Listen, * Peter Keating joins Mina to discuss the U.S. Soccer's court victory and what's next for the U.S. women's national team. Dave Berri of Forbes explains. For instance, 994 million people watched at least one minute of the 2019 Women's World Cup on linear television, a 30% increase from 2015, while 3.26 billion watched a minute or more of the men's World Cup in 2018, up just 2% from four years earlier. "The good news is that folks outside the federation, from sponsors to broadcasters to partners, are incredibly bullish on the U.S. women's national team and on women's football," Levinson says. Last season, Ogwumike earned $115,000. Bird said. I personally love watching the WNBA because these women are extremely talented shooters, ball handlers and passers and I find the teamwork displayed by WNBA teams to be something that the NBA could take a lesson or two from. Leagues and clubs are subject to what economists call "network externality," which means the value of something depends on how many consumers use it. Of 199 countries for which the World Bank has GDP data for, in 2012 Bangladesh ranked 175th. NBC and its fleet of cable channels showed a record 631.5 hours of the 2018 Winter Olympics -- and for the first time ever, a majority of prime-time airtime was devoted to women's sports, according to research by Andrew Billings of the University of Alabama and James Angelini of the University of Delaware. But the number was wrong. These women should be paid more. Of course, the sports world is bigger and more lucrative today. Yet nobody is suggesting that Ogwumike ought to be paid $27 million a year -- not even the WNBA athletes who have been fighting the longest for better wages. Instead, she has a very reasonable argument for why the players deserve more: Kelsey Plum was a guest on The Residency Pod where she laid out an obvious and easily fixable discrepancy between the NBA and WNBA. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. So did Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber. The financial disparities between the leagues are undeniable. All Rights Reserved. Sabreena Merchant is a women's basketball Staff Writer for The Athletic. Major sponsors, including Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, released statements supporting the athletes. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. It is true that on average, female athletes are paid far less than male athletes. Players will also be able to earn up to $250,000 apiece from a $1.6 million pool the league is dedicating to marketing agreements and will gain free agency after five years, down from six. Leading WNBA players were stunned, but they took note of the NBA's terminology, which was full of words like "development," "programmatic opportunities," "supporting infrastructure" and "tools for top young players to grow." The week in tennis: Djokovic and Nadal out, and the younger generation steps up again, Why it's easy to forget that the world's best full-back, Ellie Carpenter, is just 22, College softball rankings: The top 25 teams in the NCAA this week, Everything you need to know about "The Bag Game," a podcast on college hoops' bribery scandal, USWNT lawsuit vs. U.S. Soccer explained: Defining pay gaps, what's at stake, a federal judge sided with U.S. Soccer on most of the key issues at stake in the lawsuit, The WNBA inked a landmark labor deal in January, and reached an eight-year agreement in January. In 2015, the WNBA averaged 202,000 viewers on ESPN and ESPN2. Heading into this season, he had made six All-Star teams, and he created 0.247 win shares per 48 minutes in 2018-19. Has commitment been equal? They cant. In 2017, the WNBA posted its highest attendance in six years, more than 10,000 fans below the per game mark seen in the NBA in 2016-17, NBA broadcasts averaged around five times that. Those are honorable reasons to stick with the WNBA, but players shouldnt have to choose between these personal anchors to the league and their need to make a living. But in stark contrast the highest-paid WNBA players in 2022Diana Taurasi, Jewell Loyd, and Breanna Stewarteach earned . The answer is that reward is not necessarily proportional to effort. The athletes did want a larger share of league revenues. Investment includes public money too, usually in the form of taxpayer-financed stadiums. wells city council election results 2022. ford city mall shooting today. The American squad beat the Netherlands 2-0 in the final, capping a month of dominance in which Team USA outscored opponents 26-3. In actuality, the WNBA's all-time assists leader said she believes that calls for equality between men's and women's professional basketball are less about exorbitant salaries than about equal investment and exposure for the WNBA. Compare that to the NFL average of $2.7 million (median is $860K), $4.41 million in the MLB, $3.5 million in the NHL, and the average NBA salary is a whopping $9.662 million for the 2022-23 season. As an example, the Global Sports Salary Survey (GSSS), produced by the U.K.