The U.S. men's national soccer team just lost to Belgium in front of 45 million viewers. Before the locker room cooled down, their $16 million World Cup prize pot was already being carved up — and not just for the guys who were on the field.
Under the collective bargaining agreement between U.S. Soccer and both national teams, the organization takes a 20% cut off the top. The remaining 80% — $12.8 million — gets split evenly between the men's and women's player pools. That means each team receives $6.4 million. For a 26-person men's roster, that works out to roughly $246,153 per player. The women's team, currently not competing in any tournament, gets the exact same total.
The New York Post laid out the math: "The remaining 80 percent is split evenly between the men's and women's player pools, meaning each team is set to receive $6.4 million from the USMNT's run." Not from the women's run. From the men's run. The women's next World Cup isn't until 2027 in Brazil.
This is what "equal pay" looks like when one side is generating the revenue and the other side is collecting a check. The men hadn't made it past the round of 16 since 2002, so this tournament mattered. They trained for it. They qualified for it. They played in it. They lost in it. And their payout got halved before they touched it.
Melissa Chen, writing for The Spectator, put it plainly: "It disincentivizes excellence on the men's side — why push harder if your windfall gets redistributed?" She went further, comparing the structure to divorce court: "Like divorce settlements that trap high-earners in perpetual support roles, this policy treats men's soccer as a piggy bank for 'fairness.'"
The counterargument is that the women's team has historically been more successful — and that's true. They're heading to Brazil in 2027 chasing a fifth championship. Their 2015 World Cup final drew 26.7 million peak viewers, which was a record at the time. But success on the field didn't translate to equivalent revenue. The entire women's tournament payout in 2019, the year they won it all, was $4 million. Overall league revenue that year was $30 million. The men's single-tournament pot this year is $16 million. The CBA doesn't equalize success. It equalizes money by moving it from the column that generates more to the column that generates less.
Imagine telling any other worker in America that their bonus gets automatically split with a colleague in a different department who didn't work that quarter. Not redistributed based on need. Not adjusted for performance. Just split, fifty-fifty, because someone decided that was fair three years ago.