Emma Hayes has one of the premier jobs in women’s sports. Whoever replaces Gregg Berhalter will, in the grand scheme of things, just be some guy
A big fight on the soccer internet used to be whether or not the United States Women’s National Team should be paid the same on a per-game basis as their counterparts on the United States Men’s National Team. While often argued in bad faith by the more trollish types opposed to equal pay, this fight was actually important, in that it was part of a yearslong legal struggle by the WNT players to be compensated in the way that they deserved for their myriad accomplishments on and off the field.
That conflict was more or less resolved in 2022 when the USWNT and USMNT struck a combined collective bargaining agreement with the United States Soccer Federation that ensured equal pay across the two teams. It has since then been replaced with another, much stupider, fight.
The new argument is centered around whether the wider implications of that 2022 agreement prevent the federation from hiring a World Cup-winning head coach for the men’s team. The theory, as advanced by people with varying degrees of both credibility and anonymity, is this: Due to the new equal pay rules allegedly extending to the coaching staff as well as the players the USWNT coach must be paid the same as the USMNT coach. That means that the USSF cannot afford to hire a truly top level coach, because they would be forced to match his salary on the women’s side.
It is sort of unclear whether or not this is actually true. The closest that anyone with inside knowledge has come to actually indicating that there is in fact some sort of linkage between the pay for the two head coaches was around four weeks ago, during a June 10 live stream of CBS Sports’ “Call It What You Want ” podcast.
The relevant section comes at around 47:40, when former USMNT defender Jimmy Conrad theorizes that while top managers in the world are too invested in their club careers to spend four years trying to make a good national team into a great one, someone at that level might be tempted to spend 18 months doing that.
Brian McBride, the former USMNT striker and more relevantly the very recent USMNT general manager cuts him off to say that even if that were the case, the financial picture is slightly more complicated. Here is exactly what he says:
Jimmy, that’s the other big issue that people don’t talk about. Because the federation is a non-for-profit, and we’ve gone through the process of making sure that the men and women — which is great — are paid the same, the head coaches are paid the same. You have to look at this and understand any move you make — and if you’re going for one of these big names, you’re talking $8-to-$10 million a year. And we don’t have the finances for that.
Maybe after the World Cup that changes. But at this point in time, your pool is limited. Unless there’s a situation where a coach says “I want this. I will take a paycut, and I will go and put my stamp on this group.” The pool is a lot smaller than what people think, just because of the ability for the federation to pay.
So there’s certainly an implication. But he doesn’t outright say that the federation would have to pay $8-to-10 million to both coaches in that scenario, so he might not literally mean that the USWNT coach salary would rise to match a lavishly paid new men’s coach. He could simply mean that since Emma Hayes currently makes the same amount as Gregg Berhalter 1Goodbye Gregg. — which is around triple what her predecessor Vlatko Andonovski made — the federation has less total capital available to hire a top men’s coach. If you are paying $1.6 million for a position that you previously paid $450,000 for, there is less money in your operating budget.
Similarly, he references equal pay to the women and men players as a financial constraint: There’s less money to pay for a men’s coach now that the USSF is no longer artificially keeping its costs down with a humiliatingly sexist pay structure.
More to the point, it is incredibly unlikely that there is a literal paper agreement that ties head coach pay between the two programs. Notably, there isn’t anything about coach salaries in the 2022 collective bargaining agreement, as it is a legal document covering players, and coaches are not players.
If there is some sort of agreement on maintaining gender parity in coach salaries it is probably an unwritten policy related to, but not literally part of, the equal pay agreement. It is far more likely that there is political and social pressure that means that even if the USSF wanted to, they couldn’t pay a men’s coach $8 million while the women’s coach is making $1.6.
And if that is the case, then the USSF is absolutely doing the right thing.
The USWNT coach should make the same as the USMNT coach. In fact, the women’s national team coach should make more than the men’s national team coach, because coaching the USWNT is a much more important and prestigious job.
I am a genuine men’s national team sicko. There are very few things in this world, discounting actually important stuff like the health and safety of my friends and family or climate change or social justice and world peace, that I care about more than the USMNT doing well.
But there is no comparing where the two teams rank in terms of importance in global soccer or in American sports or even in American culture more widely. If two defining trends of 21st century sports in the United States have been the growth of soccer and the growth of women’s professional team sports, that comes down in no small part to the USWNT.
In 1991, the team won the first ever women’s World Cup. W2hich, insanely, FIFA refused to officially dub the “World Cup” so technically it was the “1st FIFA World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&Ms Cup.” In 1991, there was no national men’s professional soccer league in America and the WNBA was five years away from existing. Eight years later, Major League Soccer was averaging 14,282 fans per game and the WNBA was bringing in 10,207 each night. That summer, 90,185 packed into the Rose Bowl to watch the USWNT defeat China in the World Cup final. That’s about 3% of total MLS attendance on a single night.
That we now live in a world where millions of Americans are glued to women’s college basketball, where men’s soccer stadiums in Europe are packed to the rafters for women’s Champions League game, where there are soccer bars in every midsize city across the United States, is thanks in large part to the way that the USWNT captured the minds of people around the globe in the 1990s and 2000s.3In terms of the stature of women athletes generally, I will hear any arguments about the role played by the great track stars of 1970s and 1980s or Billie Jean King or any other individual pioneers, but women’s professional team sports are divided pretty clearly into pre-USWNT success and post-USWNT success.
No American men’s soccer player has ever become a part of mainstream American culture the way that Alex Morgan or Megan Rapinoe or Brandi Chastain did. Mia Hamm was in a Gatorade commercial with Michael Jordan back when being in a Gatorade commercial with Michael Jordan put you just behind the Secretary of Commerce in the presidential line of succession.
The coach of the USWNT occupies a hugely important position in the landscape of global soccer. Arguably, it is the most prestigious coaching job in all of women’s sports, at least in the United States. The salary should reflect the weight of that history.
It’s also just a much better job than coaching the men’s team. The next USMNT coach will be tasked with somehow working a miracle to get a bunch of very good players to achieve greatness. They will have access to probably the 12th or 13th best roster in global men’s soccer, and be asked to get that team to be a top eight or top four finisher at the World Cup.
Frankly, even if that happens, the global face of “American men’s soccer coach” will probably still be a fictional character played by Jason Sudeikis.
The USWNT, meanwhile, features several players who will very soon be among the absolute best in the world, if they aren’t already. Naomi Girma, Sophia Smith, Catarina Macario, and Jaedyn Shaw are all some of the brightest young talents in women’s soccer. Lindsay Horan has not always performed at her best for the national team, but she’s an anchor in midfield for one the best sides in Europe. Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman regularly embarrass defenders in the world’s most physical league.
The USWNT has an electric group of players and can reasonably expect to compete for the World Cup. The USMNT has lots of exciting young prospects that might be able to make a run to a semifinal if everything breaks their way. People who coach the teams that win the biggest trophies get paid more than people who coach the teams that have an outside shot at coming sort of close to winning the biggest trophies.
And listen, there are absolutely counterarguments here: Because the men’s team is worse than the women’s team, they need to drop more cash to entice a coach who is good enough to make a difference to take the job. Because there is so much money in European men’s soccer, and so much sexism in the world generally, top men’s soccer coaches command higher salaries than women’s soccer coaches and the USSF simply needs to match that in order to compete.
That’s all fair enough. But the USWNT is the crown jewel of soccer in America and still the most successful team in all of global women’s soccer. That team is worth more to the sport in this country than the men’s team is. The coach should be paid in a way that reflects that.
