All About Women’s Sports: Equal Pay for the USWNT?

By Claire Guest

To close the pay gap between the Women’s and Men’s teams, the U.S. National Soccer teams mutually decided to split their World Cup bonuses. With the historic collective bargaining agreement reached in May between U.S. Soccer and its national teams, the USWNT will receive half the prize money of the USMNT bonus money from the 2022 World Cup.

Since the Men’s World Cup contains a much larger bonus pool than the Women’s World Cup, this pooling of money enables both teams to equally receive the same amount of money, despite the unequal treatment by FIFA.

For example, the 2018 men’s tournament had a total prize pot of $400 million, while the 2019 women’s tournament pot had only $30 million. 

“My ideal vision is for FIFA to equalize not only the World Cup prize money, but to equalize their investment in the women’s and girls’ game,” U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone told Just Women’s Sports in 2021.

With the USMNT advancing past the group stage, they earned $13 million dollars. The USWNT and USMNT will split this profit, with each team receiving $6.5 million.

This $6.5 million is more money than the USWNT received for winning the 2015 and 2019 World Cups combined.

With the Women’s World Cup coming in 2023, the USWNT and the USMNT will also split the Women’s teams bonuses. The further they go in the tournament, the more money they will receive from FIFA.

The Women’s World Cup will receive $30 million dollars as a total pool, which is double the amount 2015. Since the USWNT were champions of the 2019 World Cup, they received only $4 million. If the prize money stayed the same, the USWNT and the USMNT would each take around $2 million dollars.

This difference between the Women’s team getting $2 million dollars for winning the whole tournament, compared to the USMNT receiving $13 million dollars for making it to the group stage highlights FIFA’s unfair pay disparity.