The US women’s soccer team trounced Team Thailand in soccer on Tuesday 13-0 in their first game of the world cup.
They celebrated every goal… excessively which bothered some folks.
The women’s team is also sued the United States Soccer Federation in 2016 for sex discrimination due to their alleged pay inequities.
On Tuesday Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pushed the conspiracy that women are not being paid as much as men due to sexism.
Here's an idea: If you win 13-0—the most goals for a single game in World Cup history—you should be paid at least equally to the men's team.
Congratulations, #USWNT!
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) June 11, 2019
The truth is that women’s soccer does not bring in as much as men’s soccer.
The Examiner reported:
Men’s teams are generally paid higher in top-level soccer because they bring in substantially larger audiences on average than women’s teams. They also tend to bring in higher revenues — and that includes national teams. It is telling that for 2015, when the U.S. women’s team actually won the World Cup, its revenue was just a bit larger than that of the men’s team, which was in the middle of an off-year.
World Cups are the pinnacle of soccer competition, and so ratings from these tournaments represent a good point of comparison. But it’s also worth noting that there are no women’s pro leagues with the kind of viewership or revenue that even Major League Soccer, which just recently became profitable, brings in.
Almost half the world watched the men’s 2018 World Cup, with nearly 3.6 billion total viewers tuning in to watch some part of the tournament. The final match alone reached an audience of over 1.1 billion people. Subsequently, the tournament’s sponsor, FIFA, brought in a profit of over $6 billion.
The women’s team garners significant but substantially lower viewership. We don’t have data for the 2019 tournament, as it’s currently underway, but during the women’s last World Cup in 2015, 764 million viewers tuned in for some portion of the tournament. This is quite good, but it still pales in comparison to the men’s tournament’s audience. Seeing as professional sports is an entertainment industry, it’s not at all unfair — let alone sexist — to pay teams more if they bring in larger audiences. With an audience five times as large, the men’s World Cup is simply a bigger affair.
