‘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

Introduction

Women’s football (soccer) is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, with now over 30 million women playing football worldwide (FIFA 2014). The sport’s popularity amongst spectators is also on the rise, with the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup setting new records for spectator numbers (FIFA 2015). Despite this growing popularity, the pay received by female footballers continues to be a fraction of that received by male footballers. The 2017 Sporting Intelligence Global Sports Salary Survey (Sporting Intelligence 2017) showed that the pay gap is especially wide in football compared to other sports. Women footballers earn as little as one-hundredth the sums of their male counterparts, even amongst elite players in nations where women’s football is relatively advanced. Average first-team pay in the (men’s) Premier League has risen to £2.64 million in 2017 while average pay in the equivalent women’s division, the FA Women’s Super League, is £26,752 (Sporting Intelligence 2017, 7).

This gender pay gap has recently been challenged. A high-profile campaign by five members of the United States’ Women’s team in 2016 under the slogan ‘Equal Play, Equal Pay’ called for the women’s national team (USNWT) to be paid the same as the men’s team.¹ The USWNT even filed a federal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging the U.S. Soccer Federation with wage discrimination, in March 2017. In 2019 all 28 current members of the United States women’s soccer team filed a lawsuit against their own governing body alleging years of ‘institutionalized gender discrimination’ (Guardian Sport 2019). U.S. national team captain Carli Lloyd supported these actions by saying: ‘I think we’ve proven our worth over the years. Just coming off of a World Cup win, the pay disparity between the men and women is just too large. And we want to continue to fight’ (Stump 2016). Goalkeeper Hope Solo added: ‘We believe now the time is right because we believe it’s a responsibility for women’s sport, specifically women’s soccer, to really do whatever it takes for equal pay and equal rights and to be treated with respect’ (Stump 2016).

The Danish Women’s team have also been involved in a pay dispute with their employers, leading to a strike resulting in the cancellation of a world cup qualifier. Similarly, the Norwegian men’s team members requested the Norwegian Football Association to pay the men’s and women’s football teams the same amount, returning part of their paycheck. Members of the Danish men’s team also supported the women’s call for fair payment (Wrack 2017).

Thus, calls for football’s gender pay gap to be reduced are growing. In this paper, we investigate the moral arguments that can be made in support of reducing football’s gender pay gap. We focus our attention on the question of whether national associations have a moral obligation to pay their men’s and women’s football teams the same amount.² We investigate three different ways of defending the claim that national associations ought to pay their men’s and women’s football teams the same amount. In Section Two we consider an argument that appeals to the principle of equal pay for equal work. We call this the ‘labor rights’ argument. We argue that the ‘labor rights’ argument provides good reason for some national football associations to pay their men’s and women’s teams the same amount, based on the idea that it has been illegal to pay men and women working in the same place different salaries for similar work. In Section Three we consider an alternative argument, which appeals to what we call with Dobos (2019) the ‘expressive power’ of wages. 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, while the expressive power argument Succeeds  in showing the existence of moral reasons for equal pay, it struggles to show that associations have a moral obligation to pay their men’s and women’s teams the same. We then outline what is, probably, the most controversial but also the strongest argument for equal pay, the ‘argument from historical injustice’. This argument falls into two parts. In Section Four, we argue that many football associations have committed historical injustices against women’s football. We argue that these associations, therefore, owe ‘duties of reparation’ to women’s football and that these duties of reparation can plausibly ground a duty to pay their women’s team the same as their men’s teams. This argument may not apply to all national associations. However, it does provide a plausible ground for thinking that those associations that it applies to not only have moral reasons to pay their men’s and women’s teams equally, but also moral obligations to do so. We then conclude that although none of the arguments we consider provides a general case in favor of the claim that all national associations have an obligation to pay their men’s and women’s teams the same, there is a good case to think that many associations do have such an obligation.