-based research firm Sporting Intelligence, counted 137,021 men who played professional soccer in the world in 2017 and just 1,287 women -- a ratio of 106 to 1. In the same way, if you're the only fan you know of a new sports team, your experience will be extremely limited. Jackson, whose husband and son are both NBA veterans, kept asking, "What motivates you?" Sue Bird is one of the greatest players in WNBA history, but that doesn't mean she thinks she and her colleagues in the W should be paid the same as their male counterparts. Beyond anticipating the savings from that huge gulf, Gulati had a second simple reason for paying men and women differently: U.S. Soccer replicates the compensation practices of FIFA, the organization that is by far the biggest driver of unequal pay in global soccer. The highest-paid players in the WNBA make less than 14 percent of that. As someone who has studied the WNBA for years, only about half of WNBA franchises finish the season in the black, a market segment worth around $830 million, have argued that interest drives coverage, Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), Lecturer in Environmental Art - School of Art and Design. This is something that the 150-ish WNBA players have been fighting to change for quite some time. And for the first time, gamers could play with WNBA players in NBA Live 18. Your joys and agonies and memories increase exponentially as your network of friends and family involved with the same team expands. , in large part, for the financial security it provides. "The NWSL has the opportunity to be the best league in the world," says Becca Roux, executive director of the U.S. Women's National Team Players Association. He certainly was right about that. It also includes corporate sponsorship. For all that backbreaking labor, in Bangladesh, it was just $662. CBS Sports Network struck a deal in 2019 to show 40 WNBA games a year, increasing the number of regular-season contests on national television by more than 60%. If the NBA wanted to pay WNBA players more, they could. ", FIFA has a notoriously checkered past with women athletes. But by the time Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and their mates were celebrating their triumph, the world knew they would earn just $4 million collectively, a fraction of what their male counterparts had taken home a year earlier. "We have to consider why the revenue is different, what bias and discrimination are in play," says Lindsay Kagawa Colas, senior vice president for women's sports at Wasserman, whose clients include a bevy of the WNBA's biggest stars, such as Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore, as well as gymnast Katelyn Ohashi and swimmer Simone Manuel. Shes played in Russia for the past seven years, and she makes over $1 million per season. The contract, which runs through 2027, pays players an average of $130,000, with the top stars able to earn more than $500,000 through salary, marketing agreements, an in-season tournament and bonuses. The Athletic, for example, expanded its reporting in 2019 to include regular coverage of all 12 WNBA clubs and women's college basketball. terry mcdonough aerodata. BroBible is the #1 place on the internet for the very best content from the worlds of sports, culture, gear, high tech, and more. Meanwhile, the U.S. women want more than a new pay structure. This pay gap is very real. The minimum salary for an NBA player for the 2018-19 season will be $838,464. I didn't make the meme. OUR SERVICES. Since the WNBA costs $70 million to run, it has technically lost an average of $10 million every year that it has existed which, as one lovely blogger puts it, the NBA subsidizes out of the goodness of its politically correct heart.. For some players, the math just doesn't make sense when they're trying to . Professor of Educational Psychology & Higher Education, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. As David Berri wrote for Forbes recently. In 2017, for example, a majority of the most popular sports sites on the Internet didn't dedicate even one page to a women's sport or league, according to research by Berri. Nancy Lough does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. why wnba players should be paid morespillover david quammen sparknotes record attendance at old wembley curiosity daily podcast cancelled mega foods vitamins class action lawsuit passo della forcola webcam why wnba players should be paid more But suddenly the USSF has a new president in Parlow Cone and a new CEO in William Wilson, formerly an executive at Wasserman and MLS. He covers an array of topics including NFL, Pop Culture, Fishing News, and the