The Stars and Stripes are champions once again, as the US Women’s National Team took down rival Canada 1-0 Monday night in Mexico to win the 2022 CONCACAF W Championship. With the victory, the Americans officially punched their tickets to the 2023 World Cup and 2024 Olympics.
They also padded their wallets, thanks to their hard-fought equal pay agreement.
Each USWNT player is set to earn nearly $150,000 for her efforts this summer — including the five games won in Monterrey, as well as their two stateside victories against Colombia in late June. That payout is only slightly less than what each athlete made after the team’s 2019 World Cup victory.
The US men’s and women’s national teams’ historic collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with US Soccer ensures players for both national teams are paid $8,000 per appearance in a friendly match.
Bonuses vary based on results, as well as opponents’ FIFA rankings. In friendlies against teams ranked 25th or better, each player earns an additional $10,000 for a win, $3,000 for a draw, and $0 for a loss. When facing any other opponents in unofficial contests, athletes on the roster earn $5,000 per win, $2,000 per draw, and $0 per loss.
The payouts grow even larger for non-FIFA official competitions and FIFA World Cup qualifying, but for the purposes of the USWNT’s most recent haul, we’ll focus on the latter. Each player earns a $10,000 appearance fee per World Cup qualifying match, plus they’re eligible for bonus payments of $14,000 per win and $4,000 per draw.
As The Athletic’s Meg Linehan outlined on Twitter, those numbers add up to approximately $146,000 for each player, sans per diem payments:
—Meg Linehan (@itsmeglinehan) June 14, 2022
Even more striking: the USWNT players made just $1,500 more than that for their winning efforts at the 2019 World Cup. According to Sports Illustrated, the 23 players on that team “split $862,500 for making the roster and $2.53 million for winning the 2019 World Cup, which came to $147,500 per player.”
It appears that the USWNT players’ years-long legal feud against their own federation is already paying off.
And now that the team has officially qualified for next summer’s World Cup as well as the 2024 Olympics, there’s even more money to come for the reigning World Cup champs.