The players fought to keep their NWSL allocation contracts intact, however. The CBA ensures that 22 national team players will be allocated at all times throughout the life of the contract. That clause signals a commitment from both U.S. Soccer and the national team to have allocated players in the NWSL through 2021, regardless of whether U.S. Soccer is the league operator or not. It also signals a shift where club play becomes more important for the careers of national team players. NWSL salaries were raised for the 2017 season to between $62,500 and $67,500, depending on each player’s tier, with a $2,500 yearly increase.
Samantha Mewis, one of the younger players to participate in some of the negotiation sessions, says the reduction of contracts gives more opportunities to more players, which ultimately expands the player pool and helps the sport as a whole.
“Someday, the league will ideally provide high annual salaries, leaving U.S. Soccer free to call in the players who are in form and pay them per game,” Mewis says. “With more contracts, there is certainly more security for the players on those contracts, but there is less opportunity for other players, as U.S. Soccer is incentivized to call in players who they are already paying.”
The issues went well beyond compensation, though. The players remembered the 2015 victory tour, which was mostly on artificial turf, and boycotting the Hawaii game because U.S. Soccer hadn’t inspected the field beforehand. The players didn’t want to rule out turf entirely—some key soccer markets have good artificial-turf venues—but they secured language in the new contract that any games on artificial turf be inspected by the federation and deemed to be “in safe condition” and “conducive to soccer on game day.” The players can request “photographs of the turf and a report on its condition” and offer input on venue selection, too.
The 10-game victory tour—the one the 1999 team fought so hard to create—was something the national team had outgrown. With the NWSL looking stable and viable for years to come, the players wanted to prioritize club play and asked for the victory tour to be cut drastically. The two sides agreed on a post-tournament victory tour of just four games that would be held only within FIFA windows to avoid disrupting the NWSL.
“The movement between line items was so small, it would take days,” Sauerbrunn says. “There was never a day where we got everything we wanted. Every proposal was so carefully countered and movement was very incremental. It was a daily chess match.”
With the biggest hurdles out of the way, a deal was getting closer as April 2017 approached—three months after their previous CBA had expired. Both sides were eager to get a deal done, and U.S. Soccer seemed to be particularly anxious. By the time the players had to report to camp in Texas for a pair of friendlies versus Russia, the federation insisted the team continue negotiations there.
“Camp is the players’ time to do their work,” Roux says. “It felt disrespectful to hold negotiations between training sessions such that players were sitting in chairs for hours—for some players, until midnight—rather than doing proper recovery.”
If negotiation sessions had to be held during camp, then all of the players eligible to vote on the contract—not just the CBA committee—decided they should show up. Mallory Pugh, who was in college at the time, and Rose Lavelle, who had just joined the team, were not eligible to be in the session, but the rest of the team showed up in matching Nike T-shirts that read “Equality” and sat around a large conference-room table. Players who weren’t at that camp called into the session over the phone. Alex Morgan, who was playing for Olympique Lyonnais, called in from France, even though it was late at night there. Julie Ertz, formerly Johnston, called in from her honeymoon.
The last negotiation session to finalize the terms was on April 3, 2017. At the last minute, U.S. Soccer asked for a clause allowing for an “identification camp” to be held every January that would not be tied to any games and would only feature so-called floaters—players who were new and not under contract. That camp could be held during a new six-week annual rest period for veterans built into the CBA for every winter. The players, who throughout the negotiations had generally supported expanding the player pool, agreed.
With that, the deal was finally done. The new agreement was ratified on April 4, 2017, two days before their two-game series versus Russia was set to begin.
It wasn’t the deal the players truly wanted—it didn’t include equal pay—but it was something that allowed the players to continue to do their jobs and play soccer while the EEOC investigation continued. They couldn’t have known that, more than two years after the EEOC claim was filed, it would remain unresolved as the calendar turned to 2019. But they knew it would take long enough that they needed a new contract. Now they had one.
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With the negotiations over and a new contract in place, a new batch of work was set to begin.
Perhaps most pressing, the national team players now had to figure out what to do with those commercial rights they took back from U.S. Soccer. It was the first time the national team had full control of those rights—and that meant they had to essentially build up a new business from scratch. It’s not as simple or as immediate as collecting a salary from U.S. Soccer, but the national team believes it sets them up in the long term.
“With licensing merchandise, the players controlling those rights going forward is a huge deal,” Becca Roux says. “It gives them an ability to monetize something that otherwise wasn’t being monetized. Just because there wasn’t any authorized product doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening—it was being done in an unauthorized way and players weren’t capturing the royalties.”
Nine months after the new CBA was finalized, the national team launched a new licensing and branding agency with players from the WNBA and the NFL called REP Worldwide. The agency was the first step in maximizing those new commercial rights. Meghan Klingenberg, the player who’d pushed hardest for control of the licensing rights, was elected in 2018 by her teammates to sit on the board as the national team’s athlete representative. In that role, she has helped the team build its new business operations.
