The United States women’s national team has reignited parts of its dispute with US Soccer five months after the sides
reached a momentous agreement to increase pay and improve standards. The recurring issue at hand is one that has incensed women’s players before, when a handful of stars — Americans included — sued over FIFA’s decision to host the 2015 World Cup in Canada on artificial turf fields.
The American women are facing the same dilemma on their own, with four of their final nine games of 2017 scheduled to be played on turf.
“We feel that it’s not their top priority to put us on grass,” veteran midfielder Megan Rapinoe
told the New York Times, “so they don’t.”
Rapinoe’s frustration stems from the clause in the collective bargaining agreement she feels US Soccer is violating. Among agreeing on a pay raise and higher standards of travel and accommodations in April’s collective bargaining agreement, the sides signed off on a statement that natural grass was the “preferred” surface for all games.
While the players reportedly were informed of the federation’s reasoning behind each venue selection, they felt slighted by the number of games still being relegated to turf — a surface many argue increases the risk of injury and shows the women are not being treated equally to the men, who play their international games on grass.
More than anything, Rapinoe worries the locations reveal is a sign of thwarted progress, especially after the players’ union fought for so long to reach April’s compromise.
“We just finished the negotiation process and this was something that was very important to us,” Rapinoe said. “We finished the deal and felt good about it — and then we turn around and we have three games at the back end of the year on turf. That doesn’t signal to us that the progress we wanted and talked about with the federation is being made.”
One bright spot is the the newfound transparency between US Soccer and the women’s national team, winners of the 2015 World Cup and quarterfinalists at the 2016 Summer Olympics. The two sides hold bi-weekly conference calls, as part of a provision included in the CBA, and are expected to meet face-to-face in Chicago on Monday, according to the Times.
While the number of games on turf has decreased since 2015 and relations have dramatically improved, the American women have been down this winding road before — going so far as to threaten a strike if their wages did not improve,
as forward Alex Morgan did in January — and don’t want to navigate it again.
“We do understand that we can’t — or the federation is unwilling to — put every single game of ours on grass,” Rapinoe said. “But the expectation is that wherever we can, and with their best efforts, they will try to put us on grass.”
