The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

Then, the procession turned the corner. The sidewalks were packed 30-people deep in places—and it continued all the way up Broadway as far as the eye could see. There were thousands and thousands of people lining Broadway into the horizon.

  “We turned onto the street and it was like, Are you fucking kidding me? All these people are here for us?” Ali Krieger says, laughing.

  None of the players had seen anything quite like it. Office workers on Broadway were opening their windows and throwing paper shreds out. The air was filled with paper, floating over the parade route like some sort of festive fog.

  When the parade reached its destination, City Hall, the players got off the 12 floats they had been riding. They waited in a room at City Hall, finally together again and able to talk about what they’d just seen, and the players became emotional. Some players were crying. Some were in shock.

  “I never quite understand the following this team has until it’s thrown in my face, and the ticker-tape parade epitomizes that,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who has nearly 150 caps for the USA. “I was like, Is anyone going to be at this parade? What if no one shows up? It blew me away.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “It Is Our Job to Keep on Fighting”

  In the days after the national team won the World Cup, the players were the most in-demand athletes in the entire country.

  After a sleepless night in Vancouver following the final, they did a round of media for Fox Sports, the broadcaster of the World Cup, and then zipped off to Los Angeles for a victory rally that U.S. Soccer had set up for the next day. Two days later, they needed to be in New York City for an appearance on Good Morning America and the ticker-tape parade.

  Within 24 hours of the parade, U.S. Soccer expected the players to report to their clubs in the U.S. Soccer–backed NWSL for games the very next day. For the players, who had been on the road and flying across the continent for more than two months nonstop, it was a harsh request. They had to be in Los Angeles again in four days for the ESPY Awards, and in less than a month, a 10-game victory tour across the country was scheduled to start.

  “We weren’t allowed to go home first. We were at the mercy of whatever media appearances they wanted us to go to,” goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris says. “It was more exhausting after the tournament than during it. You didn’t have a choice—it was mandatory.”

  The players weren’t upset to have all these obligations. There was genuine excitement amongst the team that people across the country wanted to celebrate their success. But everything was taking a toll, and not everyone on the team was convinced that the players’ interests were being put first.

  Hope Solo couldn’t help but notice that Don Garber—the commissioner of MLS, the men’s pro league—was on one of the floats for the national team’s ticker-tape parade. When it came time for the rally outside City Hall at the end of the parade route, many of the people who came up to the podium to speak were as expected: Mayor Bill de Blasio, coach Jill Ellis, and U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati. But the commissioner of the NWSL, Jeff Plush, who was there, never got up to speak. Instead, Garber spoke after de Blasio.

  MLS was one of the corporate sponsors that helped New York City pay for the parade, but representatives from Nike and EA Sports, who sponsored the parade as well, didn’t get up to speak.

  “Things just didn’t look right,” Solo says. “Everywhere we looked it was Don Garber, it was MLS, it was U.S. Soccer’s sponsors. It wasn’t necessarily about us when they were using our success to promote MLS and U.S. Soccer but not the women. It felt like they were using us.”

  Another mandatory appearance the next day at NWSL games didn’t make sense to players who were exhausted and needed a break. Usually leagues build gaps into the schedule for major tournaments—international breaks, they are called—but the NWSL played through the World Cup. Many members of the national team wouldn’t be able to play in their NWSL games the next day anyway, with such a short turnaround from both playing in the World Cup and the crosscountry travel, and players generally don’t go to games they can’t play in. So, that’s what the players told U.S. Soccer.

  “They wouldn’t work with us at all,” Solo says. “They demanded that every player had to be at her NWSL game that weekend.”

  Coming off the World Cup win with the most leverage they’d ever had, the players felt confident enough to push back.

  “When we put our foot down, I think they got a little bit nervous,” Solo says. “They said, Okay, what will it take to get you guys at all the NWSL games this weekend?”

