The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  Other small things added up. Players weren’t allowed to keep their jerseys after they played—they had to give them back to the federation, which was unusual in the world of soccer. There were no provisions that covered childcare for mothers on the team. Joy Fawcett and Carla Overbeck had children that they often took to national team camps.

  Armed with the list and the complaint of late bonus payments, Langel told U.S. Soccer they had breached their contract and the players wanted a new one. The federation disagreed and refused to budge, even as it eventually paid the overdue bonuses.

  By January, when the draw came around for the 1999 Women’s World Cup—the event the women would campaign so hard to promote—the players were still angry at U.S. Soccer. Langel threatened the federation: Mia Hamm, the star of the team, would not appear at the draw unless the federation made some concessions. The draw, which would determine the matchups for the tournament, was a major promotional event, and it would’ve been a public embarrassment if Hamm didn’t show up. The federation relented and made a deal.

  “It wasn’t a major deal, but it set the table for equivalency on some noneconomic items with the men’s team, like training tables and doctors and physical therapists and massage therapists,” Langel says. “Nothing got out to the media, and no one knew that Mia might not show up to the draw.”

  After that ordeal, the players learned not to expect U.S. Soccer to look out for them—the players felt they needed to take care of themselves. With the 1999 Women’s World Cup on the horizon, the players, with Langel’s help, set out to find ways to capitalize on the tournament.

  The inspiration for the indoor victory tour—the one advertised in the Los Angeles Times after the 1999 Women’s World Cup—came from an unlikely, tragic source.

  After the 1996 Olympics, even though the gold-medal match wasn’t aired live and most Americans didn’t see the national team win, Mia Hamm’s star power started to break through. Her sponsorship agreement with Nike blossomed into heavy-rotation ads, and she picked up other deals, including Pert Plus shampoo and Gatorade. She was named to People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” list. Everything seemed to be going right for the goal-scorer.

  But amid all that, she lost something she would’ve given all of it up for. Her 28-year-old brother, Garrett, died from an infection after a bone-marrow transplant eight months after she won the gold medal. Garrett joined Hamm’s family when she was 5 years old—her parents adopted Garrett, an 8-year-old Thai American orphan—and they grew incredibly close. As children, they played soccer together.

  Garrett was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called aplastic anemia at 16. Even when he was very sick in his final year and doctors told him there was nothing they could do to help his worsening condition, he was there in Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics to watch his sister win a gold medal, tears streaming down his face.

  “He kept telling me how proud he was of me. That meant so much to me,” Hamm later said. “It wasn’t so much that he had high standards for me, but I always looked at him as setting a standard that I could never reach. Having him say that meant the world. It meant so much to me that my family was there. It wouldn’t have been complete without Garrett. And it never will be.”

  After he died, Hamm made it her mission to honor him. She founded the Mia Hamm Foundation and launched an annual fund-raising event called the Garrett Game, where she and her teammates competed against all-stars from NCAA college teams.

  Hamm just so happened to mention the all-star game fundraiser to John Langel, and something clicked. An all-star game was the post–World Cup opportunity the national team was looking for.

  After all, the players had already asked U.S. Soccer how the federation planned to capitalize on hosting the Women’s World Cup on home soil. The answer they got back, essentially, was that the federation wasn’t really thinking about that.

  “We pressed them on it and said, Hey, what are you doing? What are the plans?” remembers Julie Foudy. “They said we were going to Africa. We were like, Africa? We need to grow the game here. Why are we going to Africa? We had never even been to Africa.”

  Yes, for some reason, U.S. Soccer president Robert Contiguglia and secretary general Hank Steinbrecher wanted to send the players on tour in South Africa and Egypt after the 1999 World Cup, when interest in the team at home would be at an all-time high. To this day, the players don’t understand what U.S. Soccer’s higher-ups were thinking.

  To say the federation lacked foresight or ambition to help the national team keep up its momentum is to put it mildly. There was no strategy to grow interest in the sport from the federation responsible for it, to say nothing of cashing in and hosting games that would sell lots of tickets. It was a strange response from the federation that only deepened the team’s mistrust of their boss.

  “They had nothing for us,” Kate Markgraf says. “They had no plan. They didn’t think the World Cup would be what it was.”

  So the players started talking through the details of a tour they could put on themselves. They agreed to hire event-marketing firm SFX, which could handle logistics of the tour. But it wasn’t done in secret behind U.S. Soccer’s back, as the federation later made it seem.

  Langel and the players sent letters to U.S. Soccer notifying the federation of their plans, but officials just ignored their messages. The team attempted again just before the Women’s World Cup to see if U.S. Soccer wanted to have anything to do with the tour.

  “They just kept ignoring us,” Langel says. “I said, Look, we’re going ahead with this. Do you want to do it with us? But they didn’t believe we could get it off the ground. They essentially told us: Try. So we decided to go ahead with the tour on our own.”

  For the national team, the tour represented a unique opportunity to make some real money: a guaranteed $1.2 million for the 12-city tour. Most important, it was income shared equally among all the players, $60,000 each, because the top players—those like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy—insisted it be that way.