We lay out the second part of the argument, in Section Five. Our main point here is that, even if a national football association does not owe duties of reparation for acts of discrimination perpetrated in the past by that association, they may be expected to show leadership and take up what Iris Young (2011b) calls ‘political responsibility’ for social change, with the aim of repairing structural injustices in women’s football. We argue that if we want to avoid a model based on the principle of ‘blame’, such as the ‘duties of reparation’ model, leaders in football may still may have a collective responsibility for justice and equality, and thus develop policies to address inequalities, including in pay.³

One issue that we shall not investigate is the justification of the gender segregation of football. A number of important contributions to the philosophy of sports literature have investigated this issue. In Jane English’s (1978) influential work on ‘Sex Equality in Sports’, she investigates what would constitute an equal opportunity for women in sports. English argues that an important reason to think that eliminating gender segregation would not create equal opportunity for women is the impact it could have on the distribution of scarce resources. In sports where sex is relevant to sporting performance, an end to gender segregation could result in the near eradication of sportswomen at the elite level. Which English (1978, 273) argues, would be ‘damaging to the self-respect of all women’. In response, it has been noted that if women were given equal reward for unequal performance this could also be damaging to women’s self-respect (Tamburrini 2000, 119). Others have noted that we should not only pay attention to the question of whether or not sports are gender segregated but also to who makes this decision and who enforces it (Birrell 1984, 26; Sailors 2014, 71; Simon, Torres, and Hager 2015, 140). Finally, it is also worth noting that, at least with regards to football, there is no reason to think that allowing women to compete alongside men would damage the women’s game (Edwards, Davis and Allison 2015, 397). We set aside this issue, as we do not see the current gender segregation of the sport as something that is likely to change anytime soon (Sailors 2016, 79). Our question is one that arises under the existing gender segregation of the sport. English (1978, 273) also claims that women receiving significantly less sporting prize money than men is damaging to the self-respect of all women. This paper builds upon this point to investigate the moral arguments for equal pay in football.

Equal pay for equal work: the labor rights argument

The first argument we consider for equal pay is summarized in the slogan the U.S. women’s team used in their campaign for to be paid the same as the U.S. men’s team: ‘Equal Play, Equal Pay’. The idea here is simple. The two teams play at equivalent levels and devote equivalent amounts of time and energy to doing so and so they should be paid the same salary. The more general principle underlying this slogan is one that has served as a popular rallying cry among feminist campaigners around the world, namely that equal work should be rewarded with equal pay. When a woman is paid less than a man for the same job this is a clear case of injustice. When a white person is paid more than a black person for the same job this too is a clear case of injustice. This principle is also reflected in many systems of employment law (E.g. UK Equality Act 2010, chapter 3). What moral considerations might underlie this principle? In both of these cases, it looks like an oppressed group is being disadvantaged in comparison to a privileged group. These seem like instances of discrimination and so wrong as a result (Hellman 2008; Moreau 2010; Lippert-Rasmussen 2014). It is tempting to think that underlying the call for equal pay for equal work is an objection to wrongful discrimination.

However, not all cases of unequal pay for equal work will be cases of discrimination. Two employees who belong to the same traditionally protected groups could also be paid different amounts for equal work. According to Jeffrey Moriarty (2016), there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such cases. If we accept that it is morally acceptable to charge different prices to different customers for the same product, then, according to Moriarty, we should also accept that it can be morally permissible to pay two people different wages for the same work. However, such cases may often be the result of deception, which would make them wrong. For Moriarty then unequal pay for equal work is wrong if it is the result of deception or discrimination, but otherwise is morally permissible. For our purposes here, we do not wish to take a stand on the issue of whether equal pay for equal work is always wrong. We are happy to work with the following weaker version of the principle:

Equal Pay for Equal Work: When two employees are paid different salaries for the same work and this inequality is discriminatory, then this inequality is wrong.

With this principle in hand, we propose the following argument in favor of the claim that football associations paying their male and female players differently is wrong:

Premise 1: Male footballers are paid more than female footballers by their national football associations.

Premise 2: When two employees are paid different salaries for the same or equivalent work and this inequality is discriminatory, then this inequality is wrong.

Premise 3: Male and female footballers perform the equivalent work for their national associations.

Premise 4: The difference in pay is discriminatory.

Conclusion: The inequality between the wages football associations pay to male and female footballers is wrong.

The first premise of this argument is supported by the empirical facts about salary discrepancy between male and female footballers we discussed in Section One. The second premise is supported by the weak version of the principle Equal Pay for Equal Work which we have examined in this section. As yet though, we have not said anything to support the third and fourth premises.

