Showing posts with label soccer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soccer. Show all posts

Monday, May 4, 2020

UK football letter roils world sport, and real world, too

Letter posted on Twitter by the AP's Rob Harris
The English Premier League football (soccer) organization wrote to the U.S. Trade Representative in February urging that the United States put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the "Priority Watch List" of countries that fail to protect intellectual property (IP) rights.

The letter has been widely reported beyond the football world for its potential implications in foreign affairs.  Where the United States is concerned, IP piracy is regarded as a critical contemporary problem, on par with national security.  Much of that regard is warranted, as countries such as China, at least historically, have been linked to IP theft as a means to unfair economic advantage, to the detriment of American enterprise.  Some of the sentiment derives from the capture of Washington by IP-wealthy corporations, to the detriment of intellectual freedom.  Regardless, the gross result has been a paper war with nations that countenance IP piracy.  To put Saudi Arabia in those U.S. crosshairs adds a layer of complexity to our already impossibly complicated love-hate relationship with the KSA—read more from James Dorsey just last week—with ramifications from Yemen to Israel.

The letter has potential ramifications within the Middle East, too.  The Premier League's indictment calls out specifically a Saudi-based pirate football broadcaster that calls itself "beout Q" and seems to operate in a blind spot of Saudi criminal justice, even distributing set-top boxes and selling subscriptions in Saudi retail outlets.  The name seems to be a thumb in the nose of beIN Sports, a Doha-based, Qatari-owned media outlet with lawful licensing rights to many Premier League and other international sporting matches.  Saudi Arabia has led the blockade of Qatar since the 2017 Middle East diplomatic crisis, a high note of previously existing and still enduring tensions between the premier political, economic, and cultural rivals in the region.

A 2016 Amnesty International report
was not flattering to Qatar or FIFA.
Football and international sport are weapons in this rivalry.  Qatar has long capitalized on sport as a means to the end of soft international power, winning the big prize of the men's football World Cup in 2022, if by hook or by crook.  Saudi Arabia has more lately taken to the idea of "sportwashing" its image, especially since the Jamal Khashoggi assassination and amid the ceaseless civil war in Yemen.

The letter roiled the world of football no less, as Saudi Arabia has been in negotiation to acquire the Newcastle United Football Club.  That purchase requires Premier League approval.  So everyone and her hooligan brother has an opinion about what it means that the league is so worked up about Saudi IP piracy as to write to the United States for help.

This unusual little letter is a reminder of a theme, known to social science and as old as the Ancient Olympics, that, more than mere diversion, sport is a reflection of our world.

Saturday, May 2, 2020

U.S. female footballers suffer slide tackle in equal pay match: Understanding the summary judgment decision

U.S. co-captain Alex Morgan is the first named plaintiff.
(Photo by Jamie Smed CC BY 2.0.)
The women of U.S. Soccer suffered a major setback Friday with an adverse court decision (e.g., N.Y. Times).

The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles awarded partial summary judgment to defendant U.S. Soccer, rejecting the plaintiffs' core claim in the case, pay discrimination against the U.S. women's national team (USWNT) relative to the men's national team (USMNT).   In the complaint filed in March 2019, USWNT players claimed violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended by the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended.

The USWNT always faced an uphill battle on the numbers.  To generalize, the women could not deny, they were paid more than the men, dollar to dollar.  The devil lies in what "more" is.

The USWNT has been fantastically successful.  The team has won the World Cup of women's soccer four times, most recently in 2019 in France (I saw a match from a Paris Fan Zone, and my daughter went to one) and won the Olympic gold four times.  The squad has been a global force to be reckoned with since its inception in the 1980s.  Moreover, many a football fan, such as myself, will tell you that the women's talent is a marvel to behold on the pitch, the United States having substantially defined the women's game for the world.

We were in France for World Cup 2019. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)
Direct comparison between women's and men's play is inevitably uneven, because the style of play in the women's game is different from in the men's, apples and oranges.  And worldwide, many soccer-power nations have failed to invest in developing female talent, so any given head-to-head is not necessarily taking place on a level playing field.  Nevertheless, by many a worthwhile measure, including technical proficiency, the women indisputably are better than the men—who failed even to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The women's superiority was exactly their problem in the equal-pay litigation.  A plaintiff bears the burden of making out a prime facie case of pay disparity.  Compensation in professional soccer in the United States is mostly based on the principle of pay for performance.  The women played more than the men and achieved more than the men, so they were paid more.  Their burden, then, was to show, in essence, that their pay rate was relatively lower than the men's.

We win, 2019.  (Photo by Howcheng CC BY-SA 4.0.)
U.S. civil rights law is, thankfully, sufficiently sophisticated to account for disparity based on pay rate.  As U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner explained in the instant case, quoting precedent, it can't be that "an employer who pays a woman $10 per hour and a man $20 per hour would not violate the EPA ... as long as the woman negated the obvious disparity by working twice as many hours."  However, the parties disagreed about how to calculate rate so as to compare apples to apples.

