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Women’s World Cup Payout Arrives After USWNT’s 2022 CBA Struggle

Emily Caron
·5 min read

Come late August, when the 2023 Women’s World Cup is said and done, the U.S. women’s earnings will be pooled with the $13 million the men’s team took home in Qatar last winter after reaching the round of 16. Then, for the first time in the history of U.S. Soccer, equal payouts from the aggregate prize pool will be dished out to the men’s and women’s players.

“It’s exciting to see all the hard work that we’ve all put in actually play out,” Cindy Parlow Cone, the president of U.S. Soccer, said in a Zoom interview. “I’ve been in the equal pay fight for over two decades, and to finally reach equal pay with our senior men’s and women’s national team and to see the impact it is having throughout the soccer ecosystem, [and] the ripple effects to other industries and other sports, has been really cool.”

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The $13 million payday the men’s team secured in Qatar was more than three times the $4 million prize the women’s team took home for winning the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France and more than six times the $2 million the women’s team earned for winning the 2015 Canadian iteration.

The winner’s share of the upcoming tournament in Australia and New Zealand will start to bridge the gap but still trails the men’s prizes. Of the record $110 million up for grabs Down Under, $10.5 million will go to the champion, $7.5 million to the runner-up, $6.75 million to the third-place finisher and $6.25 million to fourth. (The USWNT has reached at least the semifinals in all eight Women’s World Cup tournaments to date, though the top of the field has arguably never been stronger.)

A third consecutive World Cup victory for Team USA would bring the total pool to $23.5 million. Of that, 10% will go to U.S. Soccer, per the terms of the new men’s and women’s national team’s CBAs, and the remaining 90% will be shared equally between both squads—which would amount to almost $11 million total for each team.

It’s a pay equity milestone negotiated into the CBAs signed in 2022 after a years-long battle between members of the women’s team and U.S. Soccer. The end result—equalized national team salaries, bonuses and cuts of FIFA World Cup winnings for each cycle of men’s and women’s tournaments—is what several other countries, including the U.S.’s northern neighbor, Canada, are now fighting for.

One of the people who pushed the American equal pay agreements over the finish line was Parlow Cone, 45, a former U.S. women’s national team player and two-time World Cup participant. She was named president of the U.S. Soccer Federation in March 2020 after Carlos Cordeiro’s abrupt resignation, becoming the first woman to hold the job.

Parlow Cone took over amid the federation’s long and contentious litigation with women’s national team players, who sued in federal court for equal pay in 2016. Two years into her tenure, in February of 2022, the case was settled for $24 million. By summer, the men’s and women’s national teams had both officially ratified the new CBAs that paid players equal rates going forward.

The pay equity victory helped Parlow Cone win reelection as the governing body’s president in March of 2022 for a full four-year term.

The disparities in the prize money awarded by FIFA at the two tournaments were a focal point in the U.S. women’s team’s six-year legal battle for equal pay—and a difficult problem to solve without massive changes in FIFA’s prizes. And while the total payout for the women’s tournament is up 300% over 2019, it still makes up just a third of the $440 million awarded for the men’s contest. Argentina, for example, took home $42 million for winning the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and all the men’s teams were guaranteed $9 million just for qualifying.

Reaching pay equity at World Cups—which FIFA has said is its eventual goal—will take time, as it may for individual federations.

Parlow Cone said understanding that informs the advice she’s given to the representatives from other soccer federations that have reached out to her for insight into how U.S. Soccer overcame the seemingly insurmountable gaps.

“One thing that I have expressed to everyone—because not every federation is in a position to get to equal pay like we did, which even took us a really long time—is making sure that they’re continuing to make progress,” Parlow Cone said. “We don’t want to prevent progress because we’re trying to get to perfection.”

Equal pay isn’t an overnight endeavor, as the U.S.’s own six-year battle exemplified. But Parlow Cone is optimistic that progress can continue across the globe in the interim, whether that’s getting federations to invest incrementally more in their girls and women’s soccer programs or to put more resources behind closing the participation gender gap.

Her No. 1 tip? “Formulate a plan. If you want to get to equal pay, how do you get there? What can you do now? And then what does that look like over the next X years?”

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