Caitlin Murray > Quotes

“The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Team sources say some players were still upset with how Sundhage handled the Hope Solo situation and Sundhage’s tendency to brush issues with her aside. Another player says Sundhage made the players write essays after every game, whether it was for club or country, and constantly checked up on players. She also wasn’t open to feedback from players.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Then, Langel launched into a laundry list of allegations of how U.S. Soccer discriminated against the women: • USSF’s statements in the 1990s to the effect that they would not have a women’s national team if they were not required to do so; • USSF has attempted to persuade the Men’s National Team Players’ Association to structure its contracts in a way that would not result in any payments to the women under the same matrix; • USSF’s unwillingness to pay the women anywhere near equal compensation for successes comparable to the men’s (indeed, USSF is committed to paying the women less than the men even though the women have been far more successful on the playing field);”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Hope Solo, who had precious few touches by that point, ran from her goal to hug Lloyd, something the goalkeeper rarely did. She looked at Lloyd and said: “Are you even human?!” “I’ve dreamed of scoring a shot like that,” Lloyd later said. “I did it once when I was younger on the national team in a training environment. Very rarely do you just wind up and hit it. When you’re feeling good mentally and physically, those plays are just instincts and it just happens.” Now, Ali Krieger jokes that the most exhausting part of the final was celebrating Lloyd’s goals: “We had to chase Carli after she scored all her goals. I was like, Can she not run around the entire field?”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“It was a moment where I realized that if we can back down that easily and we can get intimidated, then U.S. Soccer has the upper hand on us at all points in time because it didn’t take that much,” she adds. “We had the courage to say we were going to go on strike, and then, within a few days, we decided, no, we’ll get on the plane and play in Portugal.” During the Algarve Cup, discussions within the team continued and Langel met with U.S. Soccer for negotiations while the players were out of the country. By the time they got back, they were close to a deal with U.S. Soccer that would cover them both in the NWSL and in case the league folded. Striking”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“An all-star game was the post–World Cup opportunity the national team was looking for. After all, the players had already asked U.S. Soccer how the federation planned to capitalize on hosting the Women’s World Cup on home soil. The answer they got back, essentially, was that the federation wasn’t really thinking about that. “We pressed them on it and said, Hey, what are you doing? What are the plans?” remembers Julie Foudy. “They said we were going to Africa. We were like, Africa? We need to grow the game here. Why are we going to Africa? We had never even been to Africa.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“By the time the national team prepared to compete in the 2013 Algarve Cup in late February and early March, collective bargaining agreement negotiations had ramped up considerably. With the team’s existing contract having been expired since the end of 2012, the players were also no longer bound by the no-strike clause in their contract and a boycott was on the table. In February 2013, while the team was in Nashville for their final friendly match before the Algarve Cup started, discussion turned to whether they should go on strike and skip the upcoming tournament in Portugal. “We decided as a team that we want to go on strike to get more money for our new CBA, and we were going to go on strike until we understood everything about the NWSL, before we were forced to decide which team to play for in allocation,” says Hope Solo. “There were a few players in the room that didn’t know how to vote, but the rest of the team raised our hands and said it’s time to take a stand.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“But while U.S. Soccer was making a windfall with higher ticket prices, the players didn’t see anything from it other than the $1.20 per ticket they’d negotiated in 2013. While U.S. Soccer’s merchandise for the national team flew off the shelves, the players didn’t get anything from that. The team’s popularity was surging, but they weren’t in any position to capitalize on it. “I thought it was bullshit,” says defender Meghan Klingenberg, who played every minute of the 2015 World Cup as a left back. “All these people are making money from our likeness and our faces and our value, but we’re not. We’re only getting money from our winnings, and that doesn’t seem right.” “We didn’t have any rights,” she adds. “We had basically assigned our likeness rights, for sponsorships and licensing, to U.S. Soccer to do with them whatever they wanted.