sortiwa
[ad_1]
Accusations of a pay gap at US Soccer have dogged the federation for years. The players on the US women’s national team have accused US Soccer of wage discrimination in a high-profile lawsuit, and last year the federation caught heat for paying USWNT coach Jill Ellis a much smaller salary than her less successful male counterparts.
Although the new guard at the federation has promised reform, the pay gap at US Soccer still exists, according to public tax documents released on Wednesday. The difference is certainly less striking than in years past, but it also doesn’t appear parity will be achieved soon.
In one month of work in 2018, US men’s national team coach Gregg Berhalter earned nearly as much as Ellis earned in an entire year. The tax filing, which discloses the coaches’ salaries for the 2018 calendar year, showed Berhalter made $313,109 in the one month he was on the job after his 1 December appointment. Meanwhile, in 12 months of work, Ellis earned $418,645.
Furthermore, Berhalter’s base compensation for his first month of work – around $100,000 in salary, plus a $200,000 signing bonus – shows that his annual salary is at least $1.2m, more than double Ellis’s salary. This is despite Ellis having been at the federation four years longer, and Berhalter having none of the proven success of Ellis, who had won one World Cup at that point. (She later went on to win another World Cup in 2019.)
If Ellis had not stepped down from her post in October 2019 and stayed on to coach the USWNT through the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, she would have been entitled to an option on her contract that would’ve bumped her pay up to $525,000, sources have told the Guardian. Since she ended up winning the World Cup again, maybe she could have negotiated a better pay raise – but then again, maybe not.
After all, from US Soccer’s standpoint, there has been little incentive to pay Ellis more – before she stepped down, she was already believed to be the highest-paid coach of a women’s team anywhere in the world. Whereas Berhalter could earn competitive salaries at many clubs around the world, the risk that Ellis would have been lured elsewhere by more money was almost nil.
The federation did give her a large raise midway through 2018, bumping her base pay up from around $300,000 to $500,000, sources have told the Guardian, which is why her actual compensation for 2018 is reported as $419,000. But it appears that decision was driven more by optics rather than an effort to retain her services.
In the tax filing released this week, Ellis was listed as earning much less than several coaches on the men’s side, including the under-20 men’s coach. She was also paid less than three coaches who didn’t even work for a full year and helped the USMNT miss the 2018 World Cup: Jürgen Klinsmann, his assistant Andreas Herzog, and Bruce Arena.
In fact, despite being fired in 2016, Klinsmann has continued to earn huge payouts from US Soccer. The tax filing released on Wednesday shows Klinsmann was the highest-paid employee in the entire federation in 2018, earning nearly $1.5m. Indeed, Klinsmann has been the best-paid coach US Soccer has ever had, and yet his compensation pales in comparison to the sums managers can command at super clubs around the world in men’s football.
That is at the heart of the big question for US Soccer: is adhering to market rates around the world a good enough excuse when it comes to paying the successful coach of a women’s team much less than the coach of a mediocre men’s team? Or is it incumbent on US Soccer to change market realities if it can?
It’s certainly difficult to look at anything Berhalter or Klinsmann have done and say their outsized compensation is deserved compared to Ellis. The Klinsmann contract was negotiated by a version of US Soccer that is slowly being dismantled – president Sunil Gulati, CEO Dan Flynn, and CCO Jay Berhalter have all stepped down – but Berhalter’s salary was set by the new guard. (The man who hired Berhalter, US Soccer’s first general manager Earnie Stewart, earned $305,778 for his first six months of work in 2018, according to the tax filings. His base salary was also higher than Ellis’s.)
Perhaps it’s just a matter of expectations. Ellis steered the USWNT through a flawless campaign to qualify for the 2019 World Cup, and she did not even earn a bonus for doing so, according to the tax document. Whatever bonuses she received for winning the World Cup will not be revealed until next year’s tax filing.
But an exclusive Guardian report has already found that USWNT players could only earn federation bonuses for winning a World Cup at 1/5th of what USMNT players could earn for doing the same. The men can earn bonuses for small successes at their World Cup, such as reaching the knockout round and for each point earned during the group stage. The women only get a bonus for finishing in the top three – and it’s a tiny bonus by comparison. In all likelihood, Ellis’s World Cup bonuses will follow a similar track.
What is clear is that US Soccer expects the women to succeed but thinks the men need extra motivation. That, of course, has been a key argument in the lawsuit USWNT players filed against US Soccer: the men were compensated handsomely just for playing the game whereas the women only got paid well if they won.
It’s not that such expectations have been totally off-base. The USWNT has been the dominant team in the world two cycles running while the USMNT has been something of a laughing stock. But if US Soccer wants to change its results – whether it’s on the field, or amid the controversies the federation has faced off the field – maybe it’s time to revisit those expectations.
In some ways, US Soccer’s new president, Carlos Cordeiro, has shown a willingness to do that, but if the USMNT is going to get more competitive, or if US Soccer is going to stop getting sued, changes are in order – and they just might need to include how compensation works.
[ad_2]
Source link