The first point to establish is that the work that male and female footballers do for their national associations is the same. Both male and female footballers compete in the same sport at the highest available level, playing games that last the same length and dedicating as much time to training. This presents a plausible case in favor of the claim that they perform equal or similar work. Of course, not all footballers work can be considered equivalent. A youth team player, for example, might be thought to be playing at a lower level, enduring less public exposure and less related stress than an elite adult player. A part-time player playing for a lower league club is not doing a job that is at the same level as a top league player. However, this is not the case for two players playing at the highest level for their national teams. In this case, there seems good reason to think that both players are doing equal or at least equivalent work. As it stands, this argument is far from conclusive. An objection that has been raised against paying male and female sports people the same is that male and female sports differ in their commercial value. We shall respond to this objection later in this section.

The next point to defend is the claim that the unequal pay between men and women is discriminatory. This claim is one that many campaigners for equal pay for women’s footballers would endorse. U.S. national team player Carli Lloyd, for example, claims that she and her teammates were ‘sick of being treated like second-class citizens’ (Lloyd 2016). The captain of the Danish men’s football team, Simon Kjaer, made a similar point when explaining his team’s request that the Danish Football Association redistributes some of the money it gives them to fund higher salaries for the women’s team saying, ‘Women must not have inferior rights to us’ (FifPro 2017).

But can this unequal pay really be described as discriminatory? To defend this claim we must first say something about what discrimination is. This issue is one that has generated an extensive philosophical literature. We do not have the space to provide a full defense of how discrimination should be understood. Instead, we attempt the more modest task of outlining a plausible conception of discrimination and explaining why it provides good reason to think the pay gap between male and female footballers is discriminatory.

According to this view, discrimination involves the denigration of one group of people in comparison to another. This view is defended most prominently by Deborah Hellman, who claims that, ‘the act of demeaning is the wrong of wrongful discrimination’ (2008, 172). Similarly, Patrick Shin claims that acts that involve morally objectionable unequal treatment are those that treat someone ‘as though that individual belonged to some class of individuals that were less entitled to right treatment than anyone else’ (2009, 169). Both accounts hold that wrongful discrimination involves treating someone or some group in a degrading way.

Not all cases of unequal treatment will count as discrimination on this view. According to Hallman, people can only be discriminated against as members of groups that have a ‘history of mistreatment or current social disadvantage’ (2008, 22–23). The reason for this qualification is that there seems to be a substantive difference between these cases of differential treatment and those that do not target members of a disadvantaged group. Tim Scanlon (2008, 71) supports this claim with an example of someone who is renting out her house and has to choose between several prospective tenants. Deciding not to rent the house to someone because they went to Princeton may be a bad reason not to choose someone as a tenant. However, it cannot be considered morally equivalent to deciding not to rent the house to someone because of their ethnic background. While the first decision may be insulting, it is not a case of discrimination, as it does not take place against a background of mistreatment or social disadvantage of people who went to Princeton. Some may disagree with Scanlon about this. However, we intend to show that the pay disparity between male and female footballers is a case of unequal treatment that takes place against a background of social disadvantage. We are happy to accept for the sake of the argument Scanlon’s more demanding account of what is needed for an action to count as discriminatory, as this will make our argument acceptable to a wider range of views on discrimination.

It is not difficult to make the case that women are a historically and socially disadvantaged group, and have a long history of consistent mistreatment. Focusing just on the issue of pay disparity, in 2016 the median income of women working full time in The United States was 80% of the rate of full-time male workers (AAUW 2018). In the same year in The European Union, women’s gross hourly earnings were on average 16.2% below those of men in the European Union (Eurostat 2018). In the UK, the median gender pay gap in the UK is 18.4% with nearly 8 in 10 companies in the UK paying men more than women (Topping, Barr and Duncan 2018). This widespread pay disparity means that individual instances where women get paid less than men are not merely insulting to the individual, but also count as cases of discrimination.

The case becomes stronger when we consider the mistreatment and social disadvantage that women face specifically in the world of sport. Young’s (2005, 2011a, 2011b) theory on the immanence of female athletes combined with her account of the ‘five faces of oppression’ fits the degrading way women are treated in sport more generally.⁴ This gives us reason to think that the unequal pay is not only a financial disadvantage, but also a way of marginalizing women and depriving them of professional respect. Moreover, Young teaches us that one disadvantage never occurs ‘alone’: if there is a financial disadvantage, women often face other forms of disadvantage as well.

