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Story highlights
- USWNT star players are suing U.S. soccer over pay gap
- Women's team is not only more successful than the men but they also bring in more money
(CNN)Key members of the U.S. Women's National Team (USWNT) have filed a lawsuit demanding pay parity from U.S. soccer's governing body.
The five players who filed the suit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn, did so through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal body that tackles workplace discrimination.
They say that they filed the complaint on behalf on the entire team, which sometimes earns as little as between a half and a quarter of their male counterparts, depending on bonuses.
The case should be the legal equivalent of an open goal, some analysts say. Not only are the U.S. women much more successful than the men, they also generate much more revenue for U.S. Soccer.
"It's been noted... that the women's team itself has generated more money by far -- by $20 million in 2015 than the men's team did," sportscaster, journalist and author John Bacon tells CNN's Natalie Allen.
"Their case is based on how much they're getting paid, how much they're winning, but also how much they're generating for the U.S. Soccer Federation."
He says that "pretty clearly" they should at least close the pay gap on their male colleagues, and says, "you might argue they should be getting more than the men.
"Winning does help, doesn't it?"
In a statement released March 31, U.S. Soccer said that its "efforts to be advocates for women's soccer are unwavering," adding that it is committed to negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement for the women's team at the end of 2016.
11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
The U.S. women's soccer team celebrates its World Cup victory with a ticker tape parade in New York on Friday, July 10. Midfielder Megan Rapinoe is holding the trophy.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, center, participates in the parade. The U.S. women's team defeated Japan 5-2 to take its third World Cup title.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
A young fan cheers while waiting for the ticker tape parade, the first in New York for a women's sports team.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
U.S. forward Abby Wambach takes a photo aboard a float. The floats carried the players from Battery Park to City Hall.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
Fans cheer and take photos during the parade. The last time female athletes paraded along the Canyon of Heroes was in 1984.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
Young fans line the parade route. The cost of the parade is reportedly $2 million.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
U.S. midfielder Carli Lloyd takes a selfie with the World Cup 2015 trophy during the ticker tape parade.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
The team's players are an inspiration for women of all ages, New York's mayor said.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
Mayor Bill de Blasio salutes the U.S. women's soccer team at a City Hall ceremony Friday.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
Robin Robbins, left, and Mayor Bill de Blasio celebrate soccer player Megan Rapinoe, center, and her fellow World Cup champions at City Hall.
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11 photos: Ticker tape parade for U.S. soccer team
Throngs gather for the rally at City Hall. De Blasio announced the hastily prepared parade this week.
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Serial winners
The USWNT, which has been serially successful, winning three World Cups -- it is the current holder -- and four Olympic golds, including the London Olympics in 2012, claims that its winning ways should translate into equal pay.
Despite being far more successful on the field, the complaint alleges that the women's team earns around a quarter of its male counterpart, which has a solitary Olympic silver medal to show for their century-plus history of competing -- and that came in 1904, in St Louis.
Men's soccer stars Tim Howard and Landon Donovan have come out of support of this motion, Bacon says, and this action "has the support, I think, of almost the entire nation."
The timing "could not be better," Bacon says, this coming as gender pay gaps have become a hot-button issue in the upcoming Presidential election.
I think their odds of winning are excellent... any logical reason that you can give me that they're not to be paid the same simply breaks down very quickly, so you're going to hear al kinds of crazy stuff ... (but) the women have, in my opinion, a rock-solid case."
Imagine if FIFA was run by a woman – The election for FIFA's new president takes place at the organization's headquarters in Zurich on Friday. While the battle to replace Sepp Blatter tops the bill, reforms set to boost women's participation in football, particularly representation on the new FIFA Council (replacing the Executive Committee), are expected to be ratified.
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FIFA HQ – In the run-up to the election, CNN contacted the five presidential candidates to seek their views on the involvement of women in the game.
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Sheikh Salman – The Bahraini royal, who also heads the Asian Football Confederation, is the favorite to replace Blatter. Does he think a woman will ever be FIFA president? "The truth is that it is not a question of gender but rather a question of qualifications," he says. "The best woman or the best man should run FIFA. If one had a choice between surgeons of different backgrounds or sexes to operate on a loved one, one's decision would be based on their qualifications and experience and nothing else. FIFA, as many other professional organizations in the west, shares the same challenges when it comes to gender issues."
