FIFA pays the women champs a fraction of what it pays the men (Mike Argento column)

Mike Argento

In the wake of the U.S. women's soccer team winning the World Cup, there was a lot of news coverage of how the members of the team provided young female athletes with stellar role models, that their example of competing at the world's highest level in the world's most popular sport would inspire American girls to reach for their dreams and achieve greatness.

Just about every news outlet in the country — including this newspaper — ran with that story, quoting young soccer players who looked up to the women who had just vanquished the world and became champions.

The women who dominated the Japanese team are certainly great athletes. They worked very hard to get where they were, and they continued to work hard, through some adversity in earlier rounds of the competition, to win the World Cup.

And yes, they are role models.

And great examples.

Just not for what you would expect.

First, some background: The World Cup is run by something called FIFA. Seven FIFA officials have been arrested on racketeering charges for extorting $150 million in bribes in what was, basically, the routine conduct of their business. The charges include bribery, fraud, money laundering, parking-meter violations, for all I know, and a bunch of other alleged criminal activity.

The indictment alleges that FIFA extorted bribes in an effort to influence everything from broadcast rights, to site selection for tournaments, to the selection of clothing and shoe sponsorships. Nike is believed to have paid at least $40 million in bribes to secure the exclusive rights to clothe and shod the Brazilian national team. (That's probably part of the reason why LeBron sneakers cost so much.)

And then, that doesn't even touch on FIFA's other allegedly corrupt practices, of bleeding host countries dry when it comes to hosting a soccer tournament, forcing countries to spend hundreds of millions to build stadiums that sit empty after FIFA leaves town and taking all of the revenue from any of those tournaments. And some of the stadiums, as is the case in Quatar, are built with essentially slave labor as FIFA and others allegedly skim off bales of money.

It's not pretty.

But that does nothing at all to detract from the U.S. women's victory in the final Sunday. It would be like allowing the NFL's socialism for billionaires and weird attitudes about domestic violence and the health of its players detract from whoever won the Super Bowl this year. (New England? There is plenty of other justification to dump on New England.)

But here's something that kind of provides women with the role models they can expect in life beyond sports.

FIFA awarded the German men's team $35 million for winning the World Cup in 2014. That same year, the U.S. men's team, eliminated in the first round of the competition, got $8 million from FIFA.

For winning the whole megillah, the U.S. women's team got $2 million.

What? Not even 78 percent?

A women's team that won the world championship got one-quarter of what the men's team got for losing in the first round. The disparity isn't even close to the wage gap between men and women, the aforementioned 78 percent.

FIFA tried to explain the gap, its secretary-general telling a newspaper, "We played the (20th) men's World Cup in 2014, when we are now playing the seventh women's World Cup. We have still another (13) World Cups before potentially women should receive the same amount as men. The men waited until 2014 to receive as much money as they received."

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And FIFA really doesn't have the excuse that it doesn't have the money. FIFA spends a lot of money on stupid stuff.

It spent $30 million to produce a propaganda movie, titled "United Passions," which sounds like the title of a late-night Cinemax flick, or so I'm told, that has been described by its own director as "a disaster." One of the stars, Tim Roth, said his role in the film would have his father "turning in his grave." One review called the movie "pure cinematic excrement" and said it was "valuable proof of corporate insanity."

It spent $4.4 million in bonuses to members of its executive committee. It sent $2 million to the Cayman Islands despite the fact that the tiny nation has never been to a World Cup tournament. The Cayman Islands, though, is home to a lot of banks that take the privacy of depositors very seriously. So there's that.

The monetary discrepancy is also reflected in the attitude of FIFA's top guy toward the women's game.

Last year, FIFA's president, a terrible human being named Sepp Blatter, said that women should wear skimpier clothing to attract fans to the game.

"Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball," he said. "They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men — such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?"

OK, for one thing, women use the same ball as everybody else. For another, well, did I mention Sepp Blatter is a terrible human being?

So what you have is a group of women who worked exceptionally hard to reach the pinnacle of their profession, and they are still paid significantly less than their male counterparts and are demeaned by suggestions that they use their appearance to improve their lot.

And in that way, the U.S. women provide great role models for young women.

It prepares them for what lies ahead and teaches them the valuable lesson that life just ain't fair.

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at @FnMikeArgento.