Christen Press and the USWNT: Living the Dream, but is the Dream Enough?

U.S. Women’s National Team forward Christen Press plays with passion. A two goals and an assist in her first-ever USWNT game, three goals in her first two international contests (a USWNT record) kind of passion. But in her younger days, Press’ ardor for the game was even more evident than it is now that she’s a member of Jill Ellis’ forward group, now that she’s prepping for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. In those days, Press’ passion took the oftentimes-volatile form of on- and off-field blow-ups she now lovingly dubs, “rage fits.”

“I love soccer, I have so much fun, but there’s this part of me that just gets hyper-competitive and, like, beyond myself,” Press said recently.

At first, that rage, that unrelenting desire to be the best, was the fuel Press needed to find success.

“If I think about my work ethic, I think it came from that competitive, ‘I had to be the best, there was no other option,’ spirit,” she said.

The middle child of a family made up almost entirely of girls – condolences, Papa Press – those “rage fits” were the second Press child’s way of, she thinks, seeking attention, as much as they were about the game. Red cards, emotion that would often spill out and over the field’s chalk lines, a fierce attachment to outcomes that went far beyond whatever you could rightly consider “normal” for a teenaged soccer player – Press ran the gamut as a footy hothead.

These days, though, the world is seeing a much calmer (and more capable) Press, though it hasn’t been easy. And really, the change may never be as complete as she wants.

Unfortunately for Press, success on the international stage hasn’t taken the edge off the realization that having reached the pinnacle of her sport isn’t the end of her fight, doesn’t provide the solace she once thought it might.

“I’ve always had that dream,” she said, almost disbelievingly. “And now I’m living the dream. And I still have that sense like it’s not good enough.”

Press, of course, was speaking of her own experiences as an athlete chasing the ever-elusive state of greatness, but she may well have been speaking for the rest of the USWNT and their ongoing compensation battle with the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Despite having reached the highest heights of the sport of soccer, despite having excelled there, the USWNT allege that, based on the U.S. Soccer Federation’s 2015 financials, female players are paid approximately four times less than their male counterparts.

And as Press’ USWNT teammate Carli Lloyd indicated recently, the players are willing to fight to see that rectified.

“Simply put, we’re sick of being treated like second-class citizens,” Lloyd wrote in a New York Times op-ed in April. “It wears on you after a while. And we are done with it.”

Based on recent events, it would seem a fight the women are not prepared to lose.

To Press, soccer has been a learning experience, the result a realization that the “value is in the journey,” as well as a continued maturation as a player.

“It’s been a path – a long path,” said Press, who added that she now considers herself a “spiritual, peaceful person,” at least off the field.

But while the rage is (mostly) gone, the journey – for Press and for the USWNT – is far from over.

The USWNT, following its at-times dominant 2015 World Cup win, now has three World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals, seven CONCACAF Gold Cup wins, and ten Algarve Cups to their name. They’ve medaled in every women’s World Cup or Olympic tourney in recorded history and, after last year’s World Cup, of which Press was a part, appearing in four of the USWNT’s seven games, it’s hard to envision the train, already barreling toward success, coming off the tracks anytime soon.

Despite this, there remains a clear discrepancy between how the USSF values its women’s team as compared to the men’s.

Per the USWNT lawsuit, making the World Cup roster in 2015 meant $15,000 for a female player. A men’s player making the USMNT’s 2018 World Cup squad garners $76,000.

Actually winning the World Cup? That earned the women’s team $1.8 million.

Had the men won, they would have taken home $9.8 million.

As a result, the USWNT have been forced into what they perceive to be a corner with few options for reprisal.

In early January of 2015, the Women’s National Team Players Association filed a proposal seeking the negotiation of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that would provide USWNT players what attorney Jeffrey Kessler – he of Deflategate infamy – called “equal pay for equal work.”

In response, U.S. Soccer sued the USWNT to keep the current CBA, which expired in 2012, but was extended on agreement through 2016, in place, and to head off the possibility of a strike for Rio.

Sick of the inequality in their pay versus the men’s team, the women declared that agreement, that “memorandum of understanding,” invalid. And in late March of 2016, five key USWNT players filed a wage discrimination suit against U.S. Soccer in the hopes of drawing attention to the matter via a resulting investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Independent of the looming investigation, the women were dealt a blow when, in early June of this year, a judge ruled that memorandum was indeed valid. The decision essentially left the USWNT with no choice but to play out the remainder of the current CBA and head to Rio seeking gold around their necks, if not necessarily in their bank accounts.