The players association signed three of its first deals in April 2018, for player-specific scarves with the brand Ruffneck, socks with Stride-line, and giant decals of the players’ faces with Build-A-Head.
For the first time, not only can fans buy U.S. Soccer scarves with all the royalties going to U.S. Soccer, but fans can also buy an Alex Morgan–branded scarf and have 100 percent of the royalties go directly to the players. If the Alex Morgan scarf has a U.S. Soccer logo, the players and the federation each get cuts.
By September 2018, the team added deals to sell T-shirts through the company Represent, digital collectibles called Player Tokens, and perhaps most important, official jerseys customized with players’ names, via Fanatics. In the past, U.S. Soccer and other retailers sold unauthorized player-specific jerseys and reaped the profits, but now fans can buy an authorized jersey with their favorite player’s name and a portion of that sale will go back to the players.
The players don’t know exactly how much these group-licensing rights could be worth—it’s a gamble, to be sure—but they think the value will exceed whatever they got out of their previous CBAs. After all, for instance, when the USA women’s team appeared in FIFA 16, it ranked as the 23rd most-played team in the game out of 600 teams—not just in the U.S., but around the world.
“It’s a good outcome to get away from the federation’s belief that there is no value in the women’s game,” Roux says. “Now we can test the market and prove them wrong.”
Even as more contracts are signed and more revenue streams are put into place, the players are keenly aware it will take time to see the benefit of this new business they are building. But, like much of the new CBA, the focus has been on building for the future.
“The real potential will probably be long after I’m done playing, but I think the potential is massive,” says Megan Rapinoe, who has been on the national team since 2006. “
Right now, we’re still in an experimentation period of figuring out what it is, what it means, how do we do it, and how do we capitalize, both individually and as a group. We have a million questions every day.”
The new CBA created a lot more work for other people, too—specifically NWSL owners, who were tasked with changes immediately and in the years to come. That’s because all the problems in the NWSL that national team players had to take on—bad playing surfaces, locker rooms without basic amenities, sub-par staffing—were addressed in the national team’s new CBA. With U.S. Soccer running the NWSL, the national team players saw an opportunity to use their CBA to improve the league.
“We understood that we can’t fight for the NWSL players, because we’re not the NWSL Players Association—we’re the U.S. National Team Players Association,” says Becky Sauerbrunn. “But we knew that we wanted to help women’s soccer as a whole as much as we could. So we said we need to have these minimum standards for the NWSL. We did that knowing it wouldn’t just benefit the national team players, it would benefit all the players.”
The new CBA called for immediate changes in 2017, including that all NWSL locker rooms should, at a minimum, be clean. But those requirements were set to expand over time. By 2020, every NWSL team will be required to have a designated on-site locker room with showers, an on-site training room with equipment, and a medical treatment room. From 2019 onward, every NWSL team will need to play its home games on either natural grass or on artificial turf that meets specific, high standards, unless an ongoing stadium lease prevents it.
Roster sizes in the NWSL will increase, too, which will allow teams to rest players more and better mitigate injuries. By 2020, the minimum roster size in the NWSL will jump to 22 players from the 18 players it was in the years prior. That will also give more national team hopefuls a chance to prove themselves in the NWSL.
The CBA also set out to ensure that if the national team experiences unprecedented success off the field, like it had in 2015 and 2016, the team will reap the benefits.
If the average TV viewership for U.S. Soccer–hosted games increases by 10 percent over the previous calendar year, it will trigger bonuses for the players of $15,000. If the team sells out U.S. Soccer–hosted games, the players will earn bonuses of either $15,000 or an additional 7.5 percent per average ticket price for all sales beyond a threshold of 17,000 tickets, whichever is more.
The players may have forfeited some of their security, but they increased the potential rewards. It was a dramatic shift from the early years: The team wasn’t so worried about avoiding the downside—they wanted to be able to capture the upside. The hope was that they’d found a way to capitalize on their success in a way no previous generation of the national team had.
After all, Kate Markgraf can recall her son asking her why she still has to work when she is one of the most-capped players in the world and has won World Cups and Olympics medals. She had to explain to him it’s because she’s a woman: “I’d probably have enough saved by now if I were a male athlete,” she told him.
Brandi Chastain remains one of the most famous female soccer players ever, but when she thinks back to the $500 check she received for winning the 1991 Women’s World Cup, she remembers how grateful she felt then and how differently she feels now about it.
“The farther I get away from that moment, the more I realize, Man, I still have to work really hard to earn a living and I hustle every day,” she says. “I do think sometimes, if I had been born a male and I had the success I had, financially I’d be in a much bigger tax bracket.”
The team’s new CBA doesn’t figure to change all the harsh realities that female soccer players face, but the current players hope it offers a few steps in the right direction.