In the history of football, women have been prohibited to play for around 50 years by their national associations. Between the 1920s and 1970s, national associations in Europe (amongst others) explicitly oppressed and excluded women, using consistent denigration and demeaning as strategies to marginalize and devalue women.⁵ At the same time, the men’s game developed rapidly, professionalizing since the 1950s. From the 1970s onwards, women were allowed, but not encouraged, to play. National associations opened up football to allow women in, yet paid little attention to improving and developing the game. On the contrary, by investing only minimum time, energy and money, and withholding women from good facilities, they continued the discrimination in a different form. Today, women’s football is provided with more support, but the game is burdened by the use of culturally imperialistic strategies which impose male norms on the women’s game. The lack of (commercial) value is then used as reason for withholding further investment and upholding inequalities in facilities and payment. Thus, the culture of women’s football may have progressed from a culture of explicit oppression (1920s–1970s) to a culture of toleration (1970s–2010s) and a culture of stimulation (2010sff), the culture of stimulation is one of ‘conditional stimulation’ at best.⁶

There is then a case to be made in support of the claim that the unequal pay for men and women’s footballers is discriminatory. However, a much-raised objection by (male) athletes and sport viewers (rather than by academics) is that male athletes and men's sports represent a much higher commercial value, raise more public interest and therefore rightfully receive higher salaries and prize money, before they effectively are doing another job. The tennis player Novak Djokovic, for example, called on male tennis players to demand more money than female tennis players by saying, ‘we have much more spectators on the men’s tennis matches. That’s one of the reasons why maybe we should get awarded more’ (Killelea 2016). Djokovic’s point seems to be that it would not be discriminatory to pay male tennis players more than female players, as this would simply reflect the demands of the market. In other words, the argument we have given above can be rejected, because Premise 4 is false.

Similarly, the greater commercial revenue generated by men’s sport could be used to respond to the claim that the work of male and female footballers is equal or equivalent. This is the approach Matthew Syed takes in the following:

Norwegian male footballers are effectively doing a different job. In economic terms, they are more productive, persuading more fans and TV viewers to watch them, and more companies to sponsor them. To equalize pay in these circumstances is not about removing gender from pay considerations; it is about artificially introducing it (Syed 2017).

Syed’s point is that the commercial disparity between male and female football means that male footballers and female footballers cannot be said to be performing equivalent jobs.

However, even if the logic of the argument is accepted, it cannot be straightforwardly used to justify all of football’s gender pay gaps. For example, after winning the World Cup in 2015, the US women’s football team generated a profit of $6.6 million compared to the $2 million profit generated by the men’s team in the same year. They still, however, received lower salaries than their male equivalents (Eurostat 2018). While the details of this case can be disputed, there is good reason to challenge the claim that the gender pays gap in football always follows the logic of market forces.

Of course, the US team is an exception. In most cases, male national football teams, do generate greater revenue than their female equivalents. If we accept the claim that it is permissible for the salary of sports players to be at least partially determined by their commercial value, then there is a good reason to think that paying female players less is not discriminatory. Note though that this response to the claim that the unequal pay for male and female footballers is discriminatory places an important restraint on the conditions under which this pay gap is permissible. If the justification lies in the greater commercial value of the male team, then it will only be acceptable to pay male footballers more when they do in fact generate more revenue. In other cases doing so would be discriminatory.

It would be disappointing if this rather limited claim were the strongest claim that could be offered in support of the campaign for equal pay for women footballers. How then should supporters of this cause respond? One option would be to challenge the claim that commercial value can play a legitimate role in determining the level of salary that one should be paid. Defending this approach though, would require us to engage in an extensive critique of the capitalist system. While we are not opposed to such critiques, this would take us far beyond the scope of this paper to try and argue for this approach. Moreover, our aim is to offer arguments for equal pay for women footballers that can be accepted by people holding a wide range of divergent views.

