When Brooke Elby woke up on June 20, 2018, the first thing she noticed was a strange odor. It was coming from the bathroom of the hotel room in which she had slept. The shower had failed to drain and water had seeped into the carpet of the bedroom. The air stank of wet dog. All Elby wanted to do was cry.
Later, she did. On the phone to her parents, like a jilted teenager begging to be picked up from a party, the 25-year old explained through sobs what had happened. She – a professional soccer player - had been traded with no warning by her team in Utah, made up of some of her closest friends, to a club in Chicago, a city she’d never even been. Then Elby listened in a state of numbness as her father tried to convince her to leave her job and come home to Pasadena, 2,000 miles away.
Early that morning, she had arrived at O’Hare airport from Salt Lake City, scared and discombobulated. Two days prior, while she was sitting at a hotel breakfast buffet with her teammates on the Utah Royals Football Club, talking about their upcoming match against North Carolina, she had been pulled aside by her coach.
“That’s when she told me I wouldn’t be playing,” Elby recalls. “I’d been traded unceremoniously, like a pawn in a game of chess, to Chicago.”
Shock transfers are not unusual in soccer. In fact, in many sports they’re as integral to strategy as anything that happens on the pitch, court or field, but what astonished Elby were the conditions and the way in which the move was executed.
“Often when we hear about a big-name athlete – a male soccer player or a football star, for example - being transferred suddenly, a generous pay packet is thrown in to sweeten the deal,” she explains. “I was in a city I didn’t know, embarking on a new job, with no permanent place to stay and a salary that was technically below minimum wage. Let’s just say my self-worth was not in a good place.”
Hours after she was informed of her move, Elby started packing a single suitcase. Over the years she’d learned to travel light. With no time to make plans, she left her red Honda in the Salt Lake City stadium parking lot. In the weeks ahead, her teammates would intermittently send her pictures of the abandoned car with captions like, “Still waiting for you to come home”.
The following evening, after a slew of miserable farewells from the women who had been her colleagues, confidantes and friends since she had transferred from the Boston Breakers a year earlier, Elby boarded the three-and-half hour United flight. An old school friend, the only person Elby knew in Chicago, scooped her up at the other end, bundled her into a car and deposited her at the soulless “LaGrange” Holiday Inn. This would be Elby’s home for the next two weeks while she waited for her new employer, the Chicago Red Stars, to figure out what to do with this defense football player, their latest arrival.
During the next few days, Elby eased into a state of lonely limbo. She became accustomed to the training sessions with strangers and the seemingly endless hours of daytime TV. The distinctions between her anxiety-filled days and restless nights blurred. At some point, between painful phone calls to friends and moments of deep self-reflection, she started to understand that things couldn’t go on like this.
As a young girl, she had pined for sporting stardom. She had tacked posters of
David Beckham and Landon Donovan - widely considered one of the best
male American soccer players of all time - to her bedroom wall. She adored
Kristine Lilly and
Mia Hamm, two of the greatest ever female players, and was convinced that if, like them, she trained hard and played well, she too could become a rich, world-famous athlete.
But in the ensuing years, she realized that the career path she had staked out for herself was rigged with potholes, hurdles and dead ends. Misogyny overshadowed so much of the world she found herself in. Unlike many male counterparts she knew, Elby struggled to earn a comfortable living or secure a lucrative sponsorship deal.
Whether it was in training or during a match, there was an unexpressed but palpable understanding that women’s soccer comes second to men’s, she explains. Every day, she was not only considering how to beat her team’s next opponent, but also how to keep going in the face of systemic sexism.
“I realized during those weeks in that Chicago hotel room that [the way I was living] was entirely unsustainable. I was an adult woman but I was being treated like a prop. That was the beginning of the end of my career as a professional soccer player.”
***
Women’s soccer in the United States is a two-faced institution. Particularly over the last few years, the picture of it painted by the media tends to feature the national team in 2019 storming to World Cup victory against the Netherlands in a strapping display of female prowess. National team co-captain Megan Rapinoe’s trademark shock of purple hair has been hailed a symbol of a promising new era for women athletes everywhere but the playing field so many seem determined to level is still painfully uneven.
And this is what Judge Klausner seemed to refer to when he explained why he dismissed the equal pay argument. The women's national team had previously rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the men's national team is, Klausner said. Instead, they had opted to forgo higher bonuses in favor of other benefits, like a greater base compensation.
“Accordingly,”
Klausner concluded, “plaintiffs cannot now retroactively deem their CBA [collective bargaining agreement] worse than the [men's national team’s] CBA by reference to what they would have made had they been paid under the [men's national team’s] pay-to-play structure when they themselves rejected such a structure."
There’s one stark fact that speaks for itself though: When the U.S. women’s team won the World Cup in France in 2019, it received $4m in prize money. Their male counterparts took home $400m - one hundred times as much - during the corresponding tournament in 2018.
***
Although the women’s case was thrown out, and although some players readily concede that the judge’s argument stands - at least technically - the dismissal has done nothing to curb the momentum building behind a much broader movement across women’s soccer in the U.S.
Inspired by global campaigns like #MeToo and #TimesUp, female players are at last finding the courage to express their resolve to change the way they are perceived and treated, both on and off the pitch.
Veteran athletes like Billie Jean King and politicians like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have thrown their weight behind the players’ call for fair pay. When the team scored those victorious goals against their Dutch rivals in France in 2019 year, it was chants of “equal pay! equal pay!” that rang out across the bleachers.
In April 2019, before the compensation case was dismissed, U.S. Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro
quit over language in a court filing that suggested women possess less ability than men when it comes to playing soccer. That incident prompted on-field player protest, during which the women wore their warm-up jerseys inside out to hide the U.S. soccer logo prior to playing.
In June of that year, The Wall Street Journal published
audited financial reports from the U.S. Soccer Federation showing that in the three years after the U.S. women’s soccer team won the 2015 World Cup, games played by the women actually generated more total revenue than those played by men: $50.8 million compared to $49.9 million.
“We’re really not asking for much,” the former player who doesn’t want to be named, says. “We want to be respected - we want to be treated like adults and in a dignified way - and we don’t want to be afraid of losing our jobs if we don’t agree to move across the country based on a quick decision made by someone we’ve never met. There’s not much more to it than that.”
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