of the 2018 Audited Financial Statements. I think that might be what you're after. And as long as you're there, scroll down to the charts on document-pages 26 & 27. Unless I'm misreading, it appears that neither of the national teams (Men's or Women's) generate sufficient direct revenues to cover their operating expenses. A bit-of-a-wrench in the "revenues argument" being bandied by both sides.
Why would the fact that both teams operate at a loss (which, as I believe Dure shows in his analysis is more regularly the case on the USWNT side) have anything to do with revenue-based compensation?
It shouldn't. But one of the new USWNT arguments is that they recently outearned the men. The fact that they cherry-picked years in which the men practically went into hiding after not qualifying for the WC doesn't matter, but this is their argument. Anyway, US Soccer is a nonprofit. It's trying to promote the game in this country. And it's key revenue comes from FIFA world cups, and the tickets and TV from hosting the Copa America. Not a friendly in Nashville.
Thanks. I'm not a CPA, so it's a little hard to decipher exactly what the categories and numbers mean. Once think I can see, though, is that the numbers for the men and women changed quite a bit between 2017 and 2018. It makes me wonder what they would be averaged out over a longer time period, or even better what historic trend lines would show the relationship between the men's and women's expenses to be. I also note that coaching expenses are a separate line item and are not broken out between the men's and women's teams. If looks like for 2018 the women's team expenses were greater than for the men's team, even including the NWSL charge as applying to the women (I suspect the NWSL charge number is an allocation of USSF office expenses to the NWSL for the management functions the NWSL performs ... but there's also an indication that the USSF gets expense reimbursements from the NWSL so I don't know whether it's really right to include those numbers as women's team expenses). It also looks like for 2017 the men's team expenses were greater than for the women's team. Over the two years, it looks like the men's team expenses were greater than the women's, by a significant but not enormous amount. I'm assuming that the men's and women's team expenses include their compensation packages (both direct pay and benefits), but also may include some other expenses. On whether they include other expenses, it's hard to tell since some or all of them might be included in other line items. Maybe, if I have time, I'll go back over the earlier financial statements to track the evolution of the two teams' expenses to see what that shows. Since there seems to be significant variability from year to year, perhaps related to where the two teams are and how successful they are in their respective World Cup cycles, looking at the longer term might give a better picture of how much money the USSF in general is putting into women's and men's team expenses. Then, if we assume that these expenses are mostly, or entirely, the value of the teams' compensation packages, we would have a good basis for evaluating whether the entire pay packages are equal or not (while recognizing that the amounts of the pay packages may be spread over different numbers of players).
Pretty sure Beau Dure did what he could with this already. Are people allergic to Beau Dure or something?