Canadian women’s soccer team is fighting for equality

Canada’s nationwide girls’s soccer team is the reigning Olympic Gold medalist. There is no motive why they need to be taking a funds reduce. There is no motive that they need to be getting paid lower than their male counterparts. There is no motive they shouldn’t be supported, particularly as they’re the perfect their team has ever been.

On Feb. 10, the Canadian Soccer Players Association issued a statement, voicing their disappointment within the funds cuts and lack of funding. We are six months away from the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, and Canada can’t fund its team that has been dominant during the last 10 years? They are Olympic champions. It’s outrageous, it’s unfair, and it’s a horrible look.

The assertion additionally discusses that these talks between the gamers and the group have been happening for a few 12 months. The funds cuts have left gamers with fewer coaching periods, some coaching home windows fully wiped from the calendar and fewer gamers and employees members invited to coach. The gamers even have alleged that they haven’t been paid in any respect for their 2022 season.

“It hurts, I’m not going to lie,” Team Canada captain Christine Sinclair advised TSN on Feb. 10. “We all represent this country proudly. We’ve shared some of the greatest moments together. But to not feel that support from your own federation has been hard in the past. But it’s gotten to a point where, at least for me personally, until this is resolved I can’t represent this federation. I’m such a competitor that breaks my heart and kills me.”

Team Canada’s protests have already began. They have been coaching all week with their shirts inside out and wore purple warm-up shirts, with “Enough is Enough” written on them earlier than their first recreation of the SheBelieves Cup on Feb. 16, the place they misplaced 2-0 to the United States. The Canadian National Team is additionally threatening to not play once more after this event, successfully happening strike till an settlement is made, or new administration steps in.

Equal pay debate

The most up-to-date and arguably largest motion within the equal pay debate was with the USWNT, whose lawsuit was settled in February of final 12 months. The skinny of the lawsuit and all the main points are primarily that the ladies weren’t getting paid as a lot as the boys’s nationwide team, which posed an enormous downside as a result of the ladies received two straight World Cups, and at the moment, the boys hadn’t actually had a lot to indicate. They had been capable of get a brand new CBA the place they’re assured the identical amount of cash as the boys’s team, and a settlement value $24 million.

“There’s no real justice in this other than this never happening again,” midfielder Megan Rapinoe advised ESPN on the time. “With the settlement of the working conditions and this settlement which is contingent upon a CBA that will have equal pay going forward, there’s no other way to look at it than just a monumental win for women’s sports and women’s soccer, in particular.”

But then it occurred once more. This time, with the neighbors to the north.

Rapinoe and teammates Alex Morgan and Becky Sauerbrunn have publicly shared their help for Team Canada.

“We’re with them 100 percent and obviously know exactly what they’re going through, how difficult it is to do all that off the field and have to perform,” Rapinoe mentioned on Feb. 15.

Before the sport on Thursday, the gamers from each the USWNT and the Canada WNT had a second of solidarity collectively, becoming a member of on the center circle.

This is an issue that we now have seen in girls’s sports activities for a very long time. Each time, there is an indication heard all over the world that suggests one thing alongside the strains of “disappointed, but not surprised.” It shouldn’t be this difficult to make issues equal, so why are we operating into these issues?

It’s laborious to pinpoint. You might name it systemic, as traditionally girls have made lower than males. You might additionally say that it ought to have by no means occurred and there is no motive for skilled feminine athletes to be making much less within the first place. Canada deserves higher, girls’s sports activities deserve higher. This is a reminder that the battle for equality is not over.