Thread by @asymmetricinfo

The rain has stopped in Washington DC, but there's still a tweetstorm coming!

Today we're talking women's World Cup, and equal pay for our champions.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/socce…

As usual, we will not be recapping the column, but answering questions it raised.

First question: why did you discuss overall FIFA earnings instead of the details of US Soccer, which doesn't draw all its revenue from the FIFA bonuses?

Answer: Space. I originally included this in an earlier draft, but it's rather technical, and I've only got 750 words.

In an earlier era, when I was writing for the web, I would have naturally included the technical discussion, but print is a cruel taskmistress.

But hell, pixels are free, so let's discuss it here.

So for one thing, this is not actually about whether the women are paid more than the men, because the women on the US national team are being paid more than the men on the US national team. It seems weird that no one has pointed this out.

The lawsuit is about how much the men could hypothetically be paid, if they won a World Cup, which they haven't. And probably won't, because the United States has other, more popular sports that attract men into them at young ages.

For women, on the other hand, there's no particular reason to leave soccer for basketball or softball, because these aren't hugely more popular and (potentially) lucrative than soccer.

If Americans watched soccer the way they watch football, basketball, and baseball, then we would probably have a dominant national team, the way we do in those other sports. Why? Because America's a huge country, and bigger countries on average field better teams in big sports.

In the end, athletics is just a number's game: the bigger your country, the more potentially great players you have to draw from.

This is one reason that China is becoming so dominant in the sports it has chosen to focus on.

So in a weird way, this whole dispute only exists because of viewership/attendance/pay disparities between other sports, which increases female comparative advantage in soccer.

Now, let's discuss those contracts. The women do get paid than a hypothetical WC-winning men's team would. But we must note two things:

1) The hypothetical men's WC-winning team would be eligible for a much bigger bonus from FIFA, because FIFA revenue for men's WC is 45x women's

2) The women are paid a salary, with health benefits, and small bonuses. The men are on 100% performance pay: they only get paid if they play, and their pay varies depending on whether they win, lose, or draw.

It's the difference between inside sales and 100% commission.

This guarantee is very valuable! Imagine someone offers you a job that can be either 100% commission with no benefits, or salary-and-benefits plus a small amount of incentive pay, with the commission set so that the expected payout for the average salesperson matches the salary.

Obviously, you'd take the salary, right? Why would you bear the risk for no gain?

If you want someone to work on incentive pay only, you have to pay them a lot more.

Now, this structure is also necessitated by the revenue differential in professional soccer. The men can support themselves by collecting salaries from professional soccer clubs. The women can't. So US soccer provides them steady income. At the cost of some upside.

But they are still making more than the *actual* men's team this cycle. They're just not making as much as an imaginary men's team that won the world cup.

But of course, we can argue that this represents embedded sexism: sexist audiences don't watch women's soccer as much as men's. US Soccer shouldn't necessarily just ratify social biases, but actively work against them.

Fair enough, but are we *sure* that's just social bias?

It is a fact that women are slower, weaker, and have less endurance than men. The strength distributions, for example, barely overlap.

reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti…

I'm not really going to argue this, because the disparity is *the whole reason we have women's soccer in the first place*. If it didn't exist, Megan Rapinoe would be playing for Manchester United.

It is surely at least *arguable* that greater strength, speed, and endurance make a difference to the quality of game play, and how exciting it is to watch. After all, if it didn't, senior sports would be a big a draw as the kind featuring young buff people.

I am not really qualified to assess the differences in men's and women's soccer play. But having played basketball (sadly the only thing I was good at was 'being tall'), I can tell the difference between the women's and men's basketball games.

There is a minority that prefers the slower, more stately play of the WNBA, with its much greater focus on teamwork rather than showboating. But it's kind of like a taste for classical music over hip-hop--sure, those folks are out there, and bless 'em. Most folks like showboating

Maybe some of that is sexism. That's impossible to fully disaggregate. Hey, maybe all of that is. But I can't rule out the possibility that people just like watching faster, stronger players. WNBA & NBA are 2 different games, and there are many reasons to prefer one or the other

Many soccer fans seem to feel that the same is true of men's and women's FIFA, and I can't gainsay them.

This brings us, finally, to the claim that women's World Cup has much higher revenues in the US than men's.

Eh ... this is at best highly debatable.

I know: a CNBC article says the women's team had higher attendance than men's over the last 3 years.

Question: why would you look at 3 years, in a sport that plays on a *4* year cycle?

Usually when people choose weird metrics, it's because the obvious one yields a boring answer

And indeed, a four-year comparison doesn't give you that result; on average, the women were earning less, at least, 3 years ago.

espn.com/espnw/sports/a…

USMNT have much higher attendance than USWNT games, about 2x, comparing best to best and worst to worst

worldsoccertalk.com/2018/12/13/usw…

worldsoccertalk.com/2018/12/12/usm…

The women played more games than the men in 2018, but this doesn't necessarily translate into profit. There's a fixed cost for the venue, which amortized over fewer fans can actually mean bigger losses on each game.

But even leaving that aside: you might have an incentive to schedule more games if your players are on salary than you do if your players are contractors who get paid by the game. So we can't necessarily separate this from the choices USWNT made with its collective bargaining

Television viewership roughly follows the same pattern: men attract a lot more viewers than women do.

Importantly: except for the finals of the World Cup.

Many of my interlocutors were mad I didn't mention that in the US, the finals of the world cup attracted many more viewers.

True that! Guess who sold those rights? FIFA, not US soccer. Which brings us back to the upthread question of I chose to look at FIFA rather than US soccer

Which brings me to my final point: this argument has been really ill-defined. Treating an argument about hypothetical pay in a typical year as if it were an argument about the actual money people are collecting. Jumping back and forth between FIFA & US soccer.

And assuming, without bothering to prove it, that we're talking about the exact same game, which we really aren't, even though they're both played by the same rules.

I think it's entirely possible that one day, women's soccer will be as lucrative in the US as men's. What do I know about a game I can't bear to watch unless we're in the World Cup? But I don't think that's a fact, just a possibility.

And I doubt that the situation of a handful of ultra-elite athletes, competing in an arena that is 99% biology and 1% everything else--every one of those women had to hit the Pick 6 in the genetic lottery just to get on the field--is a good forum for litigating equal pay.

With that, I'll remind you to read the column, which is here, and bid you good morning.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/socce…