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For the national team, stats alone can tell a story. Kristine Lilly, the iron woman of the team, has a record 354 caps, which is about 100 more than just about anyone else. Abby Wambach, the goal-scoring leader, has the most international goals of any soccer player on the planet, male or female. Mallory Pugh, the teenage prodigy, became the youngest American to score a goal at an Olympics in 2016. And so on.
Off the field, the national team’s collective bargaining agreements have told a story in a similar way. In 2000, it was about being treated like professionals at the most basic level. In 2005, it was about financial security and making a living. By 2012, things like pregnancy protection, sharing revenues on ticket sales, and building a league came into play. In 2017, it was about taking control and ownership of the future.
The national team’s current collective bargaining agreement is the latest chapter in a story that has been told over more than three decades. Now, it’s a story that has inspired other women’s sports teams to carve out similar paths. In that sense, the players of the national team have emerged as a different kind of role model—not just to girls who play soccer but to female sports teams around the world who demand equal treatment.
When the U.S. women’s national hockey team boycotted their biggest event of 2017—the world championships hosted for the first time in the United States—it was a page taken out of the soccer team’s book. But more than that, it was a decision made with the close guidance and input from those who fought the same fights in soccer.
One day in 2015, out of the blue, John Langel got a call at his desk in his Ballard Spahr office. The USA women’s hockey team had gotten his name from Heather O’Reilly, who happened to work out at the same gym as Meghan Duggan, a forward for the hockey team. The hockey players had asked O’Reilly about how the soccer team had made the advancements it did throughout the years, so O’Reilly recommended they call Langel. He spoke with Duggan and the Lamoureux twins, Monique and Jocelyne, who described treatment as bad as what the soccer team experienced when Langel first came on board in 1998.
“Every issue and every protection we engineered for the soccer women over 16 years was an issue that had to be addressed in hockey,” Langel says.
By September 2015, Langel and his law partner, Dee Spagnuolo, had started working with the hockey team on a pro bono basis and put together a wish list with the players of things they should fight for. It was the same thing he had done with the soccer players in 1998, a process that started when Kristine Lilly had to run out and get her teammates food in between training sessions.
The hockey players’ wages were paltry—USA Hockey paid compensation as low as $6,000 per player for every four-year cycle. It was paid out $1,000 per month for six months before the Olympics, and the players got paid $0 for the rest of the three and a half years, even as USA Hockey expected them to train and compete in games the entire time. They also had no protections for injury or pregnancy. Their working conditions and treatment were well below what the men’s team received.
But hiring a lawyer alone wasn’t enough. Julie Foudy remembers the last time the hockey team had tried to hire a lawyer and stand up to USA Hockey. She remembers it because it was around the same time she, Mia Hamm, and the rest of the soccer team were fighting a similar battle with U.S. Soccer.
“When we were doing our fighting, we tried to get the hockey team to do the same, but they couldn’t pull it off because they couldn’t stay unified,” Foudy says. “This current group of hockey players came to understand that history.”
Throughout 2016 and into 2017, USA Hockey was uncooperative and negotiations went nowhere. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, the hockey players notified the federation they planned to boycott the world championships in 2017. It was their biggest event of the year, and one year before the Olympics, it was a major statement that they were willing to take a stand.
It mirrored the story already told by the soccer team in 1999 when the players threatened to retire if U.S. Soccer took them to court over the indoor victory tour.
“That moment when Mia turns to Julie and says, I won two World Cups, an Olympics—I’m prepared to give it all up. How about you? That’s the same conversation the hockey play
ers had amongst themselves,” Langel says. “They knew they were going to bypass a world championship, and if they do that, they might not have been invited to play in the Olympics. It was the same commitment.”
It was a decision the hockey team made only after constant conversations with players from the soccer team, past and present. Duggan, the Lamoureux twins, and Hilary Knight all sought advice from Foudy and Hamm, who walked them through what the soccer team did in the late 1990s and early 2000s to unify younger players and use the leverage they had.
But not all the conversations were about legal strategy. Sometimes it was just about getting the perspective of someone who had been through this before.
“Was it scary?” Foudy remembers the hockey players asked her. She told them: “Hell yeah, it was scary.”
Some hockey players were afraid of the negative consequences, and they weren’t sure about the boycott.
“You just have to bring them back into the fold and tell them: If we stay together on this, we’re fine,” Foudy would tell the hockey players. “We knew they couldn’t fire the whole team as long as we stayed together.”
The hockey team convinced potential alternates not to accept invites to play during the boycott and, two days before the 2017 world championships were set to begin, USA Hockey and the team reached a deal. The terms were not released, but the players got living wages, and the federation agreed to better promotion for the women’s team. Only one year later, the hockey team would win a gold medal in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea.
The hockey team wasn’t the only one that gained inspiration from the soccer team. Canada’s soccer team sought advice on getting maternity coverage into contracts. WNBA players asked the soccer players how to ask for better standards across the league for travel accommodations and trainers.
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