I hate to kick someone when he or she is already down, but I’m sorry Sepp Blatter.
The former president of FIFA recently stepped down from his role amid broiling controversy, but while turning a blind eye to corruption during his 18-year tenure, it seems he also completely let the idea of gender equality fly right over his head.
“Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball,” Blatter said in 2004. “They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men – such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?”
For the record, the lighter ball statement is factually incorrect.
A little more than 12 years after Blatter committed this faux pas, women’s sports have seen an organic surge in popularity.
On July 5, 26.7 million Americans tuned in on Saturday evening to watch 23 women – wearing shorts that haven’t been adjusted for tightness – play for the biggest prize in women’s soccer.
The USA-Japan showdown had all the classic elements of a typical sports drama: The U.S. team was playing for a chance to avenge a heartbreaking penalty shootout championship loss from years ago.
For Abby Wambach, it was the one thing that eluded a player who’s won two Olympic gold medals and shattered national team records.
And guess what, the soccer’s great too.
The sport’s growth has come in spite of the players disregarding Blatter’s advice to sexualize the sport to draw viewers. It may be a shocker, but what seems to draw the viewers is the element of the fantastic sport itself.
The rise in popularity of women’s soccer comes at a time where a lot of eyes are on women’s sports. In the world of tennis, Serena Williams is simultaneously chasing a calendar-year slam and Steffi Graf’s record of 22 grand slam wins. Ronda Rousey continues to dominate the world of mixed martial arts by dispatching most of her opponents in mere seconds.
While the increasing attention on women’s soccer is a victory in some respects, there are still other battles to be fought.
The average player on the latest World-Cup-winning iteration of the U.S. team earned an average annual salary of $14,286 last year – a paltry sum when you consider the top male counterparts in Europe earn eight-figure salaries.
Bring that comparison stateside and the numbers still fail to hold up. The National Women’s Soccer League – the highest level of professional women’s soccer in the United States – has a minimum wage of $6,842. While its male counterpart, Major League Soccer, pays salaries that start from $60,000, much more than the NWSL’s maximum of $37,800.
Even the winnings of the newly crowned world champions are four times less than when the men’s team were knocked out in the round of 16 in last year’s men’s World Cup by Belgium.
Just counting on the attention from winning the world cup in Canada isn’t guaranteed to launch the sport into unprecedented, sustainable heights. The USWNT has traditionally had success on the international stage. The team recently won three back-to-back Olympic gold medals in 2012, 2008 and 2004, and Saturday’s win marks its third World Cup victory. But where the U.S. doesn’t seem so indomitable is in its struggle to maintain its domestic leagues.
The top-tier women’s soccer league has gone through several iterations, including the Women’s United Soccer Association and Women’s Premier Soccer League, which have both folded. In its place is the NWSL, which hopes to subsidize operating costs by having a portion of national team players paid for by their respective soccer governing bodies.
While this definitely helps to retain the professional services of top-tier national team players in domestic leagues, it doesn’t do enough to support the development of young players who’ve just entered the league. The situation forces many underpaid players to live with NWSL host families in order to save on lodging and food expenses and continue chasing their dreams.
In other cases, some players just don’t have the confidence financially to keep pursuing a career in an environment that undervalues their talent.
The Boston Breakers lost its Rookie of the Year and second-top goal scorer Jazmine Reeves after the forward decided to hang up her boots at the ripe age of 22. Reeves, who earned $11,000 – just below the national poverty threshold – in her first and only season as a professional soccer player, gave that dream up for a job as an area manager for Amazon, citing low pay and poor infrastructure as a reason for her retirement.
“I never really thought about it until I was playing professionally,” Reeves said in an article with The Atlantic. “Then I realized, wow, there’s a team down the street from us playing in Gillette Stadium and we can’t even get a consistent training field half the time … You can’t deny the fact that there’s a pattern.”
The thing is, Reeves isn’t the only one.
The disparity in pay is almost archaic given the sign of the times and trends surrounding sports.
In 2007, the efforts of Venus Williams and many other tennis players and Women’s Tennis Association officials paid off when Wimbledon and Roland Garros joined the U.S. and Australian Open in offering women equal prize money.
In the world of mixed martial arts, UFC president Dana White went from saying in 2011 he would never incorporate a women’s division in his promotion to having the undefeated UFC women’s bantamweight and women’s strawweight champions, Ronda Rousey and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, each headline cards in 2015.
The difference between soccer and the examples from other arenas is that those sports’ governing organizations supported the gender equality for its athletes.
And so here’s where we come full circle to FIFA.
FIFA has to begin acknowledging the talents and accomplishments of the women all around the world competing for a chance to be a part of the beautiful game. FIFA needs to first begin paying the women in their FIFA-sanctioned international tournaments the same prize money as they do the men.
What it needs to do next is help the national soccer organizations fund their domestic leagues. This will help open doors to a world where clubs can firstly pay their athletes a respectable and livable amount. In addition, it allows the league to make investments in improving infrastructure and production value both to draw in more fans and broker a better TV or live streaming deal.
With the state of crisis that FIFA is experiencing right now, hopefully this will be one of the first things on its agenda once it replaces its wayward officials.
A day after the 2005 Wimbledon finals, then-Wimbledon champion Venus Williams told the board members of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club to close their eyes and imagine being a little girl who makes it to the grandest stage of tennis only to be told you’re not worth the same as a boy.
For a girl who’s beginning to fall in love with a sport and starts having dreams of playing professionally, what true incentive will she have to strive to be the best at her craft, if it most likely will end up with her being underpaid?
There is a need for female role models who not only perform at the top level, but get paid what they deserve. Female athletes from the next generation need that inspiration.
Whether she’s 12 or 22.