  It was another step toward securing financial independence as more individual players started to earn their own endorsement deals and didn’t need to rely on U.S. Soccer as much. By then, Nike had expanded its footprint in soccer beyond Mia Hamm. They’d added Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry, Tiffeny Milbrett, and Tisha Venturini to their roster of sponsored athletes and featured all five of them in advertisements that promoted the Women’s World Cup. Nike’s expansion into women’s soccer was a game-changer for the players who benefited from it.

  “Soccer was my side hustle. There was no money in it originally. But I came right when Nike came in, and I started to get a little bit of money,” says Briana Scurry. “It was impeccable timing because if it wasn’t something that would allow me to pay my bills, I would’ve had to stop—we all would’ve had to, and that would’ve really been a shame.”

  Not everyone had that same opportunity for sponsorship, but now, with this collective group effort to launch a tour—by the team and for the team—financial freedom was available across the board. It was a payday for all players.

  And in another sense, the players were doing the federation’s job for them. The tour allowed the national team to play in front of fans who did not attend World Cup games, which would grow a fan base at home in America. Yes, it gave the players money, but it also spread the gospel of the Beautiful Game, as soccer is known around the world. It did everything that U.S. Soccer’s haphazard plan for an African tour would not.

  As Julie Foudy put it in a press statement after the tour was announced: “The one thing we’ve learned recently is that our fans want to see more of us and more of soccer. We’re answering their call.”

  So there were Hank Steinbrecher and Robert Contiguglia opening their newspapers on the morning of July 11, 1991. They were “shocked” by the tour the players warned them about and furious the players weren’t going along with the African tour, which would’ve certainly pushed the national team back into relative obscurity.<
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  “U.S. Soccer went apoplectic,” Langel says. “They immediately hired a Chicago law firm, and they sent a complaint to my law firm that they’re going to go into federal court to get an injunction.”

  An injunction, if granted, could have stopped the tour in its tracks. John Langel and his legal team worked through the night to prepare their responses to try to stop the federation from seeking a court-ordered moratorium on the tour. Then came two days of marathon meetings between Langel and Alan Rothenberg, the head of the 1999 Women’s World Cup organizing committee. Rothenberg, who had been the president of U.S. Soccer through 1998, played a sort of mediator role.

  “They had achieved success and popularity, and they had to properly take advantage of that,” Rothenberg says. “But to go around on tour as a unit, no matter what they call themselves—effectively as the national team—that right belonged to the federation.”

  In a panicked move to retake control, U.S. Soccer offered $2 million to essentially buy out the tour from the national team and send them to Africa as planned. Even though this would be more money than they had ever been paid for playing soccer, the players were having none of it.

  “We were like, You haven’t spent any time on this. You expect us to jump ship and go with you guys?” Foudy says. “After this marketing group invested in us, not even knowing if the World Cup was going to be a success or not? They’re the ones who believed in us, and you never did. No, screw you.”

  Negotiations with U.S. Soccer became incredibly tense and acrimonious. It was as if everything—contract disputes, lack of communication, and perceived slights—was finally coming to a head. When Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and John Langel met with U.S. Soccer president Robert Contiguglia and federation counsel John Collins in Washington, D.C., the players were ready to stand up.

  At one point during a meeting, Contiguglia was dismissive of the planned victory tour and accused the players of “adulterating the sport” by playing at indoor venues. Mia Hamm threw the comment right back at him.

  “You used the word adulterate,” she said. “Well, I’ll use the word adultery because we feel like you cheat on us all the time.”

  Contiguglia was taken aback. The players, who felt like U.S. Soccer was too worried about the men’s team, had had enough, and they weren’t going to back down, even under the threat of a lawsuit.

  “If you sue us, I’m prepared to never play for U.S. Soccer again,” Hamm told Contiguglia. Then she turned to her teammate.

  “I don’t know about you, Julie, but I feel pretty good about what we’ve done with our careers,” Hamm said. “I won a World Cup in ’91, I won a World Cup in ’99, I won an Olympics in ’96. I’ll call it a day.”

  Foudy nodded.

  “Yeah, me too,” she replied. “I’m pretty happy walking away from the game.”

  “I’m sure Nike will like that you’re walking away from the game, too,” Foudy said to Hamm. Foudy was deftly calling out the federation’s coveted sponsorship with Nike, which was then worth about $15 million per year.

  Asked about these specific negotiations now, Contiguglia says he doesn’t remember them, but he does recall that over the years, the relationship between the federation and the players was hostile. At one point, he admits, “I did lose my cool,” but he adds: “The last thing I ever wanted was an adversarial relationship with our athletes.”

  “That’s what happens in collective bargaining when you don’t have a relationship of mutual trust,” Contiguglia says. “It was a horrible, horrible environment. It was not healthy, but I blame lawyers.”

  While the federation was certainly unhappy the players defied them by moving forward with the indoor tour, there were other practical considerations behind their opposition to the tour. The federation had its own sponsors at the time, and if the national team was going on an unsanctioned tour where they used a competitor’s equipment or wore another company’s uniforms, it could damage U.S. Soccer’s existing business relationships.

