The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in soccer has begun its group stage, with 24 nations divided into six alphabetized groups of four...the USA is in Group F along with Thailand, Chile, and Sweden. Chile and Sweden begin this group's play today while the United States will face Thailand. All matches in the World Cup will be held at various locales throughout France. Sixteen teams will quality from the group stage to enter the knockout rounds, culminating in the finale to be held on July 7th in Lyon. The American team features Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan and are defending champions. I'm looking forward to following the matches and hope you are, too...
This morning on the United States Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the disparity in pay between the American men's and women's national soccer teams. He pointed out that the men's team was rewarded with a $5.1 million bonus for getting into the Round of Sixteen in their last World Cup...not the one most recently held in Russia since they didn't even qualify for it, while the women's team was given a paltry $1.7 million after they WON the World Cup in 2015...one third of the men's take. Furthermore, women have already won three World Cups. The men, by contrast, have never even come close to winning a World Cup. And you see a similar discrepancy in pay for men and women's league soccer. But then again, this relegation of women's sports as secondary to men's isn't just in soccer...in the recent French Open in tennis the women's semifinals were exiled to secondary courts in order to focus the primary ones on the men. It's too bad we live in a world like this...I think we'll be hearing more about this gender-based inequity in the days to come as the Women's World Cup coverage intensifies...
Later: USA beat Thailand 13-0 with Alex Morgan scoring 5 goals. I originally got the match's date wrong...imagine my surprise when I finally got off from an extended work day only to see it being replayed on FS1...
No comments:
Post a Comment