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Inside the fight for livable salaries in women’s soccer
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- Inside the fight for livable salaries in women’s soccer
Michelle Budge, Deseret News / Source: Getty Images
When the North Carolina Courage drafted Ashley Hatch second overall out of BYU in the 2017 NWSL draft, Hatch felt excited to embark on a new stage of her soccer career.
She'd now spend her days training alongside and playing against the best women soccer players in the country and world — but she'd spend her nights babysitting.
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The babysitting was necessary in order to supplement her meager soccer salary. Hatch, like many other NWSL players, needed side hustles to survive.
The 2017 NWSL Rookie of the Year ended up babysitting for families she found on Care.com on weeknights, as well as weekends if the Courage didn't have a game. She'd also offer personal training sessions, and in the offseason, when players weren't being paid, Hatch would work at soccer camps.
"I would pretty much take any opportunity I could that didn't interfere with my soccer schedule to either babysit or do private trainings," Hatch told the Deseret News.
Washington Spirit attacker Ashley Hatch (33) and Utah Royals defender Ana Tejada (17) chase after the ball in a women's soccer match at America First Field in Sandy on Saturday, June 8, 2024. Hatch previously played for Brigham Young University. | Megan Nielsen, Deseret News
NWSL salaries were so low — the minimum salary was $15,000 at the time — that the host family Hatch lived with after being traded to the Washington Spirit would occasionally buy her groceries.
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The financial struggles for NWSL players hasn't changed much in the eight seasons since Hatch was drafted. But amid a surge in support for women's sports, salaries for women soccer players are about to increase significantly, and Hatch played a hand in making it happen.
Through the new CBA, which will run through the 2030 season, players' minimum salaries will increase to $48,500 in 2025 and to $82,500 in 2030. Hatch said the NWSLPA pushed as hard as it could on increasing the minimum salaries.
"We are always going to want more, and we're always going to push for more, so I'm glad that we got more, but I think that we could always continue to get more," Hatch said.
NWSL salary history
If you were among those horrified to learn basketball phenom Caitlin Clark would only make $76,535 — in addition to the millions she'd make through endorsements — as a rookie in the WNBA, you'd better brace yourself before looking at the NWSL salary history.
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In the NWSL's first season 11 years ago, the minimum salary for players was $6,000. The minimum salary has gradually increased over time to $37,856 for the 2024 season, which Utah Royals defender Imani Dorsey said "is still too low."
Utah Royals' Imani Dorsey stops the ball as the Utah Royals and Chicago Red Stars play at America First Field in Sandy on Saturday, March 16, 2024. | Scott G Winterton
"It's not a livable salary. The fact that we're improving that is gonna help and affect a lot of people," Dorsey said.
When Utah Royals defender Madison Pogarch entered the NWSL as a rookie for the Portland Thorns in 2019, she made $16,000. A rookie for the MLS's Portland Timbers made a minimum of $60,000 at the time.
"The people that come even 10 years from now I think are going to be in a completely different world than we now know if women's sports and the investment continues to grow. I can't imagine where we're going to be in five years, let alone 10," Pogarch said. "It's just different. So I think us getting to that point, again, becoming more of a professional league within the states and even within the world and pushing those boundaries, I'm really excited to see where we end up."
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To build on her relatively low salary, Pogarch has coached every year of her NWSL career up until this season, and especially when she lived and played in pricey California for the San Diego Wave.
At times, Pogarch would hold up to four individual coaching sessions a week with kids on top of her own training sessions with her professional team. She then transitioned into hosting coaching camps a couple times a week to accommodate more kids and cut down hours spent on her second job.
"Those (individual sessions) are hour long sessions, so you add on four extra hours to your already long training days, and you're not really recovering at that point," Pogarch said. "We train hard, we work hard, we have to try and recover, and then we go work again. I think to be at the 1% in our sport and have to operate that way, it's not really sustainable."
The inability to fully recover can translate to a player's performance on the pitch, which "is naturally going to decline" if a player is constantly working, Pogarch added.
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"The mental aspect of not having to worry is such a huge part of being able to show up and perform in this job," she said. "If you just show up every day and you do the bare minimum, you're not going to be able to see time, you're not really going to succeed, you're not going to have a prolonged career. So I think with expectations that we have to push ourselves to the fullest extent every single day, I think we also have to be able to recover to the full extent every single day."