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Many of the players on the national team had similar middle-class, suburban upbringings—they were, in some ways, the personification of the so-called American dream. But Solo’s background was different. She was conceived during a conjugal visit when her mother had visited her father in prison. When she was 7, her father was arrested for kidnapping her and her brother—police with guns drawn surrounded her father as he took Solo to run an errand at the bank. She”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The Canadians blamed the referee and floated conspiracy theories. Christine Sinclair, who told reporters that the game “was taken from us” and “the ref decided the result before it started,” was issued for a fine and a four-game suspension for allegedly calling referee Christina Pedersen a profanity after the game. Melissa Tancredi told the referee after the match: “I hope you can sleep tonight and put on your American jersey, because that’s who you played for today.” But”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“It just wasn’t good enough,” says Carli Lloyd, who has more than 250 caps. “Here we are, world champions, we come home and not only do we have to play all these games on artificial turf, our current CBA says we have to play 10 games to earn another bonus. We won the World Cup, great, but in order to earn a bonus, we had to play 10 games. We just thought the whole structure of it wasn’t good enough and we needed to change a lot of things.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The team needs to be a little more vocal about whether this is good for our bodies and whether we should be playing on it if the men wouldn’t be playing on it,” Alex Morgan said after the Hawaii cancellation. “We’ve been told by U.S. Soccer that the field’s condition and the size of the field are the first two talking points of when they decide on a field, so I’m not sure why eight of our 10 victory tour games are on turf whereas the men haven’t played on turf this year.” *”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“It was a moment where I realized that if we can back down that easily and we can get intimidated, then U.S. Soccer has the upper hand on us at all points in time because it didn’t take that much,” she adds. “We had the courage to say we were going to go on strike, and then, within a few days, we decided, no, we’ll get on the plane and play in Portugal.” During the Algarve Cup, discussions within the team continued and Langel met with U.S. Soccer for negotiations while the players were out of the country. By the time they got back, they were close to a deal with U.S. Soccer that would cover them both in the NWSL and in case the league folded. Striking was still on the table, but the players no longer felt it was necessary. Asked about a strike, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati says he was never made aware that the team was considering it. In the end, the contract the two sides agreed to offered large increases in compensation for the national team. If the NWSL couldn’t get off the ground, salaries would go up between $13,000 and $31,000, depending on each player’s tier. But with the new league in place, salaries would stay almost the same while players would get an extra $50,000 NWSL salary. On top of their guaranteed income, more money than ever was available through performance bonuses and a $1.20 cut of every national team game ticket sold that would be put into a team pool. In the end, the biggest sticking point, however, wasn’t the compensation—it was locking the players into the NWSL. It became a requirement in their national team contract, and there was no backing out if the players didn’t like their club teams.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Lloyd got the ball in the USA’s half. She turned and flicked it past a Japanese defender and then ran around the player to receive the ball, almost as if Lloyd passed it to herself. When she got the ball back at her feet, she picked her head up and noticed goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori was way out of goal. In a moment of pure audacity, Lloyd took a full swing at it from the center line and kicked the ball nearly 50 yards. Kaihori desperately tried to scramble back in place but could barely get a hand on the ball. Goal, USA! It was the sort of goal that was so brazen it would happen once in a while in a random high school game—no one would ever try such a thing in a World Cup. But Lloyd did. She had a hat trick . . . in 15 minutes . . . in a World Cup final. That sort of performance on the world’s biggest stage was simply unheard of. It looked like the USA had been playing a video game on easy mode.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The league, on the other hand, couldn’t afford the same. The legal mess surrounding the dispute turned into a black hole that threatened to suck up the entire league. There, of course, were still all of the league’s other problems, but the legal battle between Borislow and the WPS front office added strain the league couldn’t withstand. On January 30, 2012, Women’s Professional Soccer announced that the 2012 season was canceled while they figured out how to deal with the escalating fight with Borislow.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“don’t read stuff when we win, and I don’t read stuff when we lose. Why? Because I was there,” Ellis says. “I know how it felt, and I know what it looked like. The only people I worry about and care about is the players.” The questions about their lackluster performances had started to become routine for the players passing through the mixed zones after practices and games in Canada. The players uniformly said the same thing: They know they can play better, they are not worried, and, no, they don’t listen to what the critics have to say. But with Carli Lloyd, who stuck to the same message as her teammates, there was a hint of frustration. Lloyd is the kind of player who wants to take a game by the scruff of the neck and win it all on her own. She hadn’t been able to do that.