U.S. Soccer’s biggest concession to the women’s national team members isn’t the $24 million. It’s the acknowledgment that millions of dollars in insults were real. Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Christen Press and their teammates, like so many other women who hazard a pay discrimination complaint against a powerful employer, were treated as if they had imagined the slights and the financial sleights of hand.
After six years, countless sophistries and innumerable shell games with the math, U.S. Soccer offered up back pay and made a pledge to equal compensation rates for its men’s and women’s teams going forward.