Dorsey described financial stress as "probably one of the biggest stressors" for players, and it's not just stress over what they're making this season. It's for their future.
"It's not just that we're competitive. We want to be on the field and playing every minute. It's, 'What if I'm not playing, then what's my next contract gonna look like? Is another team gonna pick me up? Am I gonna have a job?' And I think that was always the underlying stressor of playing. I just never felt secure, and I never really even when I was on contract and on playing, I always felt like there was something chasing me," Dorsey said.
Ashley Hatch 's NWSL CBA negotiations experience
When the NWSL paused play in July for its weeklong CBA-mandated break, Hatch traveled to Philadelphia , but not for a vacation.
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Hatch went there as one of five NWSL players representing the NWSL players association at the final negotiations of the league's new CBA. The players were joined by NWSLPA president Tori Huster , NWSLPA executive director Meghann Burke, a team of lawyers and an economist.
Washington Spirit attacker Ashley Hatch (33) during the women's soccer match against the Utah Royals at America First Field in Sandy on Saturday, June 8, 2024. Hatch previously played for Brigham Young University. | Megan Nielsen, Deseret News
The 38 players on the bargaining committee, including Utah Royals players Dorsey, Pogarch and Michele Vasconcelos , participated remotely as they had throughout the 10-month negotiation process.
Together, the players' in-person delegation sat across from the NWSL commissioner and the team representing the league, including three owners.
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"You could feel a little bit of tension, just because these are all such important things to us as players, and obviously the NWSL has things that they think are very important as well. It was kind of intimidating," Hatch said.
Despite having just agreed to its first CBA in 2022, the NWSL approached the NWSLPA about starting negotiations for a new CBA last year following the FIFA World Cup.
"I think the commitment we've made to the players is that as our business continues to grow, it is our objective to also pay them more, and so it's one of the reasons that we approached the union to say, 'We're at this inflection point. We think there's an opportunity to reimagine the future,'" NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman told the Deseret News at a press conference in late September.
Initially, negotiations were expected to last a day and a half but stretched into three as both sides deliberated from early morning to late evening. Most of the in-person negotiation experience took place in separate offices as each side held caucuses with their respective parties before reconvening with the other side again.
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"Having players present was kind of a huge message, and I think it's harder for them to give pushback on things that we want when they're actually looking at players in the eye and saying, like, 'No, we don't want to give you more money' or whatever it is," Hatch said.
The Philadelphia negotiations ended with both sides ratifying the new collective bargaining agreement, which delivered monumental wins for players, including increases to the minimum salary.
What NWSL players won in the new CBA
The increased minimum salaries are just the beginning of the wins players achieved in the new CBA. The NWSLPA prioritized player autonomy by eliminating the draft and trades without a player's consent and by implementing guaranteed contracts and free agency for all players at the conclusion of their contracts, as the Deseret News previously reported.
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"Of course, money is always great, but those little things of feeling like a team is investing in you and you have that security is something that I know I really struggled with my first couple years in the league, even though I was grateful to be on contract, to be playing. To not have to really worry about a semi guaranteed contract or a trade, it's always in the back of your mind," Dorsey said. "To have that security, kind of helps you settle in and develop and improve in the environment that you're in."
The CBA also expanded benefits for the league's mothers. The full details of the new CBA and those benefits are yet to be published, but the league will double its childcare stipend, according to Vasconcelos.
Michele Vasconcelos, Utah Royals midfielder, poses for a photo with her daughter Scarlett, 6, at America First Field in Sandy on Friday, May 3, 2024. | Megan Nielsen, Deseret News
"Some of the feedback we heard from some of the moms in our league is that one of the places where they were really feeling challenged is in child care — as a mom I can appreciate — and so we up leveled our benefits for players in terms of childcare. We up leveled the accommodations we have for players who have children (and) really took a hard look and improved all the benefits as it relates to fertility and maternal health," Berman said.
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The commissioner believes it's an area that will "continue to be an iterative evolution as more benefits become available that are appropriate for women."
