For U.S. Women, a Narrow Victory and a Growing Divide

Life, then, at least in a soccer sense, is good. Off the field, though, the interests of the women’s team, which last year sued U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination, and the federation continue to diverge.

Two weeks ago, in court filings in California, the team set $67 million as the price for settling its lawsuit. But on Saturday night, and again in an interview on Sunday, the federation’s president, Carlos Cordeiro, said the team and its lawyers were actually demanding tens of millions of dollars more.

In a letter to U.S. Soccer’s members that he later released publicly, Cordeiro said the women’s players actually had refused to even discuss a proposed multimillion-dollar settlement of their lawsuit unless U.S. Soccer first pledged to make up the difference in the payouts for the men’s and women’s World Cups moving forward. The requirement, he said, could cost U.S. Soccer tens of millions of dollars every four years that, he argued, the federation could not afford.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/sports/soccer/uswnt-equal-pay-letter.html