But Press doesn’t want “equal pay for equal work.” She doesn’t want to make what the men make.

No, she just wants what’s fair based on what she and her teammates – teammates like Hope Solo, USWNT co-captains Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn, fellow forward Alex Morgan and midfielder Megan Rapinoe, the group that filed the wage discrimination suit – have managed to accomplish for the sport of soccer, not just in terms of tv deals and viewership – though they’ve been very successful there – but in terms of overall growth.

In terms of the next generation of little girls and boys who watch the USWNT win and think, “I want to do that too,” eschewing opportunities on the football field or with a lacrosse stick to instead tackle the pitch and continue the steady growth soccer has enjoyed in the states in recent years.

“At the end of the day, my perspective is less about, ‘we should have what the men have.’ And it’s just about being treated fairly and being paid fairly,” Press said, adding that “it’s not the same games, it’s not the same tournaments, it’s not the same bonuses coming from FIFA – it’s a different game and so the pay should reflect what we’re doing.”

For the men, international competition is just one piece of an ever-growing opportunity pie.

Major League Soccer continues to garner fans, with the money flowing into the league at a greater clip in conjunction – in 2014 the league signed a “landmark” television deal with Fox, ESPN and Univision Deportes through 2022, and has more recently announced plans to add four more teams by 2020 – and the number of top American players, like Tim Howard and Brad Guzan, who head overseas to play for Premier League squads is rising, though we may soon see the tide of that exodus stem as the MLS continues its expansion.

For players like Press, options at home and even internationally, are limited, as the women’s game struggles to keep pace.

Outside of international play, every USWNT player is part of either a college squad or the National Women’s Soccer League. But while the NWSL has enjoyed growth since it’s inaugural season in 2013 – they announced that the 2016 salary cap for each of their 10 teams would rise to a whopping $278,000, up from the previous year’s $265,000 – the league is not a particularly lucrative endeavor for female players who call professional athlete their livelihood.

And there are ties here that can’t be overlooked. The USSF is invested heavily in the NWSL, so national team players like Solo and Press are compensated by U.S. Soccer, not their team owners.

As a result, they do tend to make more than the league maximum and, like a parent frustrated with a greedy child, it’s surely played a part in the USSF pushing back against the USWNT’s desire for increased pay. And while few Americans would shed even a single tear for an athlete compensated well above the median household income, the fact remains that gender plays a too-large role in how pay is determined on the national and international stages.

In 2016, the maximum salary for a non-USWNT NWSL player will be $39,700.

The minimum? $7,200.

The new MLS CBA, hammered out in 2015, guarantees a minimum of $60,000 for its players, even as viewership numbers have taken a dive (there was a 38 percent decrease in the viewing numbers for the 2015 MLS Cup as compared to 2014). Part of that was that the 2014 final featured larger market teams and an outgoing Landon Donovan, but still, there’s certainly cause for concern there as salaries go up and engagement goes down.

As the aforementioned salary figures would suggest, plenty of NWSL players would just be happy to be able to pay their bills.

“At some point it’s diluting the quality,” Press said of the result of the low NWSL salary figures on the product on the field. “Or when does it become intolerable for the players?”

For Press, it’s been a winding professional career outside of the USWNT, including two separate stints in Sweden’s Damallsvenskan, and the NWSL is a far cry from the days of the WPS, Women’s Professional Soccer, which folded in dramatic and chaotic fashion in 2012 amidst controversy over funding and magicJack owner Dan Borislow’s spending habits.

“The salaries were a lot higher, the way we lived, the lifestyle that was provided for us was, quite lavish on this team specifically,” said Press, who played for magicJack in 2011, the year before the league shuttered. “The owner (Borislow) was very, very involved with the club and he was incredibly wealthy.”

Per Press, it was like a one-year taste of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with Borislow the disembodied voice urging players to test-drive his Roles Royce and winging to games on a private jet.

But his extravagant ways wouldn’t, couldn’t last and magicJack wound up the anchor that pulled down the rest of the WPS, the bright-eyed successor to 2001-2003’s the Women’s United Soccer Association.

