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Hope Solo shows you just how bad it is for professional women's soccer players

Leander Schaerlaeckens
Hope Solo
Hope Solo (Getty Images)

Hope Solo is an immensely complicated figure in our sporting society. She’s a transcendent athlete, twice named the best goalkeeper at a Women’s World Cup and a winner of the latest edition last summer. She’s a combustible personality, with a long history of incidents and conflicts and disputes. She’s also had several run-ins with the law and has been involved in two domestic violence cases, neither of which has yet resulted in convictions.

But Solo, for her faults, is a fierce advocate for her sport.

We’re not going to wade into whether this redeems other transgressions. We’re setting that entirely aside for now. Because instead, we’d like to highlight her work in advocating for equal pay and equal conditions in women’s soccer.

On Tuesday, Solo posted a long missive on her website highlighting the woefully inadequate conditions she and her fellow National Women’s Soccer League players have to put up with. It was some of her finest work off the field.

As an arrived and presumably wealthy superstar, in spite of all the above, she needn’t go to bat for things that don’t affect her nearly as much as they do her teammates. Sure, she plays in the league herself, but she’s really more of a part-timer, since United States women’s national team duties call her away for much of the season. But all the same, she put the league – albeit not her own team’s ownership – on blast in meticulous and well-argued fashion.

(Another subject we won’t be getting into just now: whether the NWSL players have a right to complain. This is a tricky subject, since their league isn’t financially viable without the considerable $10 million-plus outlay by U.S. Soccer in 3½ seasons to cover the shortages.)

In a post with the headline “Time For Change” on her website, Solo began with these words.

“Last year, on the eve of the NWSL championship – that’s the National Women’s Soccer League, our professional league – I wrote a post about the conditions we were working under in an effort to show people just how much the players in the NWSL give and give up to support and build this league. I didn’t run it at the time because I hoped that the many, many things about our league that needed to get better would get better, especially after we’d just won the World Cup.

“They haven’t.

“Sunday’s game between my team, the Seattle Reign, and the Western New York Flash, where both teams were forced to play in the outfield of a baseball field, on a field that was dangerously narrow, and absurd for a professional team to play on, was an outrageous example of what we as players deal with on an ongoing basis.”

In her post, Solo criticized pay, facilities, equipment, a lack of professionalism and hotels and aired other assorted gripes. But what makes her message powerful is that she supported it with pictures, like an ancient trainer’s table that looked like it had been the venue for a knife fight.

“Commissioner [Jeff] Plush,” she wrote, addressing the head of the NWSL, “please: If you truly value the players in this league and want the NWSL to be a model for women’s professional leagues around the world, listen to what we’re saying. Go to some of these hotels, training facilities and games yourself. See the conditions of the league up close. And after you’ve taken it all in, be the leader we need you to be.

“Until then, we the players stand united and those of us who play on the US National Team are using our platform to do more. As you might have seen over the past few days, USWNT players created an “Equal Play Equal Pay” t-shirt to promote our quest for equal pay. But equality is about more than just equal pay. It’s about fairness. And what’s happening in the NWSL is not fair.”

Go check out the full post here.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.