What’s standing in the way of women’s soccer?
When chants of ‘equal pay!’ ring through soccer stadiums, men jump on Twitter to explain why, despite performing better internationally than the men’s team, women soccer players don’t deserve equal pay because they don’t earn as much revenue.
Over the past two months I’ve become a big NWSL fan. It’s very different from being an MLB fan, my only previous experience of passionate sports fandom. There are a lot of things I take for granted that a professional sports team has, which NWSL teams do not have. These things absolutely affect revenue, either directly, or by lowering the quality of play or the experience of watching games. Here’s a list.
1. NWSL stadiums are less accessible than MLS and other stadiums.
My local team, the Washington Spirit, plays at the Maryland SoccerPlex. To get to the Plex, if you don’t have a car, requires an hour-plus train ride to the end of the metro and then either a 25+ minute car ride or a 45+ bus ride. I have multiple friends who’ve expressed interested in going to a game but balked when they found out how long it would take to get there. Another friend had to cancel because she was working late and couldn’t finish by 5:30pm, which was the time she’d have to leave to make it to a 7:30pm game.
As a trial run, the Spirit are playing a game tomorrow at Audi Field, home field of the MLS team DC United. Audi Field is about 30 minutes away from downtown and is easily accessible via Metro. Correspondingly, the Spirit is on track to more than triple their season record at the Plex. They may even sell out Audi Field. Surely if they can sell out Audi Field, they deserve to play in it?
Which brings me to the next item on the list...
2. NWSL stadiums are smaller than MLS stadiums.
The Spirit’s plex sells out at around 5,500 tickets. For tomorrow’s Audi Field game, they’ve currently sold over 16,000 tickets.
Sky Blue’s regular park also holds about 5,000 fans. When they played a game last weekend at Red Bull Arena, aka the stadium of their local MLS team, they nearly doubled attendance at 9,000+ tickets sold.
I don’t know the breakdown for every team in the league. I do know that Orlando Pride, despite having access to a great stadium, tends to draw fewer fans do to their lower quality of play. (They’re second to last in the league.) On the other hand, the Portland Thorns already share a stadium with their MLS neighbor team, the Timbers, and also boast the biggest and loudest fanbase in the NWSL. Portland recently set a league record with 25,000+ tickets sold to a game.
Items #1 and #2 combine to make clear that to grow as a league, NWSL teams need to play in larger stadiums that are easier to access. (This doesn’t even take into account how stadium facilities might impact quality of play. Some NWSL teams don’t even have showers in their locker rooms!) Owners and league managers need to invest in securing these spaces for teams, even if they might not be profitable at first. The experience of Sky Blue and Spirit suggests that managers won’t have to wait to reap the benefits.
3. NWSL games are often scheduled simultaneously, decreasing viewership.
With only nine teams in the NWSL, there are four to six NWSL games each week. Given this small number, you’d think they’d all be on at different times, right?
Nope. Every week, there’s at least one pair of games scheduled against each other. Often there’s two. If you don’t have the ability to tape games, you’re forced to miss at least one game every week. As I have taken to tweeting despairingly at the NWSL each time this happens: whyyyyyyyy.
Schedule creation is complicated, and there are more factors that go into it than I know of. But one key element is when teams even have their field available. Most teams don’t own their own fields, and have to work within a restricted subset of dates and times. To the extent that this contributed to overlapping games, it’s yet another way that issues securing good stadiums get in the way of fans supporting their teams.
4. NWSL teams have a lower quality of commentating.
Complaining about the announcers/commentators on NWSL matches is a sport of its own. Announcers regularly mispronounce players’ names and sometimes misidentify them. They repeat facts and stories, and use the same turns of phrase over and over until you can’t help but twitch every time you hear them say “she sprays the ball out wide” or “the ball found it’s way to...”
The last Spirit game I attended, I sat in front of a woman who, after Elise Kellond-Knight left with a pulled hamstring, briefly explained to her friends why women were more likely than men to have hamstring injuries. (It has something to do with women having more developed quad muscles, which puts the opposing muscles, the hamstrings, at greater risk. This also leads to increased ACL injuries among women.) This random stranger had more interesting commentary than any of the people I’d heard on TV.