  In the end, the federation treated it as an appearance fee of sorts. The players would get $10,000 each to attend their NWSL games, and they would be flown first-class, a distinct upgrade from their usual travel. It was a relatively small victory, but it set the stage for the players to stand up for themselves more assertively. The women of the national team proved they were the best in the world, they captured the country’s attention, and now they had leverage.

  “It was really the first time where we were like, Okay, we are worth something to the federation and we know it, so now we have to keep this going,” Solo says. “That’s what really empowered us. All of a sudden, we got a $10,000 fee, first-class tickets to fly to our NWSL games, and it was right before we were going to negotiate our new contract.”

  But things didn’t get better just because the federation paid the players a $10,000 fee. In less than a month, the players had to set out on the road again for a 10-game victory tour as World Cup champions and, as it turned out, the venues weren’t exactly befitting of a World Cup–winning national team.

  Eight of the 10 victory-tour games in 2015 were scheduled on artificial turf. Over the course of that year, U.S. Soccer scheduled the women to play 57 percent of their home games on artificial turf but scheduled zero of the men’s games on artificial turf. In fact, the men played at five venues that had artificial-turf surfaces, and in all five cases, the federation paid to have temporary grass installed.

  The last time the federation had scheduled a men’s home friendly match on artificial turf had been in 1994. In that same time span since 1994, the women played dozens of U.S. Soccer–hosted matches on artificial turf. Now, even as World Cup winners, they were stuck on turf again.

  “It just wasn’t good enough,” says Carli Lloyd, who has more than 250 caps. “Here we are, world champions, we come home and not only do we have to play all these games on artificial turf, our current CBA says we have to play 10 games to earn another bonus. We won the World Cup, great, but in order to earn a bonus, we had to play 10 games. We just thought the whole structure of it wasn’t good enough and we needed to change a lot of things.”

  The crowds that greeted the national team on the victory tour were unprecedented for inconsequential friendly matches. On August 16, six weeks after the World Cup ended, more than 44,000 people packed Heinz Field in Pittsburgh to see the U.S. steamroll past Costa Rica, 8–0. When, in the following game, they sold out Finley Stadium in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a crowd of 20,535—for a 7–2 win over Costa Rica—the federation tried to schedule upcoming games in larger venues. In Birmingham, Alabama, nearly 36,000 people showed up at Legion Field on September 20 as the U.S. beat Haiti, 8–0.

  But while U.S. Soccer was making a windfall with higher ticket prices, the players didn’t see anything from it other than the $1.20 per ticket they’d negotiated in 2013. While U.S. Soccer’s merchandise for the national team flew off the shelves, the players didn’t get anything from that. The team’s popularity was surging, but they weren’t in any position to capitalize on it.

  “I thought it was bullshit,” says defender Meghan Klingenberg, who played every minute of the 2015 World Cup as a left back. “All these people are making money from our likeness and our faces and our value, but we’re not. We’re only getting money from our winnings, and that doesn’t seem right.”

  “We didn’t have any rights,” she adds. “We had basically assigned our likeness rights, for sponsorship
s and licensing, to U.S. Soccer to do with them whatever they wanted.”

  The final straw for the players was a game scheduled in Hawaii at Aloha Stadium during the victory tour. No one from U.S. Soccer had gone to inspect the facilities before scheduling the national team to play there. The practice field was grass, but it was patchy, bumpy, and lined with sewer plates that had plastic coverings. It was on that sub-par practice field that Megan Rapinoe tore her ACL, which meant she might have to miss the 2016 Olympics the next year.

  Then, the next day, the players got to the stadium where they were supposed to play the game. Not only was it artificial turf, but the players were concerned by the seams on the field where parts of the turf were pulling up off the ground. Sharp rocks were embedded all over the field. If someone from U.S. Soccer had been there beforehand to inspect it, there’s no way they could’ve believed it was an appropriate venue for a national team soccer match.

  The players unanimously agreed to boycott the match and stand up to the federation together. The federation officially cancelled the match, and Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, publicly apologized, calling it “a black eye for this organization.”

