USA Women's Soccer Team Paid Less Than Losing Men's Soccer Team

U.S. Women's Soccer Team celebrating World Cup win

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 6 July 2015

See those happy faces up there? Those are the faces of WORLD CHAMPIONS. But *your* face might just be making a frown (or a grimace) once you read this bit of news: The USA women's team, who won the Women's World Cup on Sunday, are paid 40 times less than men's soccer teams—even the ones who lose.

Yep, even in sports the pay gap rears its ugly head. In a Politico piece, writer Mary Pilon notes that the payout for the Women's World Cup this year will be $15 million, compared with the total for the men's World Cup last year of $576 million, AKA 40 times as much.

In fact, the National Women's Soccer League has salary ranges reportedly from $6,000 to $30,000, which, as Pilon notes, "may put players below the poverty line in the cities in which the compete."

And this has historically been the case. Last year, when the German men's team won the World Cup in Brazil, they won a $35 million prize. The American women's team? Just $2 million.

We'll let that sink in.

Samantha Leal is the Deputy Editor at Well+Good, where she spends most of her day thinking of new ideas across platforms, bringing on new writers, overseeing the day-to-day of the website, and working with the awesome team to produce the best stories and packages. Before W+G, she was the Senior Web Editor for Marie Claire and the Deputy Editor for Latina.com, with bylines all over the internet. Graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a minor in African history, she’s written everything from travel guides to political op-eds to wine explainers (currently enrolled in the WSET program) to celebrity profiles. Find her online pretty much everywhere @samanthajoleal.