Outdoors. "FIFA wants to develop a specific commercial strategy for women's football in order to attract additional funds that can be attributed directly to the women's game. About 70 WNBA players went to compete overseas this offseason, the WNBA said Monday. This year, the WNBA gave companies the opportunity to sponsor a second jersey patch, while offering sponsors the chance to include a logo on the court during games that dont air on ESPN. All they want is better pay equity. Many NBA players are vocal in their support of the womens league because of the quality of play and because they understand the hard work these women put into their game. Teams will provide housing with two bedrooms for athletes with children, individual hotel rooms on the road and flight upgrades. He estimated that WNBA player salaries constitute 22 percent of league revenue, while NBA player salaries amount to roughly 50 percent of league revenues. From the highest-paid athletes to the newest rookies, professional male athletes are still making significantly more money than women. Griners current yearly salary in the WNBA is $227,900, which is just about a fourth of what she made in Russia this winter, and there are only three players in the WNBA who make more than Griner by $194. From 2005 to 2018, municipalities in the U.S. forked over a combined $738 million in subsidies for new Major League Soccer fields. In 2021, Tacoma and Louisville are scheduled to open the first soccer-specific stadiums with National Women's Soccer League clubs as their highest-level tenants. The Daily Nebraskan (@dailynebraskan) Instagram photos and videos. It would seriously impair our ability to support our mission and invest in these other critical developmental areas.". U.S. Soccer's lobbyists even used it to argue that the American women's national team is paid fairly, simply because there's so much less available to pay them. | by Yannick Ondoa | Medium Write Sign up Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. ", "And then it's like a 15-year-old boy," she added. As important as the equal pay lawsuit is for the players who are seeking back pay and damages, it's essentially about the past. This would give them the opportunity to negotiate a new deal that increases the salary cap, along with maximum and minimum salaries. Meanwhile, the organization's financial reports projected just $131 million in total revenue from the 2019 Women's World Cup, a number that spread like wildfire among outlets last summer. And I dont want to lose the WNBA or miss out on seeing the best female basketball players playing in the league. Similar analysis doesnt seem to exist for the WNBA, but we do know its revenue is far lower. Listen. Then, in a voice mocking the trolls in her mentions, she said: "'Maybe if you had viewership you would have that money. Essentially, the women want to partner in growing their game. I'm not going to call out some of the bad NBA players we got in commercials but y'all know who they are." In 2023, the highest average WNBA salary is held by Aces guard Jackie Young as she . They could advertise the womens league better. Players who go overseas end up playing almost year-round, with little break for their bodies to recover. Only 14 players in the league make $200,000 or more, according to Spotrac data. This simple. Clearly, the WNBA still needs to work on establishing its long-term viability, and some might argue that the players shouldnt request raises until the league has become more financially stable. They want more open accounting and less obeisance to FIFA. The move was controversial at the time given all major sport leagues in the U.S. had previously opted to keep jerseys free of advertisements but the NBA followed their lead in 2017. But WNBA players only take less than 25 percent of the total earnings of their league. At the end of the day, people will still complain that the WNBA is boring, less competitive and that theres no dunking. So Barbosa will be paid nearly five times what the WNBA MVP earned, and Barbosa won't even play for the Suns. This lack of media coverage has always hampered womens sports. What many of the women are asking for is equity in revenue sharing, as economist David Berri has written about repeatedly at Forbes. Even compared with other fields traditionally dominated by men, it's far harder for women to break into the upper ranks of compensation in sports. You have permission to edit this article. Plenty of signs indicate that will happen, and it should. They want a piece of the action. FIFA did list $131 million under "total revenue" in its financials, but for some reason, that was merely an investment figure -- how much the organization initially budgeted to spend on the 2019 World Cup, as Rachel Bachman of The Wall Street Journal reported last September. But using league revenue, economics professor Dave Berri was recently able to calculate a significant gender wage gap in another respect. That includes outlays by committed owners with deep pockets, rather than the unstable financing that has so often plagued franchises in women's sports. The athletes are planning to appeal, but at least for the moment, crucial parts of the suit have been dismissed. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE. This past July, though, Barbosa was waived by the team. And theyre not done. Suppose we take the various rates of compensation for the men's national team -- bonuses for appearances and wins in friendlies, tournaments and World Cups -- and apply them to the members of the women's national team, player by player. Demanding that female players be paid what they deserve is not about comparing the WNBA to the NBA as apples-to-apples salaries. Taylor remains the backup, but maybe for one just one more season, as this is the last . Nneka Ogwumike was the No. It has lost the support of the men's national team, which has accused U.S. Soccer of "working very hard to sell a false narrative" and called for a sharp increase in women's compensation. As Las Vegas Aces forward Kelsey Plum pointed out in 2018, 50% of the revenue in the NBA goes to players salaries, while only 20% of the WNBAs revenue goes to their players. Meanwhile, Leandro Barbosa is scheduled to earn $500,000 from the Phoenix Suns in 2017-18. Charles Barkley appeared on The Bird and Taurasi Show during the 2023 womens national title game on Sunday and didnt hold back his thoughts on what WNBA players go through in comparison to other sports leagues. "Female players are pretty, if you excuse me saying so," former FIFA president Sepp Blatter opined in 2004. Steph Curry's salary ($40 million) is more than three times as much as what every player in the WNBA earned in 2019 combined ($12.5 million). The league average in 2022 is just $102,751 for WNBA players. News coverage of women's sports seems to have shifted considerably in just the past few years, though there aren't any published studies yet to say by just how much. For decades, sports media figures have argued that interest drives coverage. But on a fundamental economic level, it is wrong, and the disparities we see between athletes salaries illustrate why. Total attendance in the WNBAs 21st season was 1,574,078, with teams averaging 7,716 fans per game. At peak popularity, marketability and leverage, they are also seeking more equitable spending on coaching. But in a sense, it doesnt matter. Meanwhile, over the same span, women's coach Jill Ellis, winner of back-to-back World Cups, earned $390,409.) And no one wants to see the WNBA die, least of all the players. So this much is clear: Whenever and however sports reemerge from the deep freeze of the coronavirus pandemic, women's leagues and federations will face changing expectations as they answer the basic question of how to compensate their players. The women's national team filed a wage discrimination act against US Soccer, and in turn received a significant raise, increased game bonuses, improved per diem stipends, better travel benefits,. She previously covered the WNBA and NBA for SB Nation. In a way, this strategy makes perfect sense. I do not know if the difference in demand for mens and womens basketball is because of a difference in the quality of the product or because of sexism on the part of consumers. On the other hand, sports news and highlight segments have historically focused overwhelmingly on men. Taurasi ranks third in the league with a $234,936 salary. Maybe most important, while TV ratings were way up, promotion and marketing remained extremely limited. The NBA commissioner complained publicly that the WNBA was losing more than $10 million a year, but that number said more about how the women's game was still small scale than about any significant damage to the bottom line of NBA teams. These short-term issues could blow up U.S. Soccer's priorities, and new labor negotiations are an even bigger threat. Refresh the page, check Medium 's. Where is the fair days wage for the fair days work? Kevin Durant doesnt produce more basketball per hour worked than Breanna Stewart, the Seattle Storm forward who claimed the WNBA MVP award in just her third season. Theyre making the most of it while they can. Last week, this exciting season of the WNBA ended after the Seattle Storm swept the Washington Mystics to win their third championship. Not surprisingly, sponsorship revenue, in turn, has grown. U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner held that the women's national team had agreed to the terms of the deal that paid them. "If players are talking ridiculous salaries ," Silver began. If the WNBA Players Association wants to opt out of its current collective bargaining agreement with the league and renegotiate