  The players seemed more determined than they had been in a long time to fight for themselves.

  “The team needs to be a little more vocal about whether this is good for our bodies and whether we should be playing on it if the men wouldn’t be playing on it,” Alex Morgan said after the Hawaii cancellation. “We’ve been told by U.S. Soccer that the field’s condition and the size of the field are the first two talking points of when they decide on a field, so I’m not sure why eight of our 10 victory tour games are on turf whereas the men haven’t played on turf this year.”

  * * *

  Though winning the 2015 World Cup finally gave the players the confidence to speak up in a way they hadn’t before, the groundwork had been laid the year before. The players were ready to start changing tactics in their contract negotiations, and that’s when they fired John Langel, the man who had led the national team through their most important previous legal battles.

  It happened in September 2014. By then, some of the players had already felt the deal negotiated under Langel’s guidance a year earlier didn’t do enough.

  The deal he spearheaded in 2013, which was set to expire at the end of 2016, largely rolled over many of the terms of their previous contract, which was negotiated back in 2005. Rather than put together a new collective bargaining agreement, the 2013 contract came in the form of a memorandum of understanding, or an MOU. It was a hastily put-together document so a deal could be done in time for the NWSL’s launch in March 2013. In some places, final terms weren’t even set—for instance, it specified that marketing rights were “an issue that remains to be discussed.” That became the source of repeated squabbles between the team and the federation.

  But still, it included what Langel saw as key wins. It increased the number of players U.S. Soccer had to put under contract—which guaranteed year-round salaries, injury protection, and pregnancy protection—to 24 players, up from 20. It raised salaries significantly, with different compensation increases built in regardless of whether there was or wasn’t a league for the players.

  The players could also earn larger bonuses and, for the first time, they could earn a bonus for finishing in fourth place of a World Cup or an Olympics at $10,000 per player. A provision set a minimum of 10 dates for the team’s victory tour, which essentially served a bonus because the team would also earn $1.20 per ticket sold to every U.S.-based friendly game. That marked the first time the team had gotten a direct cut of ticket sales.

  But the players weren’t sure they’d gotten everything they could have, and some players wondered if the team was outgrowing the basic structure of the contract. After all, the contract was built on what the team first bargained for in 2000, and an exhausting 10-game victory tour, when these players were more in-demand than ever, didn’t make sense anymore to some players.

  The MOU also left too many gray areas, even beyond the parts that were unfinished. The tier system for players was confusing, and the national team was constantly questioning the federation about which players were on which salary tier. With a $36,000 difference between the top tier and the bottom tier, players wanted something more concrete to guarantee their compensation.

  “The way we read clauses in that MOU was different than the way U.S. Soccer read the MOU,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “Looking back, we should’ve fought for something more comprehensive than the MOU, but as players we didn’t demand that, and that’s on us.”

  It wasn’t about any one specific thing, though. Some players felt Langel had grown out of touch with the team’s needs ever since Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy had retired. Others felt that John Langel and U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati had gotten far too chummy.

  “He had been in it for so long, he had a close relationship with Sunil—a very good relationship with Sunil, in fact,” Hope Solo says. “He’d go up to Sunil’s suite every game and sit with him.”

  “Some say it was a working relationship,” Solo adds. “Others say it was a little too close of a relationship to really stand up and fight for us.”

  That too-chummy impression hung over Langel’s final meeting with the team before he was fired. In September 2014, Langel and Gulati met with the players in Rochester, New York, where the team had a friendly match against Mexico.

  The meeting wasn’t unusual—the national team’s contract called for regular meetings between the players and U.S. Soccer to discuss how things were going in the NWSL. The players would send Langel their concerns about things like coaching, travel accommodations, field conditions, medical treatment, and other issues, and then he’d compile them to get club owners’ responses. U.S. Soccer’s job was to intervene and make sure improvements happened. But the meeting reinforced for players their impression of Langel and Gulati’s relationship.

