One day after U.S. Soccer offered the USWNT and the USMT identical contract proposals in terms of revenue share and bonuses, the USWNT Players Association has responded.
“USSF’s PR stunts and bargaining through the media will not bring us any closer to a fair agreement,” the association wrote in a statement. “In contrast, we are committed to bargaining in good faith to achieve equal pay and the safest working conditions possible. The proposal that USSF made recently to us does neither.”
Under the new CBA, USSF said that their hope was to align the men’s and women’s senior national teams under “a single collective bargaining agreement (CBA) structure.”
“This proposal will ensure that USWNT and USMNT players remain among the highest paid senior national team players in the world, while providing a revenue sharing structure that would allow all parties to begin anew and share collectively in the opportunity that combined investment in the future of U.S. Soccer will deliver over the course of a new CBA,” the USSF said in a statement.
But many have called into question the USSF’s motives in pushing for a single CBA. According to sources, the FIFA bonus money has been “used as a weapon” against the men’s union in order to make the USSF look better.
“The way they want to solve the women’s problem is not by increasing the women’s income fairly,” a source told ESPN. “It’s by cutting [the men’s CBA] down to the [women’s] 2017 to 2021 deal numbers.”