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Jderome Champagne – The one-time diplomat and former adviser to Sepp Blatter fervently believes in the need to reduce inequality across global football, and is in doubt about the potential for a female FIFA leader. "The biggest problem of our world is about placing individuals in boxes according to generalizations and/or prejudice according to their gender, passport, ethnic origin, religious creed or the absence of any, social background, sexual orientation, etc. So it is not about gender but about vision. History has shown a lot of cases where a cause was better defended by persons considered to be remote from that particular cause. History shows as well a lot of female leaders who were not very feminist in their deeds. One day, for sure, a woman will be the president of FIFA -- along the line of the same trends which took women to the highest positions in countries from India to Germany, from Brazil to Liberia, and maybe soon in the US."
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Prince Ali Bin Hussein – The Jordanian prince is battling to become FIFA president for the second time, after losing the 2015 elections to Blatter. Women in football is a "subject close to my heart," he tells CNN. "As president of the Jordan Football Association I started a women's league in 2006 and I was instrumental in overturning the ban on female players wearing the headscarf. Later this year my country will host the Under-17 Women's World Cup, a first for our country and the Middle East. If elected FIFA president I would assess investment levels and structure of assistance for the women's game. I would create a separate development budget for women's football, derived from new revenues, as well as reducing the financial burden for hosts of Women's World Cups of every age group. From players to coaches, officials and administrators, it is vital women are represented at all levels. As a member of the Executive Committee, I was supportive of a greater representation for women at all levels of the organization, and if elected president this will not change."
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Tokyo Sexwale – CNN contacted Sexwale's camp, but received no response.
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Professor Michael Haselhuhn – The candidates are only dreaming of becoming president after a US Department of Justice inquiry last May threw FIFA into chaos. Despite winning the elections that month, long-standing president Sepp Blatter announced his intention to step down shortly after. In December, Blatter was banned for eight years by FIFA for breaching its code of ethics. "I don't know if he doesn't know right from wrong," said an expert on gender in business Professor Michael Haselhuhn. "It's more that he perceives what he's doing as right."
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'FIFA could become well-esteemed' – German Chancellor Angela Merkel would make a fine leader of FIFA, claims political journalist Karsten Kammholz of German newspaper Die Welt. He believes Mrs Merkel, who took charge of her country in 2005, would wipe away corruption and perhaps ensure the World Cup went to traditional football powerhouses -- as opposed to 2022 hosts Qatar, where the intense heat is forcing the tournament to be rescheduled from June-July to December. "With her in charge, FIFA could become a well-esteemed sports organization where people discuss and argue under democratic standards," Kammholz told CNN. "Probably, FIFA wouldn't make that much money under Merkel, but still enough to keep it as one of the most powerful sports organizations in the world. And World Cups would only take place in summer and only in countries that clearly have a football-loving audience."
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Rebuilding trust – This time four years ago, FIFA -- founded in 1904 -- had never had a woman on its all-powerful Executive Committee. But in 2012, Lydia Nsekera of Burundi became the first. Advised that it would be a way to rebuild trust after the corruption storm that followed the 2022 World Cup award to Qatar, she was co-opted (ie invited) to take a place.
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'We're going to have a better game' – A year after Nsekera was co-opted, she won a women-only election to have a more formal -- elected -- place on the ExCo. The two women she beat were both then co-opted: Moya Dodd, of Australia, and Sonia Bien-Aime of Turks and Caicos. Dodd is unequivocal in her belief that we are living through a period of real change for women in power. "We do the game a disservice if we don't embrace and enable the whole population of the planet," Dodd told CNN. "My generation is now doing things that my mother could never have dreamed of doing. And I'm sure that what you are seeing globally over history, over the last 100 years, is the feminization of decision-making in the world. I think that's going to be a really positive thing for football. I think we're going to have a better game, a better run game, a better sport, and we'll be able to make a contribution towards a more equitable and more productive society."