terms, they have to do so by Oct. 31. THE CHANTS BEGAN almost as soon as the U.S. women's soccer team won the World Cup last July. Part of HuffPost News. ESPN, for instance, dedicated more than 16,000 hours across all its platforms and partners to the programming of women's sporting events last year, up from 7,500 in 2015 and just 1,500 in 2010. Please, enable JavaScript and reload the page to enjoy our modern features. The maximum veteran salary is $113,500. Worldwide, 18% of university presidents, 11% of astronauts who have been to space and 6% of major-company CEOs are women. The average WNBA player earns an average salary of around $75,000 per year. In the United States, women make up 24% of Congress, 18% of surgeons, 10% of Christian church leaders. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Which, again, Kelsey Plum isnt arguing for NBA salaries she just believes the league should pay out 50% of shared revenue the same as the NBA does. While the NBA is quite profitable with a blockbuster $24 billion TV deal, billions of dollars in advertising and a robust revenue sharing system only about half of WNBA franchises finish the season in the black. But in 2007, a furniture-store owner named Hilton Koch bought the club for $10 million, then couldn't pay its bills, and the team was disbanded the following year.) In other words, if the WNBA doesnt figure this out, players are going to opt out of the league. As for the players, well, they deserve to be able to play the game they love (that theyre good at!) Finally, sports need media to reach their full potential. "When I think of pay equity, I think of the opportunity that the NBA and other male sports leagues have to be successful.". In this article, we compare salaries in sports like soccer, basketball and tennis, and consider some notable changes over the past decade. By contrast, the highest scoring team in the NBA that year was the Golden State Warriors, who averaged 112.8 points per game. Kelseys been in the WNBA for 5 seasons with a career average of 12.4ppg but she put up an average of 20.2 points/game in the 2022 season. Now, as the league begins a 25th season of soldiering on in the face of those tired arguments, perhaps the time has. The biggest lesson: Today's athletes are asking for something even bigger than the strict definition of "pay equity." The raw numbers make it easy to assume that women make less money simply because fans prefer men's games -- that pay follows revenues, and revenues follow popularity. Pay is so low that it has compelled most American athletes to play overseas as well as in the WNBA just to make a living, increasing their wear and tear and their injury risk. At least not yet. And make no mistake, fans today have more access than ever to the games played by female athletes, because a burgeoning number of networks and apps, hungry to acquire and offer new content, are programming all kinds of formerly "niche" sports. Jackson posted the phrase "language of investment" on her office wall. As demands for equal pay spark across arenas, boardrooms, TV screens, Twitter feeds and even presidential campaigns, it's time to take a deeper look. We had incredibly thrilling semifinals series that went a full five games apiece. They kept telling her, "This is the legacy we want to protect.". Its so much wear and tear. "It's not just FIFA that needs to be clear about the revenue that it's making from the Women's World Cup," says Molly Levinson, spokesperson for the U.S. women's national team. Check out the clip of Bird's and Ray's conversation below: Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. Union president Ogwumike announced the move in an essay for The Players' Tribune titled "Bet on Women.". "Right now, WNBA fans are just beginning to pass their fan preferences down to their children.". New arenas allow teams to improve their game experience, hike prices and build up adjoining land. The disparity is so wide that the money pulls skilled men into a career in sports, while the lack of money makes it impossible for many talented women to earn a living as an athlete. But they were actually paid just $27.7 million. And overall, viewers consumed 2.49 billion hours of coverage across all platforms, a jump of 93%. For picks No. That same year, however, only 2 percent of airtime on the stations flagship show, SportsCenter, was allocated to womens sports. Indeed, the $30 million awarded to all of the athletes combined at the 2019 Women's World Cup would not even equal the $38 million the French national team made after winning the 2018 men's World Cup, where prize money totaled $400 million. Reward is not a function of inputs such as work or effort; it is a function of the outputs, the product. As someone who has studied the WNBA for years, Ive been excited to witness, over the course of this season, continued growth in