Germany’s Soccer Federation Refuses To Pay Its Women’s Players As Much As Men

Germany has dominated European women’s soccer for decades. Its national team has won eight out of 12 UEFA Women’s Euro competitions, the largest women’s soccer tournament in Europe and the second-largest in the world behind FIFA’s World Cup. While the country is poised to dominate again as the 13th Euro tournament kicks off this week in Manchester, England, the Germans have already lost in another crucial area of the game: equal pay.

If they win, each German player on the women’s team will get €60,000 ($61,000)—a fraction of the €400,000 ($407,000) their male counterparts were playing for during the men’s Euro competition last year.

It’s a disparity that puts the Germans well behind in global soccer’s move toward gender parity, which leapt forward in May when the U.S. women’s national soccer team struck a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer, the sport’s national governing body, that cemented equal pay with the men’s national team. U.S. star Megan Rapinoe, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Thursday for her advocacy for gender pay equality, LGBTQI+ rights and racial justice, called the breakthrough a win “for women’s players around the world,” and it indeed proved to be a turning point beyond the U.S.’s borders.

In the weeks leading up to the UEFA tournament, Spain announced a five-year agreement that grants equal pay and travel conditions for male and female players on its national teams. The Netherlands agreed to pay equal victory bonuses for men and women, with equal pay starting in 2023. And Credit Suisse, the main sponsor for Switzerland’s male and female teams, agreed to pay equal bonuses starting with this year’s competition. Denmark, Norway, Finland and the U.K. were ahead of them all, each eliminating pay disparity between 2017 and 2020.

The Germans did not follow, despite mounting pressure. Oliver Bierhoff, director of Germany’s national soccer federation, known as the DFB, refused to introduce an equal-pay agreement, noting that the last UEFA women’s tournament, in 2017, brought in revenue of just €12.6 million ($12.8 million), compared with the €1.9 billion ($1.93 billion) the men generated in their competition last year. That kind of market-focused argument doesn’t fly with critics, who argue that the financial realities are the same for every country that has agreed to equalize pay and believe that national teams have a purpose that goes beyond profit.

“You’re representing a country,” says Lisa Delpy Neirotti, an associate professor of sports management at George Washington University. “Does your country want to be known as not being equal?”

While the German women have publicly embraced their new payout, which would be a record bonus for their team, they continue to stress the need for equal conditions beyond pay, including greater visibility. And while Bierhoff has opened the door to further negotiations, the German women still have a long way to go. At a German media congress last week, Thomas Müller, a star forward on the men’s national team, publicly backed the DFB’s decision, saying that pay parity makes sense in the U.S., where the women’s team reaches more people than the men’s, which is not the case in Germany.

“In the end,” Müller said, “the customer decides where to go or not go.”