  At a hotel in Rochester, Gulati sat in the front of the conference room and all the players sat facing him while Langel sat off to the side. It was Gulati who ran the meeting. He didn’t have a copy of the player memos in front of him—he conducted the meeting without any notes—while Langel, notes in hand, would interject at times. It was a meeting for the players’ benefit, but Gulati was the dominant figure in the room.

  After the meeting, the players got ready to head to training, and Langel and Gulati broke off to have lunch together at the hotel. As far as some players were concerned, that was something Langel and Gulati had done too often—getting a meal or a cup of coffee together like old friends. Some players said goodbye to Langel on their way out of the hotel.

  Rich Nichols, another attorney, was there in Rochester, too. He had already been in contact with the players as far back as late 2012 through Hope Solo, who was frustrated with the team’s hesitance to take a stronger stance against U.S. Soccer. Solo didn’t know Nichols when she called him for the first time. She believed the national team needed a stronger voice in negotiations, and after asking around, she eventually got Nichols’s name.

  His highest-profile experience in sports came from representing Olympic track star Marion Jones in doping allegations and serving as general counsel for the American Basketball League, a women’s league that preceded the WNBA. Nichols’s expertise isn’t quite as a trial lawyer, but he speaks with the cadence and tempo of one, knowing which words to emphasize and where to pause for effect.

  As the players of the national team were debating how to move forward in contract negotiations, Solo called Nichols on her own to see if he could help. Their first conversation centered largely around the idea that the women should demand the same pay as the men’s national team. Nichols and Solo felt a philosophical connection right away. Both outspoken and unafraid to ruffle feathers, they had the same ideas about the tack the national team needed to take.

  “She was a tiger,” Nichols says of that first conversation. “It was clear she was going to do whatever
was required to get some equality with regard to compensation.”

  It wasn’t until September 2014—after that meeting with Langel and Gulati—that enough players were ready to hire Nichols. They had decided John Langel was no longer able to stand up to U.S. Soccer and Sunil Gulati in the way that they needed. The players held a vote in Rochester by show of hands on whether to hire Rich Nichols. It wasn’t unanimous, but it was enough.

  Christie Pearce, the captain of the team, was tasked with breaking the news to Langel. She told him the players needed to be sure their lawyer would not have allegiance to the federation. The firing didn’t entirely surprise Langel. Before then, he had a growing sense the players didn’t trust Gulati, and he didn’t share that view, which the players knew. It still hurt, Langel admits, but he would’ve never wanted to continue without unanimous support from the national team.

  “As far as I’m concerned, I would not want to represent the players on an 11-to-10 majority vote or 12-to-9 or whatever it was,” Langel says. “That’s not a recipe for success.”

  Rich Nichols became the attorney for the players and the new head of their players association. With that, the tone of the relationship between the national team and the federation was about to take a sharp turn.

  * * *

  Nichols’s first major action in his new role was to tell U.S. Soccer that, as far as the players association was concerned, there was no collective bargaining agreement in place and the players could strike if they wanted. U.S. Soccer got the letter on Christmas Eve of 2015.

  His argument went back to Langel’s memorandum of understanding. An MOU isn’t a CBA, his argument went, and therefore it could be canceled at any time. If that was true and the MOU was canceled, the no-strike provision of the previous CBA would not be in effect, and the players could threaten to boycott the 2016 Olympics.

  The national team was trying to get back the leverage of a potential strike.

  It was a bold strategy devised, in part, by Jeffrey Kessler and his colleagues at Winston & Strawn, who were hired as outside counsel for the national team. Kessler had been involved in a number of high-profile cases in the world of sports, such as overturning Tom Brady’s infamous “Deflategate” suspension from the NFL and successfully appealing Ray Rice’s indefinite suspension from the NFL for a disturbing domestic-violence incident. Kessler had also won the case that paved the way for free agency in the NFL in the 1990s.