viewership and attendance, along with sponsorship revenue. (In its most recent fiscal year, ending in March 2019, the USSF paid $304,113 to current men's coach Gregg Berhalter for four months of work, $241,869 to former coach David Sarachan, whom Berhalter replaced in December 2018, and $1.475 million to former coach Jurgen Klinsmann, who was fired in 2016. The WNBAs current collective bargaining agreement wont expire until October 2021, with the maximum salary paid to WNBA veterans set to increase $8,000 from $113,500 to $121,500 by that year, which barely keeps pace with inflation at its current rate. Silver was ready to hear about investment and commitment and even empowerment. Nows a good time for players to advocate for themselves because the product in the WNBA has never been better. Viewing stories about men's sports was like "watching that classic 1960s Batman TV show (Bam! A league requires seed money to grow. Today, grassroots support for the national teams seem to be at parity. are vocal in their support of the womens league because of the quality of play and because they understand the hard work these women put into their game. The State . From 1990 to 2012, for instance, MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL teams got a mammoth $17 billion in public funds for new homes, according to research by economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson. This is not what happens as women basketball players would be payed on average around 3.5 million (the average men's salary is 7 million). which tips off later this week in Tenerife, with the final on Sept. 30. will be spending a significant chunk of their year overseas playing on professional teams and in leagues in order to supplement their WNBA income. And that's led to more viewers (Women's College World Series ratings have increased by nearly 40% since 2000), more revenues (up 360% from 2003 to 2016) and, in turn, more broadcasts (more than 1,600 games, including all of the playoffs, were scheduled for this season before the pandemic struck). And I dont want to lose the WNBA or miss out on seeing the best female basketball players playing in the league. But how does this apply to basketball? Its true that the WNBA generates about $60 million in revenue per year, while the NBA generates $7.92 billion. "It's more merit-based, it will make us feel more professional and well-established, and kids are going to be able to see you can have a full-on career in the WNBA.". The WNBA will suffer if they dont figure out some way to pay players more. First, investment. But the risk also offered reward: 15 million Americans self-identify as LGBTQ, and they represent a market segment worth around $830 million. But once two sides establish good faith in a negotiation, both can see spending -- or sacrifice -- as an investment. Shortly afterward, the players opted out of their CBA. We put bad NBA players in commercials before some of yall superstars. And we need access to better stadiums, facilities and everything that makes a better entertainment product.". In 2014, ESPN paid the WNBA $17 million for broadcast rights. Some feared that such a campaign could alienate other segments of the leagues fan base. Stats show that in 2018, the top scoring team in the WNBA, the Connecticut Sun, averaged 87.6 points per game. But while women's clubs are sharing some of the new pitches (and a handful of NBA facilities too), when it comes to securing arenas as primary occupants, the women's game has barely arrived at the table. The deal also pioneers a range of provisions important to players who are mothers or potential parents. "So we can build the business, and then when it's really good like the NBA is then we can get that money.". As Berri puts it: "Men love investing in men's sports.". Kelsey Plum currently makes $200,000/year as a point guard for the Las Vegas Aces. And men's leagues have proved adept at getting state and local governments to defray the costs of that development. This means the average NBA player makes 41 times what the average WNBA player makes. But interest is also clearly driven by media: If a network highly values a property, itll market and promote it as a way to build an audience. In July 2019, the WNBA hired Cathy Engelbert, former CEO of the consulting firm Deloitte -- and a basketball walk-on who became a captain under Muffet McGraw at Lehigh in the 1980s -- as commissioner. And yet, for all this effort, there is little economic reward. Of course, a bump to 50 percent of WNBA league revenue isnt realistic, because theres a difference between revenue and profit. A WNBA spokesperson reached out to HuffPost after this op-ed was published, however, and said the WNBA has lost significant money every year and has shared its financials with the Players Association.

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