  After two days of meetings in D.C.—and some sharp-tongued exchanges between the federation and the players—the two sides worked out an understanding: The tour would incorporate all of U.S. Soccer’s existing sponsors. The tour the players had worked on was going to happen after all.

  After that concession, the players and Langel were fired up. They knew they had some real leverage for the first time. Outside the second meeting, Foudy and Hamm joked with Langel: “Who’s driving the bus? We’re driving the bus! That’s right, we’re driving the bus!”

  The tour belonged to the players, not U.S. Soccer, and it gave them a new collective revenue stream that wasn’t controlled by the federation. It was set to earn them $2.4 million over two tours—one after the 1999 World Cup and one again after the 2000 Olympics—and, in addition to the ticket sales, the team also signed balls and photos, which generated another $250,000 to be shared. Eleven of the players appeared in a Chevrolet commercial together. The players were finding financial freedom they had never experienced before.

  As part of the final understanding to make U.S. Soccer happy, the players gave the federation the opportunity to take over the tour afterward if they wanted to do it again. Now, it is built into the national team’s contract, and to this day, after major tournaments, the team still goes on the same victory tour. It started with the 1999 team and a “shocking” full-page ad, and it has lasted two decades.

  * * *

  Although the indoor-tour dispute got settled, the conflicts were far from over.

  The national team’s contract with the federation was set to expire at the end of 1999, which was barreling closer and closer. John Langel had been trying to work out terms for a new deal since the World Cup ended, but U.S. Soccer was uninterested.

  The federation had declined to meet for negotiations in the months before the deal was set to expire, from September through November, which angered Langel and the players. Alan Rothenberg flew to Philadelphia to let Langel know that U.S. Soccer would not be making a deal with the players.

  “You should’ve saved your money and called me to tell me that,” Langel told him.

  Just before the deal was to expire, the federation suggested the players just extend their existing deal, which had been agreed to in 1996. That was a nonstarter for the players, who had still not gotten everything on their list and still earned far less than the men.

  The players’ demands included better conditions and noneconomic issues, but the sticking points largely came down to compensation. For the months when the players had games to play, the federation was paying the most veteran players a modest $3,150 per month while newer players earned even less. The players had earned about $5,000 per month during the World Cup—a combined wage between U.S. Soccer and the World Cup organizing committee—and that’s what they wanted in their new contract.

  Even more of an issue than the amount of compensation was the reliability of it. Payment was contingent on the team’s schedule, which U.S. Soccer set, so if there were no camps or games in a month, the players got nothing. If a player got injured and couldn’t play, she no longer got paid, either.

  “We’re not going to mortgage our future for one team,” Hank Steinbrecher told reporters. “We have the men’s team, the U-17s, U-18s, and all the other teams we have to put on the field. Some people think we just have the women’s team.”

  The national team was supposed to go to Australia in January 2000 for a tournament, but they threatened to strike. In return, the federation threatened to send a “B team” in their place, comprised of players from the under-20 youth national team.

  The federation spun the ordeal as a positive—as Jim Moorhouse, U.S. Soccer’s spokesman, put it: “We will use this trip to Australia as an opportunity to get the next generation of players some valuable playing experience.”

  The average age of the roster for that Australia Cup, excluding 1995 World Cup defender Thori Bryan, was just 19.9 years old. For some players, it was indeed a huge opportunity to be see
n at the senior national team level.

  One of those players who crossed the proverbial picket line was Danielle Slaton, who would remain in the national team picture for years afterward. When she was called up for the Australia Cup, she was aware it was due to a dispute the national team was having with U.S. Soccer. Because she knew Brandi Chastain from Santa Clara University, she spoke with her before going.

  “It’s not a problem,” Chastain told her. “Go play in the tournament.”

  The national team veterans in the thick of the dispute didn’t begrudge younger players seizing an opportunity to represent their country. But the veterans could tell U.S. Soccer was hoping to pit the current team against the young up-and-comers. When the reserve team won the tournament in Australia, it looked like a real possibility the federation could simply refuse to give in to the senior national team’s demands and keep turning to youth players.

  After Slaton got back from Australia, she got a phone call from Chastain: “Look, they’re going to ask you to go to the next tournament, and now we need you to say no.”

  With some guidance from Billie Jean King, the national team realized they needed the younger players to see the bigger picture and join them in the fight. If the federation had the option to replace the national team rather than offer better working conditions, no one—not the current generation nor the next ones—would ever have the power to convince U.S. Soccer of anything.

  “I remember that phone call with Brandi—her taking the time to explain, this is what’s going on, here’s the history, this is what we’re fighting for,” Slaton says. “These were the women who were your idols growing up. You respected that and felt it was for something bigger.”

  It wasn’t just Slaton who received a call—all the players who went to the Australia Cup and all the players on the U-20 team were contacted by players from the senior team who were on strike. In a sort of quasi-phone tree, every veteran was assigned a youth player to call. They didn’t stop until the U-16 team was on board, too.