The USWNT and Women's Soccer: A Fan's Guide

Title IX, signed into law in 1972, required schools receiving federal funding to offer equal athletic opportunity. It was not written with soccer in mind, but soccer was the sport best positioned to absorb it: cheap to equip, easy to field, and growing fast in American suburbs exactly when the law took effect. Within twenty years the United States had thousands of girls playing organized soccer at an age when most of the world offered them nothing at all.

The second piece was college soccer. NCAA women's soccer gave the US a fully funded semi-professional development system decades before a professional league existed anywhere. Players got coaching, strength training, competitive schedules, and four years of high-level games while their international peers were still fighting for field time. For a long stretch, the national team was essentially the best of a talent pool that other countries had not started building yet.

That structural advantage is narrowing, and quickly. European clubs with enormous budgets began investing seriously in their women's sides, and countries that once had no domestic pathway now have professional leagues. The US no longer wins because of a head start. It wins because the depth is still there.

1972

Title IX signed into law

4

Women's World Cup titles for the USWNT

2013

NWSL plays its first season

The first Women's World Cup was held in China in 1991, and the US won it. Almost nobody at home noticed. There was no live television deal, no parade, no sponsorship windfall. Players came back from winning a world championship and went to their day jobs. Michelle Akers scored twice in the final against Norway, a performance that would have made her a household name in almost any other context.

It matters anyway, for two reasons. It established that the US could win at the highest level from the very first opportunity. And it created the core group — Akers, Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain — who would still be around eight years later when the country finally paid attention.

The 1999 Women's World Cup was hosted in the United States, and the federation made a decision that looked reckless at the time: put the games in NFL stadiums instead of small soccer-specific venues. They filled them. The final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena drew a crowd north of 90,000 — still one of the largest ever to watch a women's sporting event anywhere.

The game itself was a grind. The US and China played 120 scoreless minutes and went to penalties, where Briana Scurry saved one attempt and Brandi Chastain converted the winner. The photograph that followed became the most recognizable image in American soccer history.

Every generation of American players can name the game that made them want to play. For an enormous number of them, it is that one.

The professional league that 1999 was supposed to launch, the WUSA, folded after three seasons. A second attempt, WPS, lasted three more. It took until 2013 for a league to survive, which is worth remembering whenever anyone describes the growth of women's soccer as inevitable.

Sixteen years passed between world titles. The 2011 final against Japan, lost on penalties, is the best game most casual fans have never watched. The 2015 rematch in Vancouver was the correction: Carli Lloyd scored a hat trick inside the opening sixteen minutes, including a shot from the halfway line, and the US won 5-2 in a final that was effectively over before it started.

The 2019 run in France was a different kind of tournament — louder, more political, and played under constant scrutiny because the players had sued their own federation three months before it began. They beat the Netherlands 2-0 in the final in Lyon. The stadium chanted about equal pay during the trophy presentation, which tells you how completely the two stories had merged.

The dispute was never as simple as "the women earned less for winning more," though that was true in several years. The two national teams worked under entirely different collective bargaining agreements with different structures — the women had guaranteed salaries and benefits, the men were paid per appearance with far larger bonuses. Comparing them required comparing two systems, which is exactly why the argument took so long to resolve.

1. 1

   The complaint

   In 2016, five USWNT players filed a wage discrimination complaint with the EEOC, putting the pay gap on the record and into the news for the first time.

2. 2

   The lawsuit

   In March 2019, months before the World Cup, the team sued US Soccer for gender discrimination covering both pay and working conditions — travel, training facilities, and field surfaces.

3. 3

   The setback

   A federal judge dismissed the core pay claims in 2020 while allowing the working-conditions claims to proceed. The players appealed.

4. 4

   The settlement

   In 2022 the sides settled, with US Soccer agreeing to a $24 million payment and, critically, to equal pay going forward for the men's and women's national teams.

5. 5

   The new contracts

   Later that year both teams signed collective bargaining agreements that pool and split World Cup prize money between them — the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the sport.

The prize money pooling is the part that deserves more attention than it got. FIFA pays vastly more for the men's World Cup than the women's, and no federation can change that on its own. Splitting the pooled total meant the US men's team agreed to hand over a share of its own earnings. That is why the settlement is cited in other countries: it is a template that does not depend on FIFA fixing anything first.

The National Women's Soccer League launched in 2013 and is now the longest-running professional women's league the United States has had. The format is familiar to anyone who follows American sports: a regular season where every team plays a balanced schedule, a table, and then a playoff bracket that ends in the NWSL Championship — a single game, at a neutral site, for the title.

• A regular-season table decides playoff seeding; the NWSL Championship is one match, not a series.
• The league has expanded repeatedly since 2013, adding teams in new markets with dedicated ownership groups.
• The first players' collective bargaining agreement, ratified in 2022, brought free agency and higher minimum salaries.
• Rosters mix USWNT internationals, foreign stars, and college draftees, so the talent gap between top and bottom is smaller than in most leagues.
• Tickets are cheap by American pro-sports standards, and most clubs play in stadiums small enough that the atmosphere carries.

The league also matters for the national team in a way that is easy to miss. Before 2013, USWNT players had no domestic professional environment between camps; some went to Europe, some effectively stopped playing competitively. A stable league means players arrive at national team camps already sharp, and it means the pipeline no longer ends when college does.

The rhythm is straightforward once you know it. The Women's World Cup runs every four years, expanded to 32 teams in 2023. The Olympic tournament sits in between on its own four-year cycle with a much smaller field, which is why the women's game has a major international event roughly every two years — a cadence the men's game does not have.

In between, the USWNT plays friendlies and regional competitions, and the domestic calendar carries the season. If you want a club to follow, pick the NWSL side nearest you and go to a match in person; the leap in quality from television to a live game is larger in women's soccer than most people expect. Beyond the US, the English, Spanish, and French leagues are all worth watching, and the Champions League knockout rounds are where the best club soccer in the world currently gets played.