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“From their hotel in Orlando, Florida, before team training on March 31, 2016, Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Alex Morgan, joined by Jeffrey Kessler, spoke live with Matt Lauer over a video feed at the Today show studio in New York City. “Carli, you don’t just wake up one morning and say, We’re going to file a claim with the EEOC, and point a finger at U.S. Soccer,” Matt Lauer said to open the segment. “This has been simmering for a while. But why does it come to a head now?” “The timing is right,” Lloyd said. “We’ve proven our worth over the years, just coming off of a World Cup win, and the pay disparity between the men and women is just too large. We want to continue to fight. The generation of players before us fought, and now it is our job to keep on fighting.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Chastain had watched teammates like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy end their careers with testimonial matches—the special farewell games that important players earn—but she was never going to get one. Her last game was the final stop of the post-Olympics victory tour in 2004, the same last game as Hamm and Foudy, only Chastain didn’t know it at the time. “It wasn’t on my radar—it wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Chastain says. “He was the assistant coach. I’m not sure how he became coach of the national team, to be honest, and there was no discussion.” Shannon MacMillan, another veteran, tells a similar story. She, too, was surprised to find herself left off rosters, but in her case, it was because Greg Ryan had reassured her that she was in his plans. As time went on and she still hadn’t gotten a call, at age 31 she gave up hope of ever returning to the team. Her career ended at 176 caps. “I was like, Enough’s enough,” she says. “That’s kind of what forced my hand into retiring. I just got sick and tired of the politics and the B.S.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“Soccer Federation. The Olympic and Amateur Sports Act—the law that created the U.S. Olympic Committee—explicitly stated that all national governing bodies must offer the opportunity for athletes to compete “without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“By the 59th minute, the match was still scoreless when German striker Alexandra Popp ran down a lofted ball into the box. Julie Johnston, chasing, tugged her from behind. Popp fell, and the whistle blew. Penalty kick for Germany. This was it. This was the moment, it seemed, the Americans would lose the World Cup. It was a given, of course, that Germany would score this penalty kick. The Germans never missed in moments like this, and a goal would shift the momentum of the match. Hope Solo did the only thing she could do: stall. As Célia Šašić stepped up to the spot to take the kick, Solo sauntered off to the sideline slowly and got her water bottle. She took a sip. Paused. Scanned the crowd. Another sip. She strolled back slowly toward goal. She still had the water bottle in her hand. She wanted to let this moment linger. She wanted Šašić to think too much about the kick and let the nerves of the moment catch up to her. Finally, Solo took her spot. The whistle blew, and without even a nanosecond of hesitation, Šašić ran up to the ball and hit it, as if she couldn’t bear another moment of waiting. Solo guessed to the right, and Šašić’s shot was going left. But it kept going left and skipped wide. The pro-USA crowd at Olympic Stadium in Montreal erupted into a thunderclap that made the stands shake. The American players cheered as if they had just scored a goal. “We knew right then and there that we were going to win the World Cup,” Ali Krieger says. “That was it. That’s when we knew: This is ours.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The group stage in Canada didn’t provide any reassuring answers. The Americans did score first in their opening match vs. Australia, but it was a half-chance from Megan Rapinoe that took a lucky deflection. Before that, Hope Solo had been called on to make a spectacularly acrobatic save. They eventually routed Australia, 3–1, but Solo was the hero of the match more than any of the goal-scorers. “Hope came up absolutely huge for us,” Rapinoe said afterward. “I think she had three saves that nobody else in the world could make.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The national team players were in camp in Orlando, Florida, preparing for a pair of friendlies against Colombia when Rich Nichols and Jeffrey Kessler scheduled a conference call with the players on the team’s CBA committee. It was then that Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Megan Rapinoe were presented with the idea of filing a wage-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, against U.S. Soccer. If the players agreed to sign on, they would be asking a government agency to investigate whether U.S. Soccer was violating U.S. laws against workplace discrimination. In other words, the players were going to publicly accuse U.S. Soccer of discriminating against the women’s national team. It was a move guaranteed to ratchet up the tension between the national team and the federation. “I was nervous about that call the entire week because, in essence, what we were asking these great players to do was to sue their current employer for wage discrimination,” Nichols says. “That takes huge courage from anybody.