Hardening defenses on their polar positions, each side posited a favorable calculation.  Plaintiffs urged the court to look at women's compensation through the lens of the men's contract.  If the women had won the World Cup, etc., under the men's contract, they would have been far more richly rewarded.  Defendant U.S. Soccer urged the court to look at the numbers in gross.  The women simply make more than the men, and even though the women play more matches, they make more than the men on a per match basis, too.

Both positions are counterarguable.  The women's and men's contracts are both the result of collective bargaining, and a lot goes into a bargaining contract besides its raw numbers.  Simply pumping the women's performance statistics through the men's contract formula ignores the broader context of each contract, or collective bargaining agreement (CBA), and the inter-dependency of its compensation formula with other bargained-for terms: like squeezing an apple with an orange juicer.

New York ticker-tape parade for the USWNT, 2015
At the same time, the women's argument in converse challenges the defendant's attempt to aggregate numbers.  Maybe the women are paid more per match because they are better soccer players, which the evidence supports.  That doesn't mean that they are paid so much more per match relative to the disparity in talent and achievement between the women and the men.  To analogize, oranges might cost more than apples because oranges taste twice as good.  But an orange for $1.20 is still a bargain relative to an apple for a dollar.

The court's recitation of the women's collective bargaining process is painstaking, packing in plenty of detail for those who want it.  In sum, considering that the plaintiffs bear the burden to make out a prima facie case of discrimination, the court found the defendant's position more persuasive.  The contractual context was really the clincher.  Judge Klausner wrote (footnotes omitted):
This history of negotiations between the parties demonstrates that the WNT rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT, and that the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for other benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players. Accordingly, Plaintiffs cannot now retroactively deem their CBA worse than the MNT CBA by reference to what they would have made had they been paid under the MNT's pay-to-play structure when they themselves rejected such a structure. This method of comparison not only fails to account for the choices made during collective bargaining, it also ignores the economic value of the "insurance" that WNT players receive under their CBA. 
[¶] One of the defining features of the WNT CBA is its guarantee that players will be compensated regardless of whether they play a match or not. This stands in stark contrast to the MNT CBA, under which players are only compensated if they are called into camp to play and then participate in a match. ... [T]here is indisputably economic value to this type of "fixed pay" contract, as compared to a "performance pay" contract.  Merely comparing what WNT players received under their own CBA with what they would have received under the MNT CBA discounts the value that the team placed on the guaranteed benefits they receive under their agreement, which they opted for at the expense of higher performance-based bonuses.
There are problems with the court's approach, including prominently that there are systemically discriminatory reasons that the women elected for the terms they did.  Many male players are able to make a living as athletes, so playing for the national team is a bonus.  Women's soccer meanwhile has faltered as a nationwide business model, for arguable reasons that must include the ingrained underdevelopment of women's athletics.  That makes it harder for a woman than for a man to play at the national level, even if the two squads have the same number of seats.

USWNT selfie with the President, 2015 (White House photo)
Consider that a man who plays professional soccer is incidentally training for the U.S. national team while he's at work.  And his day job gives him time off, sometimes months, to play for the national team.  A woman with a collateral occupation that is not professional soccer cannot invest the time and energy in the physical training and playing time required to be a globally competitive athlete.  Of course, some women do find work in professional soccer, but far fewer than men who do.  Characteristically, the USWNT's star players bargained for better job security not just for themselves, but to support their teammates.  And that's not all selflessness; their investment in part explains the ongoing developmental success of the USWNT over athletic generations.

That doesn't mean Klausner is wrong on the law.  The facts of the case show something we already know, which is that historically rooted discrimination can persist well beyond demonstrable intention, is exceptionally resistant to eradication, and is more susceptible to redress socially and politically than judicially.  There are good reasons why the standard to establish a civil rights violation of federal law is high.  Failure to surmount that bar in court does not establish that the plaintiff is right or wrong as a social or moral matter.

Federal courthouse in Los Angeles (Photo by Los Angeles CC BY-SA 3.0)
There were other claims in the case, and the plaintiffs' cause is not formally over, even notwithstanding appeal.  The court's treatment of the plaintiffs' claim of discrimination in turf is a worthwhile read.  Female footballers often play on artificial and unstable surfaces, resulting in physical injury and career wear and tear, while the USMNT always plays on grass.  Despite the disparity in fact, the plaintiffs were unable to prove the discriminatory motive, or intent, that civil rights law requires.

The women's case persists upon some ancillary claims related to fringe benefits, such as better hotels and more frequent charter flights for the men's team than for the women's.  There might not be enough there for the women to want to keep the litigation going.  Plaintiffs probably will ask Judge Klausner to allow interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit directly from this partial summary judgment, and I expect he will.

The case is Morgan v. U.S. Soccer Federation, No. 2:19-cv-01717 (C.D. Cal. May 1, 2020).  Court Listener has the key documents.

