USWNT players accused US Soccer of using 'PR stunts' to help the federation look better in their equal pay fight

• The US Soccer Federation says it has offered the men's and women's national teams identical contracts.
• The USWNT players' association called the offer a "PR stunt" and denied that it was a good-faith effort.
• USSF fought back, accusing the team of pulling its own "publicity stunt" via its recent documentary.

The US Women's National Team's equal pay fight with the US Soccer Federation is heating up anew.

On September 10, the Federation announced that it had offered its men's and women's national teams "identical contract proposals." On its surface, the proposal brings USWNT players closer to the equal pay they've long campaigned for - and even sued US Soccer. But the USWNT's players association dismissed USSF's offer as merely a "PR stunt" and an attempt at "bargaining through the media."

US Soccer fought back, accusing the USWNT of pulling its own "publicity stunt" by going forward with the recent "LFG" HBO documentary that detailed the equal pay fight - and the messy lawsuit between players and federation - largely from the player perspective. The Federation declined to participate in the film.

"An offer on paper of identical contracts to the USWNT and USMNT, and to discuss equalizing prize money, is real, authentic and in good faith," US Soccer's official communications Twitter account posted Wednesday evening. "A publicity stunt is a 90-minute one-sided movie."

"As a PA we still need to chat about the statement given by US Soccer," USWNT superstar Alex Morgan said during a press conference Wednesday ahead of the team's 9-0 rout of Paraguay. "Any commitment to equal pay publicly is good, however we need to look line by line at what they're actually providing."

While full details of USSF's contract proposals to the men's and women's national team associations have not been made public, the Federation's press release called upon both parties to negotiate with US Soccer through a unified collective bargaining agreement, or CBA. USSF contends that the move would enable both teams to "equalize FIFA World Cup prize money between the USMNT and the USWNT."

A significant component of the USWNT's lawsuit against US Soccer hinged upon the massive disparities in payout between the men's and women's FIFA World Cup tournaments. The last men's World Cup - held in Russia in 2018 - offered participants from a $400 million prize money pool, according to Sporting News. On the women's side - the 2019 World Cup in France - teams competed for a slice of a $38 million pie.

When the USWNT won two years ago, the team brought $4 million home to the US Soccer Federation. But as Sporting News' Mike DeCourcy notes, men's teams earned $8 million just for showing up at Russia's World Cup the year prior; even losing sides raked in double the money of the top women's team on the planet.

In theory, revenue sharing via a single CBA would give USWNT players access to some of FIFA's lopsided payouts. But in practice, the US men's national team is far less dominant than its women's counterparts. The American men missed out on the 2018 World Cup and the payday that came with it. And while the men look poised to qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, there's no guarantee that they'll pull through.

Of concern is whether the joint CBA would actually see the players earning more money than they have from past deals. According to an anonymous source who spoke with ESPN's Jeff Carlisle, there are suspicions that USSF is leveraging FIFA pay disparities against the men's players' association in order to frame USSF as "the good guy."

"The way they want to solve the women's problem is not by increasing the women's income fairly," the source told Carlisle. "It's by cutting [the men's CBA] down to the [women's] 2017 to 2021 deal numbers."

Morgan alluded to similar concerns during her media availability on Wednesday:

"If you have equal but it's not even what we got before or to the value that we are, then we still consider that to be not good enough," Morgan told Wednesday. "We will continue to work with US Soccer moving forward looking towards equal and fair payment and treatment."