And while the NWSL has seemingly established itself as a much more stable home base for Press and the rest of the USWNT players – “you see more humble owners, just being cautious and it’s more important that your players have a job for the next 10 years,” Press said – there’s no denying it’s not the same kind of job or financial security that their male contemporaries enjoy, and comes with the caveat of being funded by the very federation they’re now railing against.

Press, still working her way up the ranks of Ellis’ striker group ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio – that “journey” isn’t over yet, may never really be over – knows that her own passion can still get the best of her, can still at times lead her away from the smart play.

It’s a fine line for the USWNT and Chicago Red Stars striker, utilizing that passion, that intensity that has, for as long as she can remember, been a part of her on-field persona, without letting it overtake her completely.

But that restraint lets her see the field more clearly, allows her a more comprehensive view of her game and how best to help her side to victory on a game-to-game basis.

“I believe that I’ve allowed myself to do a lot better in my performance by getting rid of that part of me,” she said.

It remains to be seen if the USWNT takes a similar tact in their fight with the USSF seems to delegitimize their achievements, runs hot.

And really, what’s the smart play but to seek equal compensation for equal – or, really, better – play? Again, most won’t feel bad for professional athletes making a pretty penny. But maybe there are larger issues at play here. Maybe there’s a conversation about athlete compensation, about bloated salaries, money-hungry owners and the allocation of American dollars.

Maybe the answer isn’t more money for the women, but less for the men.

But sport is a lucrative business and that money has to go somewhere – better it go to the product, the players on the field than the owners or the league heads like Sepp Blatter and the corrupt shadow counsel that’s held sway over FIFA for so long.

“It’s sort of this American sports ideal that you’re a pro athlete and you should just have everything and live this lavish life and, yeah, that’d be sweet if that’s how it was,” Press said.

But that’s not how it is. And that’s not what the USWNT is asking for.

Press and Co.’s continued dominance and the not-yet ubiquitous, but burgeoning belief in the U.S. that women deserve every bit as much as men would seem to point to an amicable outcome when the next CBA is negotiated between the women and USSF after 2016.

But there’s no certainty that the USSF and the USWNT will see eye-to-eye despite the women’s sustained success.

Their 2015 Cup-winning victory over Japan garnered 25.4 million viewers, making it the second-most-watched soccer match in U.S. television history. It was also the highest viewership for a televised national team match ever – the men’s team topped out at 18.4 million viewers for a 2014 World Cup match against Portugal.

And the revenue gap between the two sides is far closer than their salaries would have you believe.

$60.2 million for the men over a four-year period.

$51.2 million for the women.

Of course, the USSF will argue that the women have greatly increased their revenue thanks to the World Cup Victory Tour, a 10-game slate that was meant to capitalize on the excitement over the team’s 2015 win.

The response from USSF to the women’s request has, to this point, been incredulity. It’s impossible to tell if that will change anytime soon.

Mom and dad put a lot of pressure on Press, told her from the get that she was great and that her life was about making that Press family knowledge a worldwide reality.

At times, the bearing of such weighty expectations is, even now, even for the new-and-improved, rage-less Press, difficult.

“There’s that sense that it’s never going to be good enough, because there’s always another level to climb,” she said. “And I still have that.”

Meditation, yoga, hiking – Press has her ways of coping with these expectations, but there’s no dispelling them entirely.

They will be with her always, as much a part of her as the legs, feet and brain that have brought her to soccer success.

“You want to have a bigger role on the team. What’s that role? You want to do this, this, and this. It’s just like it’s always going to be something else.”

As Press herself noted though, as much as feeling like you can do more, can be better, is detrimental, it’s also a boon. The role of the underdog, as laudable as it is, is a difficult one. Finding a way to overcome, to succeed in spite of the many obstacles in your path, is the ultimate and most rewarding goal.

The women who make up the USWNT have been filling that role since the day they were born. Cultural beliefs are changing, the roles of gender with them.

But that evolution is slow and the fight for Press, as well as for her teammates, is far from over. Even if their end is, Press believes, a simple one.

“I just want them to look at what we do and pay us what we’re worth.”

Rio will be another step toward legitimacy for the USWNT, especially if they emerge from Group G with yet another positive result. But maybe the outcome of a legal battle with their own governing body, with the decision-makers so invested in their success, in a courtroom far from any green grass or chalk lines, will prove even more important in time.

“It’s not about looking over your shoulder [at the men],” Press said. “At some point you just have to fight for yourself.”