"We know that the system itself doesn't really think through the lens of, how do we optimize the working experience of a mom? We feel like we're on the forefront of really disrupting the standards and the norms that exist around that and are very proud of the increased benefits that our players have," she said.
A key sticking point in the negotiations was housing. Hatch admitted that she didn't think the new CBA would happen because the "housing situation is really messy."
Under the previous CBA , players could opt for a housing stipend "at the amount equal to one-half of a two (2) bedroom apartment at the rate paid by the Team for Team-provided housing," or could live in team housing, where up to three players could live per residence.
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In the new CBA's negotiations, the league wanted to transition out of league housing, "which ideally in a perfect world, yes, players would love to but they need to be compensated enough to be able to afford housing," Hatch said.
"I felt like we had to bring this up to the NWSL. I don't want to say educate, but I kind of felt like we had to educate the NWSL, and like, 'Hey, 30% of our salaries must be able to cover our housing for us to be housing secure.' And every single market is different, so someone in San Diego is gonna be different than someone in Louisville," she said.
After a lot of back and forth, the solution agreed upon was a formula dependent to determine whether a player was housing insecure based on their market city. If they are, housing will be covered for the player, and if they aren't housing insecure, housing is the player's responsibility. But a locality stipend will be available for housing secure players.
"It's kind of a complicated solution, but we felt confident that we can move forward with it because it's guaranteed that no player will be will be worse off once housing is phased out," Hatch said.
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The future for the NWSL
While the new CBA is historic, there is still work to be done in the NWSL.
When asked by the Deseret News what the league needs to continue increasing player salaries, the commissioner emphasized that the NWSL is a business, not a charity, and needs to act accordingly.
She pointed to increasing ticket sales and growing viewership through social media, community involvement and media interviews.
National Women's Soccer League commissioner Jessica Berman speaks during a news conference announcing the return of the Utah Royals, at America First Field in Sandy on March 11, 2023. | Ryan Sun, Deseret News
"The thing that will allow for us to continue to pay players more is to grow the business, and we want the players to join us in that and understand that it's one of the reasons that in the new CBA, we instituted a revenue sharing model so that the players can actually feel when our business is growing. We want to pay them more, and it should be in connection with us generating more revenue. We can't just pay players without growing our business. Otherwise, we're not thinking about it as a business, and we don't want anyone to look at our players, or our game, or our league as philanthropy. We want the world to use this as a way and as a proxy to think about valuing women and girls for what they have to offer to society," Berman said.
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To help players increase their earning power both during and after their playing careers, the league will launch Beyond the Field, a 12-month educational program with sponsor UKG, at this season's NWSL championship weekend. Through the program, a cohort of 20 players will learn skills that will set players up for success in their post-playing careers, such as media training and financial literacy.
"I think that's the most important thing, as long as players like aren't making $100k like, not everybody's making $100k. So how are you able to supplement your income and how are you able to transition into (life) after playing because we can't all play forever?" Dorsey said of Beyond the Field.
While the players hoped for even bigger salary raises in the new CBA, the progression isn't lost on them and what it means for the future.
"Having players come into this league, and if they're coming in on the minimum salary, it's a lot better than it was when I entered the league, it just shows the progression of this league and just how far that we've come," Hatch said.
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Originally, Vasconcelos didn't want a career in the NWSL for her daughter based on her early years in the league. Vasconcelos was drafted out of BYU in the 2017 NWSL draft by the Chicago Red Stars but missed her rookie season due to pregnancy , and while Chicago owned her rights, she didn't have a contract waiting for her.
"My first year in the league, we didn't have a CBA. I remember moving out to Chicago, not really knowing what was gonna happen. I had gotten drafted, but I didn't have a contract. I moved my family out there. It was really scary," Vasconcelos said. "I think the minimum was $16,000, so just for me, I wouldn't want my daughter to be pursuing that. I did it because I loved it. I had a supportive husband helping me along the way."
Now, she sees a more viable pathway for aspiring professional women's soccer players in the U.S.
"It's a pathway," Vasconcelos said. "It absolutely is, and being able to see these rookies come in now and making what they're making, and having housing, having cars, having all of these amenities, it just feels really good because the players before us did their job to get us here, and then we were able to build on that with the CBA. Now moving forward, it can only increase."
