Time in a Bottle

We're locked up. At least, if we're being careful, we should be. So much has changed since I last posted to this blog. The biggest change currently is that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people who are trying to keep everyone safe are staying mostly indoors, wearing masks and social distancing when they do go out in public. 

I had dipped back into the educational field after my ESPN contract expired in 2017, but my contract at the school where I worked ended in June, so I'm job hunting during a pandemic. Fun. 

Lots of things give me hope, however, even during a Trump presidency. The moment for social justice and confronting racial inequality seems more timely than ever and in many ways, the sports world and athletes are leading the way. 

Also, since the untimely death of the Sol, there's a women's soccer team coming to Los Angeles! With a lot of female investors, including Serena Williams and her daughter, Olympia. 

I have to give the NWSL a lot of credit for lasting longer than any previous women's soccer league in the USA. I still wish it had done so without being propped up by the USSF paying the NWSL salaries of the USWNT players. Even more so, I wish the UWSNT players hadn't inserted that infamous clause into their payment contract. To clarify, I'm referring to the contract clause where the USSF had to guarantee the lowest-paid USWNT salary in the NWSL would always be more than the payment of any other player signed to the league. It wouldn't matter if the NWSL Player of the Year was non-USWNT, either (which happened multiple times). There was no bonus option for any non-USWNT NWSL player to ever out-earn the USSF-paid group.  All legal papers pictured here courtesy of Jonathan Tannenwald's posting of the initial filing of the USWNT lawsuit.

Then they sued for equal pay. No, not the NWSL players who weren't part of the USWNT (basically all the foreign players and US players just outside the USWNT top tier), the USWNT players sued the federation for equal pay to the men's contract, ignoring how they had recently signed a separate contract with their own specifications. I'll give them credit for great public relations, because they did an excellent job of promoting their cause as a progressive feminist one. 

It frankly puzzles me how the USWNT can package their pay movement as being on behalf of women when the contract they signed as a group created an NWSL caste system which kept their group (and their group only) as the highest paid. The contract clause was an unbreakable glass ceiling that kept other women from being compensated as well. Many of them looking for "fair pay" for their play either left the league (Kim Little, NWSL MVP 2014) or never signed with it (Deyna Castellanos specified that the inability to be paid as much as the USWNT in the league factored into her signing abroad).

I would love to consider @NWSL but hard to do that when rules do not favor international talent. This article explains some of the reasons in great form. Maybe one day 🤷🏼‍♀️

Me encantaría considerar la @NWSL como opción pero es difícil hacerlo cuando las reglas no nos favorecen https://t.co/dae9JoOBHX

— Deyna Castellanos (@deynac18) November 1, 2019

Think about this, since the NWSL started in 2013 all the way to 2019, a foreign player (Little, Sam Kerr 3x) has won the League Golden Boot the majority of the time. Due at least in part to the "Most-favored Player" clause, none of those players made equal or more than the lowest-paid USWNT player in NWSL salary. 

Back in 2016, I discussed some of these NWSL issues with a national soccer writer. Here's a transcript of our online messages on the topic. 

NSW: I find your candor in the WNT debate -- going back months -- refreshing and remarkably on point. Of course it's 20 women out for themselves. Too bad the woso set is so angry they're not actually reading the words. 

Me: I started out covering women's college soccer & figure the least I can add now and then to the convo is my honest perspective. 

NSW: Deep down, I bet the WNT players would sacrifice the entire NWSL in a NY minute for full-time residency on salary. Preferably in California. 

Me: Some definitely would, and they tend to be the ones with big sponsor compensation as well. You can see the huge difference in the way they play for their club teams versus the national team. Some play NWSL like they're doing the world a favor. 

NSW: Equal play, equal pay, equally M.I.A. 

Me: It's a PR disaster, for sure, for the USSF, and I'm sure they want it all to go away. Problem is, the whole "going away" thing at some point may take NWSL with it. I know it's worst-case scenario, but then again, I've watched two of these leagues go up in smoke. 

NSW: But for the optics of folding your women's league while bidding for a WC, I figured they'd pull the plug this winter. But hard to sustain. My bet is they cut a deal and fold it into MLS. Built-in stadiums, PR megaphone, ticket-sales partners, sponsors -- just makes more sense, financially, to me to have everyone in the same boat, rowing the same direction. Of course, the WNT will hate it, but they may not have a choice. 

Me: Beyond the WNT hating it, there's quite a few in MLS opposed as well. They see the women's league as a huge albatross & have the view that they prefer to follow NFL model, with no supplementary women's league. Even some former women's league supporters, like Anschutz, are in this boat now. My point is, MLS wants to be wooed into taking on a women's league. The WNT controls much of the NWSL structure and they're not going to that altar willingly, let alone wooing. So I'm not optimistic. 

NSW: Garber would be a negotiation genius if he can pull it off. Actually, what it will really take is for the three MLS-affiliated teams to really do well. Nothing convinces people with money like money. He needs Portland's crew to sell it to the others. 

Me: As long as Portland's success is alone, it's an outlier. 