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History in the making – Sierra Leonean FA chief Isha Johansen is the other female football president. She is considering a bid in future and tells CNN: "I absolutely know -- for sure -- that there will be a female FIFA leader. These are ever-changing times and it will happen. When? I don't know. When it does, it will be the dawn of a new era and like, I guess, when Obama was elected president of the United States. It will be that same euphoric feeling -- history in the making."
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Bonita Mersiades – The Australian is a co-founder of New FIFA Now, a campaign group that wants independent and external reform of the organization. In November 2014, FIFA ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert published his summary of the report into possible corruption surrounding 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding by former U.S. attorney Michael Garcia. Mersiades had helped the latter's investigation -- under condition of anonymity -- but says she was betrayed because of her gender. "Garcia allegedly spoke with 75 people but in the summary by Eckert, he singled out two whistle-blowers (Arab-American Phaedra Almajid, who worked on the Qatar 2002 campaign, was the other)," the Australian tells CNN. "It was absolutely clear to everyone in the world who those two people were -- and they were women. Knowing FIFA and the way it operates, what they expected was that we would run away, curl up in the corner and die and never say anything."
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Trail blazers
Bacon compares the motion as similar to Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, and Billie Jean King in 1972 campaigning for equal rights for tennis players.
"This will have ripples that last for years."
The motion certainly has already caught the attention of the two Democrats vying for their party's nomination, with both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton tweeting support for the suit.
Australian jockey Michelle Payne became the first woman to win the Melbourne Cup, riding Prince of Penzance on Tuesday, November 3. Payne said she hopes her win will open doors for female jockeys because she believes "that we (females) sort of don't get enough of a go."
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Serena Williams has won 21 Grand Slam singles titles, putting her third on the all-time list. She has been ranked No. 1 in the world six times and is the oldest No. 1 player in WTA history. Williams is also the most recent player, male or female, to hold all four major singles titles at the same time.
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UFC fighter Ronda Rousey, the women's bantamweight champion, has never lost in mixed martial arts, and she holds the UFC record for quickest finish in a title fight: 14 seconds. Rousey also won a bronze medal in judo at the 2008 Summer Olympics.
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At 18, New Zealand's Lydia Ko became the youngest winner of a women's major when she won the Evian Championship in September. Her victory also made her the youngest golfer, male or female, to win a major title since 1868. She already held the record for the youngest winner on the LPGA Tour, claiming the Canadian Open as a 15-year-old amateur in 2012. Ko is also the youngest to reach No. 1 in the world rankings.
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Jennifer Welter, a veteran player on professional women's football teams, became the National Football League's first female coach when she was hired as a training camp and preseason intern for the Arizona Cardinals in 2015. Welter is also the first woman to coach in a men's professional football league, having been named a coach for the Indoor Football League's Texas Revolution.
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Danica Patrick holds the only victory by a woman in an IndyCar Series race, having won the 2008 Indy Japan 300. By coming in third at the Indianapolis 500 in 2009, she achieved the best finish ever by a female driver in the race. She also holds the highest finish by a female driver in NASCAR's Daytona 500.
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Laila Ali, the daughter of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, began her boxing career in 1999 at the age of 18. She went on to have an undefeated boxing career, winning 24 fights before retiring in 2007.
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Abby Wambach has scored more international goals (184) than any soccer player in history, male or female. She received the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year award in 2011, becoming the first individual soccer player to do so. She played her last World Cup this year and helped the United States win the tournament. She has since announced she will retire from the sport.
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Lindsey Vonn became the first American woman to win the gold medal in downhill skiing at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She has also won four World Cup titles in her career to go with an Olympic bronze and six medals at the World Championships.
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Sanders said, via Twitter, that the time for pay parity was "long overdue," and that he felt that the USWNT suit would be a success.
Clinton added her voice to the debate, tweeting that she "wouldn't want to face these women on the field or in the courtroom," adding that "every woman deserves equal pay."
The three Republican candidates, however, did not mention the decision on their social media accounts.
The suit comes hot on the heels of the resignation of a prominent tennis figure, Indian Wells tournament director Raymond Moore, who said that the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) "ride on the coattails of the men."
The furore swelled to envelop one of the sport's most successful male athletes, Novak Djokovic, who was forced to backtrack on comments he made, saying the attendance and "attention," that the men's tour generated meant that he felt those players deserved more money.