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“A couple of players who ask not to be identified say Solo had broken team rules about curfew more than once. They remember a specific incident during a tournament where Solo spent the night with her boyfriend instead of in her assigned room. These players say they told Sundhage, who chose not to punish Solo rather than turn it into an ordeal. On the flip side, Hope Solo was the greatest goalkeeper in the world. Sometimes what makes an athlete so great on the field can be the same thing that causes them problems off the field. Could you have Solo, the top goalkeeper, without Solo, the troublemaker? With a few months until the World Cup, there were more pressing questions at the moment, though. What if prosecutors revived Solo’s case and she was convicted? What if she got into trouble again? Would the federation have to suspend her? Could the USA win a World Cup without Solo?”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The good news for the national team, at least, was that now the distraction of Solo’s legal issues was in the past and the team could focus on the Women’s World Cup, which was now only a few months away. But that didn’t quite happen. On January 19, 2015, Solo made headlines again. She was at the national team’s annual January camp outside of Los Angeles when she allowed her visiting husband, Jerramy Stevens, to drive a U.S. Soccer–rented car. Stevens had been drinking and was pulled over after police allegedly saw the car swerving off the road. Stevens was arrested on DUI charges, and Solo, who was the passenger, was reported to have been “belligerent” toward the arresting officers. The federation didn’t know about the incident until celebrity tabloid TMZ reported the news. After the federation had been slammed by the media for not punishing Solo throughout the episode surrounding her arrest, there was little choice this time. Solo was suspended from the team for 30 days. Her suspension was scheduled to end about four months before the World Cup was set to start.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“In 1971, only three international women’s soccer teams existed, and just two international matches had been played. Progress was relatively slow from there, and it took until 1990 for just 32 national teams to exist. For reference, today, FIFA’s world ranking includes around 180 women’s teams.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“In the shootout that followed, Hope Solo saved one of Brazil’s penalty kicks, while the Americans buried all theirs. The Americans were advancing to the semifinal. The stunning last-second goal—Rapinoe’s cross and Wambach’s header—would captivate the nation back home. Suddenly a country that hadn’t been particularly attuned to this Women’s World Cup fell back in love with its national team. A team that had fallen off the radar since 2005 was thrust back into the spotlight again. If Abby Wambach worried in 2008 about the team not needing her, she proved her fears wrong at the perfect time.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The players’ demands included better conditions and noneconomic issues, but the sticking points largely came down to compensation. For the months when the players had games to play, the federation was paying the most veteran players a modest $3,150 per month while newer players earned even less. The players had earned about $5,000 per month during the World Cup—a combined wage between U.S. Soccer and the World Cup organizing committee—and that’s what they wanted in their new contract. Even more of an issue than the amount of compensation was the reliability of it. Payment was contingent on the team’s schedule, which U.S. Soccer set, so if there were no camps or games in a month, the players got nothing. If a player got injured and couldn’t play, she no longer got paid, either.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The last time the federation had scheduled a men’s home friendly match on artificial turf had been in 1994. In that same time span since 1994, the women played dozens of U.S. Soccer–hosted matches on artificial turf. Now, even as World Cup winners, they were stuck on turf again.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“They brought in players from other national teams around the world, including Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and others to sign a letter asking FIFA and the CSA to reconsider using artificial turf. When that didn’t work, they filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, arguing the decision to play the tournament on artificial turf was gender discrimination under Canadian law. After all, no men’s World Cups had ever been played on artificial turf, and the upcoming men’s tournaments had been planned to be on grass through 2022.”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer

“The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.” And”
― Caitlin Murray, The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer