When watching a game of soccer and your favorite team scores a goal it can be very exciting. If you are on the team that wins you are probably excited to get your reward for winning. Sure the money is nice, but it’s  just not fair.

The truth is that the women’s team makes significantly less than the men’s team after winning a game. Equal pay is a matter of valuing the players and valuing what they do. Favoring one team over the other because they are men not women is sexist and unacceptable. Equal pay for equal work is how it should be because it makes sense. Unlike giving a team extra money because of their gender. 

In 2019 Women’s team won the FIFA World Cup. That same year the Men’s team got to the 16th round of their world cup and still got more money than the women’s team.The Men’s team got a whopping $9 million  while the women only got $2 million dollars. That’s like giving someone a medal for participating and giving the winner a pat on the back. This is very important because when we watch sports we usually don’t realize how the players are getting unfairly treated. 

 If you take the paycheck of a US men’s soccer player and compare it to the women’s paycheck you will clearly see how different the money is. For example, for every dollar that the men get the women are only getting 79 cents. The women are getting paid 79% of what the men are getting paid. Looking at the percent more that men are paid versus women can really open your eyes to how bad this situation really is. 

One year in the World Cup the prize money was so unfair you wouldn’t believe how arbitrary this prize was. The prize money for the men's team was $38 million if they were the champions, but for the women it was a different story. If the women were to be the champions they would only receive $4 million. Not only is this unjust, it is biased. 

People have been pushing for equal pay for a long time. If we don’t do anything now we may never have equal pay in women’s soccer. The soccer companies have a responsibility to treat their players equally, because the men and women teams are both playing soccer at the same level.  If the companies are just going to say that it is because of  the numbers of viewers watching the game, then support women’s soccer and don’t give the companies any excuse to be unfair to ANYONE. 

Work Cited: 

Kelly, Jack. “Why the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team Earns Less than the Men’s -- and How It Will Change.” Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/07/09/why-the-u-s-womens-national-soccer-team-earns-less-than-the-mens-and-how-it-will-change/?sh=531024075934 Accessed 5 April 2022

 Peck, Emily   “Women in Soccer Are Paid Even More Unfairly than Women in General.” HuffPost, 1 Apr. 2016,www.huffpost.com/entry/women-soccer-pay-gap_n_56fea6f3e4b083f5c60790c2#:~:text=Women%20In%20Soccer%20Are%20Paid%20Even%20More%20Unfairly. Accessed 15 March 2022.