The U.S. Soccer Federation and the U.S. Women’s National Team have reached a deal to end the current allocation system and to extend the no-strike/no-lockout agreement under our current collective bargaining agreement through at least March 31, 2022. While we hope and believe that CBA negotiations will be completed much sooner than March 31, 2022, we wanted to ensure we had sufficient time to reach an agreement. Under today’s agreement, U.S. Soccer will no longer pay the salaries of any USWNT players to play professionally in the NWSL, which had been the case since the beginning of the league. Today’s agreement demonstrates that U.S. Soccer and the USWNT can and will continue to work together for the good of the game.
We now continue negotiations with both of our Women’s and Men’s National Teams for new CBAs. We’re scheduled to meet with the USWNT today to continue economic discussions around the identical offers that we presented to both the USWNT and USMNT on September 14. We continue to wait on the USMNT Players Association to do the same and hope to soon work directly with USMNT players to get a deal done. We have much work ahead of us but are nevertheless hopeful that we’ll soon reach agreement. During this time, we’ll continue to encourage both our USWNT and USMNT to come together around one table to agree on a path forward that benefits everyone and drives progress for the future of our game. This includes our joint priority of equalizing FIFA World Cup prize money. Only together can we achieve that aim.
All of us at U.S. Soccer remain willing to meet with both groups of players and their representatives anytime, anywhere to hear their forthcoming joint economic proposals and plans for equalizing FIFA prize money.