Don’t Pay Women Soccer Players More, Pay the Men Less

Attaining fair and equal pay for women is important. In most circumstances, women are underpaid compared to their male colleagues despite doing similar work.

To be fair, in most cases men are underpaid too. After all, Walmart is the largest employer in the United States, followed by Amazon. Both of these companies are infamous for their poor working conditions and wages.

But the issue of equal pay in women’s soccer is an entirely different beast. It’s not about fair pay at all — it’s about the right for some women to be as overpaid as some men are.

Is that really worth fighting for?

At first glance, the women soccer players have a great argument. Air tight, even. According to the New York Times, women soccer players have a base salary of $72,000 while men have a base of $100,000. The disparity becomes even larger when including supplemental income, which they earn based on performance. If women players win all twenty of their games, then their salaries will increase to a maximum of $99,000. Meanwhile, the men’s can increase to over $200,000.

Cleary, this is unfair. The difference in their supplemental income is enormous. But even at current levels, the income of both genders is a huge indictment of our cultural priorities.

There are two problems here.

First, the professional sports industry adds absolutely nothing to society. Working professionally in sports is not useful, it’s entertainment. Low level workers at Walmart and Amazon contribute substantially more to society than any professional sports player does. How can we justify paying soccer players more than we pay teachers or nurses? We need to reverse this trend, paying people based on their contributions to society.

The second issue, but the more important one, is the industry’s impact on the climate crisis. Sports teams are regularly flown across the country and the world, making professional sports a highly fossil fuel defendant activity. Professional sports teams often ride on charter flights that aren’t filled to capacity, thereby making their air travel even less efficient than the average person’s.

This is no small problem. If we don’t change our ways, the proportion of carbon emissions attributable to air travel is expected to increase to 22% by 2050. Currently, there’s no green alternative for powering air travel. It’s still dependent on fossil fuels. Electric commercial planes are still largely wishful thinking, and are at best many decades away. Biofuels are terrible for the planet too, requiring that farmers raze the rainforest in order to grow the required crops, destroying necessary carbon sinks and furthering habitat destruction and wildlife extinction in the process.

Given that the professional sports industry contributes nothing to society aside from entertainment, and because their carbon footprint is so huge, the industry is certainly a net loss for the world. This is equally true for both men’s and women’s team.

According to climate scientists, we have only 11 years to prevent global warming over 1.5 degrees, at which point we can expect substantially more social unrest, destruction, and death. Some studies suggest that we can expect to see the global collapse of civilization as early as 2050 if we continue down our current path.

The climate crisis is the single greatest threat to humanity since our inception 200,000 years ago, so we need to frame every decision based on how it will impact the planet. Will it save us, or destroy us?

The term “bread and circuses” was coined by Juvenal in the second century AD. It refers to a population’s dismissal of civic duty as a priority, favoring useless distractions instead. These distractions are willfully chosen by the population, but they’re also encouraged by society’s economic elites who want to avoid challenges to their economic power. Challenges that, if people were paying attention, would become inevitable.

Although originally a reference to Rome, the phrase applies today just as well. It’s an indictment of our modern celebrity worship. We could make the same indictment against all socialites and royalty, as well as most actors and musicians, who are celebrated by the media despite adding next to nothing to the world.

To be fair, I’m all for people having the privilege to do their hobbies professionally, especially if they’re very talented. But should professional hobbyists be paid better than the average worker? They certainly shouldn’t be paid better than teachers or nurses. This isn’t true of just the players, of course. It’s also true of team owners, managers, coaches, and others.

It’s legitimate to argue that the players are only being exploited by their owners, an illustration of our capitalist paradigm at work. I’m sure this is how the players see it. But this just proves that it’s a larger systems-level issue. It proves that it’s the responsibility of consumers to stop rewarding team owners by buying into their bread and circuses.

In this way, the two issues are linked. If celebrities were compensated based on their contributions to society, they wouldn’t be so enormously overpaid. We could decrease environmentally destructive activities like flying all over world for unnecessary sports games and silly awards.

Fair compensation, relative to how it benefits the world, would require that professional sports becomes a decentralized and small-scale endeavor. This would also be an opportunity to take power away from team owners, creating worker collectives instead.

The women’s soccer pay scale is terribly unfair when compared to the men’s. But when compared to society’s, it’s beyond fair — they’re overpaid. So, instead of paying women soccer players more, let’s pay their male colleagues less. Let’s decentralize professional sports, requiring that they remain local and small-scale, only traveling within a few hundred mile radius, decreasing their massive carbon footprint.

Let’s decrease demand for both women’s and men’s professional sports, which are nothing but bread and circuses, distracting us from stopping the destruction of the Earth.

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