Daily Verse | Ecclesiastes 10:2
The heart of the wise inclines to the right,
but the heart of the fool to the left.
Happy Thursday! It’s all downhill from here to the weekend.
Our US women’s soccer team (USWNT) got shut out by Sweden 3-0 in their opening match of the 2020 Olympics the other day. They came into the game with a 44-game winning streak stretching back to January 2019, and are arguably the favorites to win gold.
All my kids played soccer, so there was a time when I enjoyed watching the national women’s team play and followed their games. But not any more. In fact, I don’t actually care whether they win or not and I probably don’t have to tell you why. But I will.
They’ve become woke.
Just like a lot of other sports — the NFL, NBA and MLB, to name the most prominent — women’s soccer has been infected with cultural Marxism in the guise of ‘social justice.’
The U.S. women’s soccer team was among the squads on Wednesday to kneel before their matches in protest of racism, discrimination and inequality as the Olympics officially got underway.
A “protest of racism, discrimination and inequality.” In other words, they’re kneeling in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the radical leftist group founded by self-identified Marxists. That alone is reason enough to ignore them.
But there’s more. The purple-haired Karen known as Megan Rapinoe has complained non-stop about the women’s team’s pay as compared to the men’s team’s pay. She even testified in front of Congress about the so-called “pay gap.”
“If it can happen to us and it can happen to me with the brightest lights shining on us at all times, it can and it does happen to every person who is marginalized by gender,” Rapinoe said. “But we don’t have to wait. We don’t have to continue to be patient for decades on end.”
The only problem is that while the raw numbers show a gap — “a women’s national soccer team player earns a base salary of $3,600 per game while a men’s player earns $5,000″ — women actually make more than men as a percentage of the revenue the sport brings in.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “USSF also says the men’s team generates more revenue. The women’s team generated $101.3 million over the course of 238 games between 2009 and 2019 while the men generated $185.7 million over 191 games, according to the federation.” In an article at The Federalist, John Glynn agrees.
One of the major factors that separate men’s sports and women’s is a not so little thing called revenue. To put it bluntly, female soccer players, just like female basketball players and female hockey players, are paid less because their respective sports make less. The total prize money for the Women’s World Cup in France this July was $30 million; the total prize money for the men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar will be $440 million.
This gap is criminal, right? It’s not. When viewed objectively—based on how much money each competition generates—women actually make more than men. How so?
Well, there is a sizable difference in the revenue available to pay the male and female teams. According to Mike Oznian, a writer for Forbes, the 2015 Women’s World Cup “brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players.”
Last year, the men’s World Cup in Russia generated more than $6 billion in revenue; the participating teams shared about $400 million. That is less than 7 percent of overall revenue. Meanwhile, the 2019 Women’s World Cup made somewhere in the region of $131 million, doling out $30 million, well more than 20 percent of collected revenue, to the participating teams. It seems a pay gap does exist, after all.
The women’s soccer team has some exceptional players and has been the most successful women’s team to ever compete. So many of the women are stars in their own right, like Julie Ertz, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Christen Press and, yes, even Megan Rapinoe—and they’ve won four Women’s World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals and eight CONCACAF Gold Cups. The U.S. men’s team boasts no such record.
So, yes, the US Women’s National Team is a powerhouse in women’s soccer, but the fact remains that they don’t generate the revenue that the men’s team does. That fact seems lost on them because it doesn’t stop them from complaining about it on their international platform.
It’s a disgrace.
A few years ago in response to LeBron James’s remarks about President Trump, Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” No one wants to hear athletes make political comments because sports was an event that brought us all together, no matter your politics.
Same with women’s soccer. Their whining and complaining about pay and being “marginalized by gender” ruins the sport for so many of us. Maybe instead of virtue-signaling and insulting your country and its people, you could stop ignorantly embarrassing yourselves and concentrate on doing the one thing you are being paid for: winning soccer games.