Let me share why your post sucks.
First, everything you have said is incorrect. Second, you're obnoxious. Other than that, great addition to the thread. You've added a lot of value and forwarded the conversation.
While SF121 is certainly obnoxious and toxic in his tone, as is his wont, he does appear to have the benefit of having the facts on his side. Here's a few paragraphs from the middle of the NYT article that started this:
It has been argued that men’s sports, and their players, deserve a financial edge because they draw bigger crowds and generate far more money in ticket sales and corporate sponsorships. That is the case for U.S. Soccer’s national teams, the federation said Thursday. But that is not true for every sport. Women’s figure skating, for instance, has often drawn higher TV ratings and bigger crowds than men’s figure skating.
In their complaint, the five players cited recent U.S. Soccer financial reports as proof that they have become the federation’s main economic engine even as, they said, they often earned only half as much — or less — than their male counterparts.
At the same time, the players said, they exceeded revenue projections by as much as $16 million in 2015, when their World Cup triumph set television viewership records and a nine-game victory tour in packed stadiums produced record gate receipts and attendance figures.
U.S. Soccer officials disputed those figures, arguing that the women and their lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, cherry-picked an extraordinarily successful year to draw broad conclusions.
If their facts are correct, your entire argument is invalid, because the USWNT *is* more financially valuable to US Soccer than the USMNT. Now, US Soccer may have other arguments to make, around the replacement cost of the athletes, the relative supply and demand of their services, etc, but if those revenue numbers are as easily distinguishable as they claim (i.e. if revenue can be bucketed into whether it's derived mostly from the women or mostly from the men - which isn't always clear if, say, TV deals are aggregated), I would find those arguments to be particularly weak sauce.
Which side is right, of course, is what is being litigated. The lawsuit is, I would assume, a vehicle for discovery - get US Soccer to prove their financial claims so that both sides can start from a common set of agreed-upon facts in the CBA discussions.
edit: also, I can tell US Soccer is being disingenuous just from the content of the article, which if CC had read as carefully as SF121 wished, might have pissed him off too:
In response to the complaint filed Wednesday, U.S. Soccer argued that not only was the players’ pay collectively bargained, but that the players had insisted more than once on a salary-based system as a means of economic security over the bonus-centric plan the men work under. Russell Sauer, the outside counsel for the federation during labor talks, also said the women’s labor contract included provisions — severance and injury pay, health benefits and maternity leave, for example — not available to the men’s team.
“The truth is,” Sauer said, “the players are claiming discrimination based on a more conservative structure, based on guaranteed compensation rather than pay to play, which they themselves requested, negotiated and approved of not once, but twice.”
That's great, Russell, except it's belied by the infographics the NYT put out:
So the men get 50% more guaranteed pay,
and ~6x more incentive pay. Can't have it both ways, Russell, unless you're going to justify it based on differential value to the organization.
