Reply to U.S. Soccer Is Offering The Same Contracts For Its Men's And Women's Teams

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous][quote=RantingSoccerDad][quote=Anonymous]Or - how about no money can go from USSF to MLS/SUM.  Just make it a basic rule.

Now - it does not resolve the past history issues but it is a good start moving forward.

[/quote]

Sigh … how many times do I have to point you to the high $20m annual payouts FROM SUM TO the federation before you get the point?[/quote]

Your mean the payouts for rights that are worth 2-3 times that amount?  You mean the ones that require sponsors to sponsor MLS, if they want to sponsor the women’s team?

[/quote]

I go back pretty far.  With a daughter who played at a decently high youth level it became a "hobby" of mine.  I find that attorneys get particular "hobby" issues and with an athlete daughter Title IX and Women's Soccer were a couple of mine.  So -- I had a minor role in my kid's then club's efforts in being named one of the initial Development Academy clubs.  They were a strong girls club, but not as strong on the boys side.  I was involved in assisting with the application process, and, of course, the USSF lied about the program.  Obviously we did not know it at the time.  Initially the USSF announced that the DA would by "boys only" but just for the first year.  Get things going kind of thing.  Then year two came and went.  Then year three and the -- "we don't need to do anything for women's soccer" statements begin to come out.  Mind you -- this was no help to anyone actually involved in youth soccer, because every non-MLS club had a girls side to their program.  So now, they had the "best" boys program with coaching development and guidance from USSF and millions of dollars in support -- and free club fees for kids being big -- and the girls?  Nothing.  Was this in 1965?  Nope.  It was 2007.

The club owners started the ECNL to provide a similar league and support system for girls -- but of course this was not free as the USSF wanted no part.  They were girls after all so the USSF did not care.  Rather, it was perfectly fine to discriminate against girls.  Support women's soccer?  The US team does okay.  No one cares.  (How did that work out last Olympics?  Walked away with the gold again I assume right?)

What the DA proved to everyone in youth soccer is that the USSF does not give a crap about youth soccer, women or girls.  It cared about helping MLS.  That's it.  Everyone else could xxxx off.  For 12 years the USSF funded the boys only DA program to the tune of about $3M a year.  And, people complain about putting money into the NWSL now?  There is still a long way to go to make up.

As for the national teams -- a freshman business major could handle them better.  Yes, of course, everything was turned over to SUM/MLS (and not very well managed at that) so that money could be pushed into MLS off the USSF books.  Don't you find it odd that SUM has sponsors that are not USSF or MLS national team sponsors?  SUM?  Why would that be do you think?

Here's a thought.  Do the exact SUM deal with the women's side.  They can pay the same percentage SUM paid to USSF in exchange for getting all media and sponsorship rights to the national teams for the next 20 years.  That would even the score don't you think?

Nice work moving the goalposts.

Now that the SUM arrangement is ending, we'll see how much the rights are really worth. SUM bought them when no one else wanted them. (This is all covered in my first book.)

No one "sponsors the women's team." U.S. Soccer is a federation that, like every other national soccer federation, is responsible for soccer within its own country. That means they're responsible for the women's team, the men's team, the beach soccer team, the futsal team, the disability teams, the youth national teams, coaching development, referee development, etc., etc., etc. Fortunately, their sponsors understand that no single national team operates in a vacuum, and so they sponsor the whole federation. (I could see sponsors for specific programs -- deaf soccer, grassroots grants, etc. -- but sponsoring either the women's team seems like a bad idea because it opens the possibility that someone might instead *only* sponsor the men's team, which wouldn't be good. Maybe they could line up one major sponsor for each team, but why?)

If you want to sponsor women's soccer and do so where it would actually help, I'll start spelling the proper means for doing so: N .. W ... S ...

Nor do you have to sponsor MLS to sponsor U.S. Soccer. Among the USSF sponsors who do not sponsor MLS: Chipotle, Deloitte, BioSteel, GoGoSqueeze, Anheuser Busch, Hyperice and Visa.[/quote]

No mpving the goalposts.  You just wanted to pretend that the USSF was not now, and has not for decades, been helping MLS/SUM by giving them sweetheart deals and then also allowing them to require national team sponsors to also sponsor MLS if they wanted to a connection to the men's or women's team   See -- trying to hide the obvious only makes your argument silly.  The "oh no how will we ever be able to figure out how to allocate sponsor revenue" is frankly just plain stupid. Joe's Accounting and Bookkeeping Service could tell you how.  Grant Thornton could set up the financial recording system tomorrow and an office temp could run it for the USSF.

The real problem is that this creates a very big black hole for the USSF at a time when everyone is looking.  There really is no good choice for the USSF , but to say, "yes we discriminated against women and girls for decades -- not in the 50s and 60s, but well into the 2010s actually.  We are sorry."  That is obviously an expensive statement, because moving forward does not compensate for past actions.  But, it has to be made.  How will has it worked out for the US Gymnastics Association to pretend that no one was molesting gymnasts?   Everyone already knows it.  It is a big dead elephant in a pretty small room after all.    If, in the end, it blows up the USSF then it blows up the USSF.  But, moving forward it will be better than to have an organization pretend it did not openly, wantonly and yes, even recently, discriminate against half of the people playing soccer in the US.

And, of course, there are other issues with the USSF that are only beginning to arise, perhaps as you would expect when apparently greed was the motivation for running things rather than fairness and even common sense.   Is there a youth club in the US that thinks the USSF has not royally screwed them?  That is a huge issue yet to come, and the easy way out would be to simply form a new youth organization that is non-USSF affiliated.  The countdown for that happening is already underway.

Do you really want to run down the tied sponsorship list?  That does not come out well for you.

[/quote]

I have covered women's soccer for a couple of decades and delved deep into USSF finances for several years, checking documents back to 2001.

You, on the other hand, have a bunch of conjecture and attempts at guilt by association. (USA Gymnastics? Really? I've written stories on SafeSport as well, you know. You can Google it.)

Is SUM's deal a sweetheart deal? In a sense, yes. Again, SUM bought in when no one else was interested, and bundling World Cup rights with MLS rights made sense. (Now, of course, MLS has broadcast partners who aren't World Cup broadcasters.) If you're old enough to remember where soccer stood in 2001 (or, worse, 1985), you get it. That deal has been renewed several times since then -- in unanimous board votes, including votes by the representatives of the youth and adult associations.

Now, USSF believes it no longer needs such a deal. You could argue they could've taken off the training wheels a few years ago, and that's a perfectly valid opinion. But the QAnon/flat earther stuff falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, let alone the research I've done over the years. (For example, you've seen the list of sponsors that sponsor either USSF or MLS but not both. Actually, USSF sponsors have more directly been sponsoring the NWSL because USSF ran the NWSL at its inception and continues to subsidize the league and pay its national team players' club salaries in addition to the $100k for national team salaries, though I'd again argue that any company specifically interested in women's soccer should sponsor a damn NWSL club or the league itself. They won't, because they prefer the glitz of Megan Rapinoe to the hard work of giving the 25th- through 50th-best women's players a place to play.[/quote][/quote]

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