‘Equal play, equal pay’: moral grounds for equal pay in football

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate three different ways of defending the claim that national football associations ought to pay their men’s and women’s football teams the same amount. First, we consider an argument that appeals to the principle of equal pay for equal work. We argue that this ‘labor rights’ argument provides a good reason for some national football associations to pay their men’s and women’s teams the same amount but that these are the exception rather than the rule. Next, we consider an alternative argument, which appeals to the ‘expressive power’ of paying women’s football teams the same as men’s. We argue that this argument can be applied more generally than the first argument and gives a good reason for many football associations to pay their men’s and women’s teams equally. However, this argument struggles to show that associations have a moral obligation to pay their men’s and women’s teams the same. We finish by considering the ‘argument from historical injustice’. We argue that this argument provides plausible grounds for thinking that many associations not only have moral reasons to pay their men’s and women’s teams equally, but that they also have a moral obligation and a political responsibility to do so.

KEYWORDS:

• Football
• equal pay
• feminism
• justice
• equality
• philosophy of sport

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Cf. Allison (2017, 2018).

2. We leave club football out of our considerations, as these may raise a separate set of concerns we do not have the space to consider here.

3. Williams (2003) mentions the importance yet wide neglect of historical inequality in shaping future developments in football. She rightly states that the ‘international acceptance of gender-differentiated sport […] has had the effect of creating widely condoned protected labor markets for male players which in other areas of culture, society and the economy would be considered to be unacceptable and in need of change’ (Williams 2003, 116–117). She suggests that this will continue as long as equality in football and sports is understood as ‘equal but different’. Cf. Williams (2007), esp. pp. 10–12.

4. See for a further explanation: Prange (2018). See for legal perspectives on the 2016 law suit: Mocio (2018) and Campbell (2017). Cf. Kosofsky’s (1993) classic text on unequal pay in professional (USA) sports.

5. See for example Prange and Oosterbaan (2017) and Tate (2013).

6. See for further explanation of this: Prange and Oosterbaan (2017).

7. J. O. Urmson (1958) began the contemporary discussion of supererogation in moral philosophy. For an overview of supererogation see Archer (2018) and for a discussion of supererogation in sport see Archer (2017).

8. This issue is complicated in cases of historical injustice as the wrongdoers and the victims may both be dead. (See Perez 2011). Our interest, though, is in the duty an organisation has to make up for past injustice, not on individuals’ duties of reparations.

9. Rather than confining the responsibility for social transformation, Young seeks ‘to spread it around’ (Young 2011b, 179). The downside of this is, that no one may feel responsible in the first place, if everyone is, in one way or another, responsible.

10. The ensuing question is whether or to what extent Young’s idea of ‘political responsibility’ can be understood as what we call ‘moral obligation’. Such a discussion, however, falls out of the scope of this paper.

11. Young here follows Gatens and Lloyd’s account of collective imaginings (Young 2011a, 182; Gatens and Lloyd 1999).