Power and Finesse: How the United States’ and Australia’s Women’s National Soccer Teams Score for Equal Pay

Over the last fifty years, women’s soccer has emerged as a segment of the sport attracting an audience of all ages, genders, and national origins. Despite its relatively young but dense history, the sport’s following is fun, passionate, and inspiring to both die-hard fans and casual viewers alike. However, with its explosion in popularity comes a corresponding rise in life-altering issues requiring legal solutions. Behind the scenes, these female athletes come together not only over their love of the beautiful game but in confronting similar challenges regarding their employment agreements, which are governed by domestic and international labor law, as federations have historically been reluctant to righteously compensate to their female players equally to their male players. The most recent World Cup in the summer of 2023 once again brought these issues to the forefront of international news, with particular focus on pre-tournament favorites the United States Women’s National Team and the co-host Australian Women’s National Team, commonly known as The Matildas. Demands from these teams and others around the world for equal pay have only become louder and louder, though, prompting them to utilize domestic and international labor law to effectuate worthwhile change in the form of equal pay between women’s and men’s national soccer team players. The USWNT and The Matildas utilized different methods to achieve this worthwhile change, though, with each method bearing a myriad of advantages and disadvantages. While this note opines that The Matildas’ approach bettered the USWNT approach in their own respective contexts, both teams ultimately attained equal pay for their players. This note will begin by briefly exploring both the history of women’s soccer both globally and in the United States and Australia. Then, it will examine labor law in their respective countries and their application to each team’s choice of bargaining strategy to obtain equal pay. This examination will include the backdrop against which the campaign for equal pay began and the measures each team and its players took as a part of that campaign. A comparison of each team’s strategy will follow. Next, the note will investigate these strategies to determine how well the teams and other contributors, like the general public, accomplished their goals and how they can impact other teams around the world. Specifically, the effects will be assessed through weighing the long-awaited result of equal pay for women and men with the economic and social costs accumulated for the teams and their players along the way. A synthesis will conclude the note about how the team, their federations, and international governing bodies may be able to play a significant role in shaping the future of women’s soccer.