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Football is universal

Football in the Jamestown district of Accra, Ghana (CC BY-SA 4.0 RJ Peltz-Steele)
I'm a believer in sport and development and a participating researcher at the International Sport and Development PlatformRead about the great work done around the world by Boston-based Soccer Without Borders, winner of, inter alia, the 2017 FIFA Diversity Award.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Money in soccer, money in higher ed: Lazio will never be Juventus; will the UMasses ever be ‘UMass’?

This morning I was reminded of this observation about football (soccer) from The Blizzard (#25, June 2017), spoken by Swedish football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, now coaching in China, in an interview by football writer Vladimir Novak (@VNovak13):


Well, whether you like it or not, to make a winning team you need money. One could argue that Leicester has won the Premier League title even though they invested far less money than, for example, Manchester United or other clubs, but that was an exception. Fact is, in the long run, if you want to be a big club, you need money. Bayern Munich is Bayern Munich, Barcelona is Barcelona, Real Madrid is Real Madrid and so on. You cannot build a great team without money. I think you have a good example with Lazio. When I was at Lazio, Sergio Cragnotti was the chairman and owner of the club, and he invested a lot of money. And then, after he left, all changed. Lazio are still a big club. Maybe they have the chance to win the Serie A title now and then, but they are not Juventus.


The statement reminds me of why I stopped being a baseball fan many years ago.  The Baltimore Orioles were my Lazio.  They would never be the Red Sox or Yankees.

It struck me that this almost self-evident assertion is true of more than football and baseball—indeed, is true of higher education.  And in higher education, disparate resources play an out-sized role in perpetuating socio-economic disparity and widening the gap of opportunity and wealth that afflicts the United States.

In Arkansas, where I started in academics, the public higher ed system was loosely and unofficially divided in just this way.  The well-resourced University of Arkansas—the top tier never needs a geographic locator (Fayetteville)—served the state’s elite.  The slimly resourced University of Arkansas at Little Rock served an urban working class.  And the resource-starved University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff served the rural and poor—disproportionately African American.  The same dynamic described the state’s law schools in Fayetteville and Little Rock (with few graduate options in Pine Bluff).  Incentivized by monied interests, as usual in politics, the state legislature perennially resisted calls to level the playing field.  The schools themselves were complicit in maintaining the status quo.

I thought Massachusetts would take a more progressive approach with its first and only public law school in Dartmouth.  It hasn’t, at least not yet.  Boston’s many private schools fill in the top-tier options in Massachusetts, while the law school, affiliated with UMass Dartmouth, fits in at the Little Rock-like mid-level, focusing on the working-class South Coast.  The otherwise elite “UMass” (Amherst), the state flagship, has legal research resources—for that matter, research resources in any field—superior to UMass Dartmouth’s, even with no law school there.  UMass Boston might be the state’s Pine Bluff.  Each campus knows its place and stays in its socio-economic lane.
 
There is limited revenue sharing to level the playing field in European soccer and in American baseball.  Those measures resulted when, and only insofar as, the un-level playing field was recognized as a threat to the survival of the sport business model.  That’s OK; sport is business.

Higher education isn’t business.  Higher education is supposed to be about opportunity for all those who merit it.  To be clear, this is a libertarian ideal.  Higher education is about teaching people to fish, not giving fish away.  It’s potentially the best social welfare program ever conceived.

I was reminded of this sport-ed money analogy this morning when I received a text alert that the main library at UMass Dartmouth is closing because of an air conditioning failure—again.  I wonder how often the A/C fails at UMass (Amherst).  You cannot build a great library, law school, university, or team without money.

As a society, we have to come to grips with the role of money in higher education—especially the money managed by foundations that purport independence and entitlement to opacity despite being under the direct control of supposedly transparent public universities.

We have to decide whether higher ed will continue to be part of the wealth-and-opportunity gap problem or part of the solution.  The UMass campuses east of Amherst deserve more than an occasional title.  They should all be Juventus.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Book Review (Preview): Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, by James Dorsey






My book review of James M. Dorsey's Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (Hurst 2016) has been published at 52(6) International Review for the Sociology of Sport 772 (2017).  Below is a preview; read more at IRSS from Sage.
Dr. Dorsey's blog also is titled, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.  For the opportunity to write and publish this review, I am indebted to Dr. Colin Howley, Richmond University in London, and to the editors at IRSS.
--
 James M Dorsey, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, Hurst Publishers: London, 2016: 359 pp.: ISBN: 9781849043311, £15.99 (pbk). 
....
No interest in soccer ('football' in most of the world) is prerequisite to the read. Dorsey himself acknowledges in the book's introduction that soccer was 'a journey into the unknown' for him, and—though he is co-director of the Institute for Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg—he disavows personal fandom. Rather Dorsey analogizes soccer, 'the world's most global cultural practice', to a 'prism'. Just as a prism separates white light into its constituent colours, Dorsey's study of soccer disentwines the modern Middle East into 'sport, society, culture, politics and development'....