(This part of the convo referred to the starting 11 of an NWSL game about to start)

NSW: As if any NWSL team is allowed to sit a WNT player.

Me: Never even thought about that. Might be unwritten rule, for sure, but how to prove it? 

NSW: Only a fired coach would say so. But then, only a moron would bench a NT-level player for some of the extras and emergency fill-ins that league regularly runs out.

Me: It's a Catch 22 again - why would any NT level players from other top countries ever sign with NWSL if teams can't even match the salary being made by lowest paid USWNT players? That's just a set up to sign mostly scrubs. 

NSW: Exactly. And protect the gravy train from interlopers. Or from getting shown up on the field by better pros. 

Me: Still, I was really surprised to see the venom among some WoSo players for Marta's contract back in WPS. Arguably, she was so good and so well known that she was still worth the profile she brought. But the backlash allowed the USWNT to sorta frame the exclusionary aspect of their contract as a GOOD thing for the NWSL to be so protectionist. But really, it's taking everything bad about Marta's contract and extrapolating it to the entire team, instead of just one person. It's jingoistic, and the opposite of "Fair pay for play" to have a contract that guarantees that the whole team will always make more than any foreign player ever will. 

NSW: That's the biggest bull in the whole argument. It's protectionism, pure and simple. And it makes them all full of crap. Of course, they'd probably just as soon see the league fail. Full time NT residency camp a much easier life. 

Me: Especially for those who prefer to live in Los Angeles anyway. It's just that the league now seems set up on a false premise - geared to players who are in it to try not to win for their clubs, but to earn a call-up and a USWNT contract to play for real money. They hang on to that dream as long as they can, then they let go. 

NSW: Except there is no room at the inn. 

Me: Yep. It ends up like the lottery, or the Hunger Games for those females scrapping so hard with so little, for so long, for just a couple of new USWNT spots that these days are more likely to go to a college phenom anyway, not an NWSL player at all. 

NSW: Truth

What's changed in four years? 

Well, the NWSL has endured and even raised their salary cap a modest amount. The USWNT won another World Cup, which gave them a great bargaining position against the USSF. Also, the infamous NWSL clause disappeared -- or at least, it wasn't specifically present in any of the current documents of the USSF/USWNT lawsuit agreement. The entire 2017 CBA agreement, which expires in 2021, wasn't ever released publicly, so we don't really know. 

 Some other stuff came out, including a horribly sexist and paternalistic argument from the USSF about the USWNT. This led to the resignation of Carlos Cordiero (next time, read your lawyer's papers) and the installation of former WC winner Cindy Parlow Cone. 

Though the latest judge's ruling has focused on how the USWNT as a group signed their contract and it is binding on that basis, it didn't really address the inequality aspect. Frankly, the stupid USSF wording about the women  concerning "certain physical attributes such as speed and strength." made it impossible for the public to focus on more valid differences between the WNT and MNT, like how the qualifying for the World Cup is completely different or how WNT contracts pay salaries differently & offer different benefits (such as to pregnant players) because the women have different situations. Equal pay by the USWNT is always presented without their NWSL pay factored in, although the USSF not only pays that, but through the clause, affected the pay of other league players.  

Media coverage of the USWNT has generally been solidly in their camp, with very few bothering to mention that the 2017 labor contract was voluntarily signed, or that USWNT NWSL salaries are paid by the USSF. Not a single reporter has ever, to the best of my knowledge, even asked any USWNT member about the salary clause that kept all of them on a different earning plane than their club peers, let alone the possible hypocrisy related to their current lawsuit. 

Beau Dure has been one of the few soccer writers even looking at possible USWNT lawsuit ramifications on the next generation of female players.  If you don't want to sign up for Soccer America's free articles or subscribe for unlimited access, I'll spill the tea -- it could be very bad. Even without the worst case scenario, the current lawyer costs have no doubt impacted the USSF finances and therefore, investment in youth development somewhat. 

I'm not changing my name from Canales to "What Happened to the NWSL Salary Clause, USWNT?" yet, though I'd buy a reasonably priced T-shirt of that phrase. It's long been my view that the WNT are deserving of a better contract with the USSF, one that's specific to their needs and desires. The equal pay campaign of USNT being warriors on behalf of all women players, however, that glosses over their past of being decidedly unequal in regards to NWSL seems conveniently revisionist at best and downright deceptive at worst. Pretending there was never a clause about "no non-WNT Player receives compensation greater than a WNT Player," doesn't make it true. The clause was in multiple MOUs that appeared to be in effect from 2013 to 2017, at least.

That matters, even if it's gone now. In this Caitlin Murray article about the new NWSL allocation pay structure, Megan Rapinoe is vociferous in her objection to the possibility that someone on her NWSL squad might possibly get paid more than herself.  Though she specified "we need to find a way to appropriately compensate our best and brightest," that clearly wasn't as big a priority in 2013, when she signed onto the clause that kept all non-USWNT players out of  Most-Favored Player status; that clause isn't mentioned in the article. 

I'm not paid to write on soccer anymore, so who knows if I'll ever get to ask any USWNT member the clause question. Perhaps by the time I do, no one on the current team will know.