But why are these announcers so bad? The answer’s easy: NWSL announcers are barely paid. They make $300-$400 a game, with no travel or lodging expenses paid, which means unless you live in Fort Lauderdale where the announcing is recorded, you have to pay to announce.
I don’t know how much MLS announcers make, but I bet it’s better than that.
5. NWSL teams have a lower quality of refereeing.
Oh boy. Okay. There have been some issues with NWSL refereeing lately. As national team star Ali Krieger put it:
We’re putting a good product out on the field and every year we’re getting better and the referees seem like they are not. So, I beg the NWSL — just the standard needs to be higher. It’s just unfortunate that you feel like the referee is ruining the game. They are taking the fun out of the game because they are not good enough.
How could we raise the standards of referees? Well, they could stop treating the NWSL like a training ground for MLS:
There are five tiers in the U.S. Soccer refereeing program. The top-level, called “FIFA,” is the highest tier. These referees can officiate in FIFA-sanctioned matches.
”The second tier is “P.R.O.” These referees can officiate MLS matches and are selected by the Professional Referee Organization.
The next tier down is called “National,” and these officials are certified by U.S. Soccer. These referees can officiate USL Championship and NWSL matches. And therein lies the problem.
The NWSL will never have officiating as good as the MLS as long as this remains US Soccer’s official policy. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
6. NWSL games are not marketed as well as they could be.
I won’t pretend to understand marketing, but I know that it’s hard for people to go to games they don’t even know about:
[Portland Thorns defender Meghan Klingenberg ] couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when she saw Fox discuss the U.S. Men’s National Team’s run at the CONCACAF Gold Cup during halftime of the Women’s World Cup final Sunday, rather than preview the upcoming games in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).
“I love Fox. I think they did a great job. They gave the Women’s World Cup the attention that it deserves, but I wish we mentioned the NWSL more. [...] We need that to be put into the consciousness of the general public. We need ESPN to talk about the NWSL year-round. We need beat reporters in every single city that has an NWSL team. We need investment in advertising and marketing, in ground support, in make sure that people know that there’s a freaking team in their area.” [source]
It seems that marketing is another area in which US Soccer is underinvesting in women:
[Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of Major League Soccer] handles deals for MLS and the U.S. Soccer Federation but not the NWSL, even though U.S. Soccer runs the NWSL. This fact has long been lamented by the women’s soccer community.
The NWSL marketing team needs the resources to at least let people know that their teams exist and their games are happening. But beyond that... the NWSL is full of charismatic stars, both current and potential. Let’s give them the spotlight.
7. NWSL salaries are, for all but the biggest stars, below average income.
No one goes into women’s soccer for the money, even if a few of the game’s biggest stars have managed to get some lucrative sponsorships. The league guarantees a minimum salary of $16,538, barely above the poverty line, and caps max salary at $46,200, a bit belong the mean American income.
Talented young women who are making decisions about where to go to college and what to do after college need to take this into account. If they have dependents, family members with health issues, or significant debt, they simply may not be able to afford to play soccer professionally.
This impacts the number of women available to play professionally as well as their ability to nurture their own talent by investing in themselves via special camps and training. For every Megan Rapinoe or Alex Morgan or Crystal Dunn who has made it to the NWSL there’s someone equally talented who stopped playing in high school or college because law school or medical school or learning to code seemed like a more financially viable career path.
In other words, for all the strides women’s soccer has made over the last twenty to thirty years, the NWSL still selecting from only a fraction of the potential talent pool.
I’ve been an NWSL fan for less than two months, so I’m surely missing other ways that women’s soccer has been under-invested in. But the seven issues outlined above should be enough to convince you there’s a problem.
Saying that people just don’t want to watch women’s soccer isn’t merely an oversimplification - it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whole point of investment is you take a risk now to reap a payoff later. The NWSL needs US Soccer and the wider sports community to invest in them, and given time, everyone will benefit.
You know what keeps ringing in my ears? Research that shows that men are judged on their potential, while women are only judged on their performance. The NWSL has the potential to be a thriving league with the revenues and fan enthusiasm of the MLS. The question is whether women’s soccer will be given the support they need to deliver on that potential.
