US Soccer Reaches Deal on Equal Pay

US Soccer reached a landmark collective bargaining agreement with the men’s and women’s national teams yesterday that stipulates both teams will be paid equally.

⚽ More deets... The deal, which runs through 2028, gives both men’s and women’s players “significant raises,” per the WSJ. It also creates new “identical economic terms” for the two teams across all competitions.

• Both teams will pool their World Cup prize money and share it equally among all players, making the US the first nation in the world to do so.
• For context, the men's team received $9M for finishing 11th in the 2014 World Cup, while the women received $2M for winning the tournament in 2015.

📸 The big picture: Americans largely prefer to watch women's soccer over men's on a national stage – nearly 31 million people tuned in to see the US women win the 2015 World Cup final, the largest domestic TV audience for a soccer game in history. 

• The same trend can be seen in tennis, where the US Open women's final has beaten out the men’s championship in terms of total viewership since at least 2018.