Another way of responding would be to point out that the argument about the lower commercial value of the women’s game ignores the fact that women’s football receives less media coverage in Western countries, thus making it harder to build a fan base. This coverage is mainly incidental and not structural. The lack of visibility, let alone positive media coverage of women’s sports, contributes significantly to the lack of public interest and commercial value (cf. Cooky 2015; Cooky and Messner 2018). While a full investigation of this issue is not possible here, it is far from obvious that the commercial value of women’s football straightforwardly legitimates lower pay. For now, though, we will explore alternative ways of arguing for equal pay for women.

Equal pay for equal value: the expressive power argument

In this section, we outline an alternative way of arguing for equal pay for women footballers which appeals to the ‘expressive value’ of equal wages. By this, we mean that equal pay for women footballers would send a valuable message about the equal value of men and women’s football. This thought is expressed by a number of those who support this cause. For example, Joachim Walltin, the President of the Norwegian Players’ Association, said of his association’s decision to pay their men’s and women’s teams equally: ‘Isn’t it a cool idea and wouldn’t it be a good signal if we did things equally?’ (Wrack 2017).

Why think that equal pay for women’s footballers would send a message about the importance of women’s football? The first point to note is that there is a good reason to think that wages in general, or at least in capitalist societies, have ‘expressive power’. We support this claim by appealing to an argument made by Ned Dobos (2019). Dobos begins his argument with the observation that in an idealized market, people’s wages would track their economic contribution. However, in the real world, markets are not ideal. This means that we cannot draw conclusions about someone’s economic contribution from the wages that they receive. Nevertheless, many people believe that their wages do reflect their economic contribution. As Watson, Webb and Birdi put the point in their empirical investigation into employees’ perceptions of their place in the labor market: ‘an employee’s perception, or opinion, of his or her own worth (i.e., their productivity) is dependent on their current l'abour' market outcome (i.e., their wage)’ (. explain this phenomenon by claiming that people believe that wages ought to reflect economic contribution, regardless of whether or not they do reflect this. This generates a state of cognitive dissonance which employees eradicate by altering their beliefs about their economic contribution. Regardless of the precise mechanism involved in generating this belief, the thought that many people view wages as some kind of indication of economic contribution, albeit a rough and imprecise one, is a plausible one. Moreover, as Dobos (2019, 338) notes, ‘workers in capitalist societies are also ideologically primed to think this way’. This, after all, is a key part of the meritocratic ideology of capitalism that holds that someone’s economic position is reflective of their merits. Dobos (2019, 339) summarizes this by saying: ‘Given the way our minds work, and especially against a certain ideological backdrop, wages have expressive power. They say something to the worker about the value of her labour’.

Dobos’ argument concerns the ‘expressive power’ of wages in general but wages also have expressive power in football in particular. A clear sign of this is in the thought that the world’s best player should also be the world’s best-paid player. This view is explicitly endorsed in the following response by the Barcelona FC Club President Josep Maria Bartomeu when asked about the salary that his club would offer star player Lionel Messi: ‘I don’t want to talk about numbers really. If he’s the best player in the world, though, then he should be the best player in the world in all aspects, even economically’ (Murray 2016). Here we see the thought that a player’s wages are a reflection of their worth and so the best player in the world should also be the best paid. This gives us good reason to think that Dobos’ claim about the expressive power of wages applies specifically to the case of footballers’ wages.

However, this quote suggests that the message being expressed is not identical to that identified by Dobos. According to Dobos, wages are expressive of economic worth. The example, though, make no reference to a player’s economic value, but rather to their footballing ability. The statement claims that a player should be the world’s best-paid player because he is also the world’s best player, not because he is the biggest economic asset, This is not to say that a footballer's wages may not also express their economic worth. However there seems good reason to think that they also express something about their sporting worth.

With this account of the expressive power of footballers’ wages in hand, we are now in a position to offer an alternative argument for equal pay for women footballers. Given that the amount of money paid to footballers is expressive of their sporting worth, the wage gap between male and female footballers conveys a message about the comparative footballing worth of these players, and the ‘professional respectability’ of female players. Paying female footballers less than their male equivalents sends the message that the female players have less sporting and professional worth than their male equivalents. This is a damaging message for football associations to send, reproducing the long-standing lack of professional respectability, as a form and result of ‘marginalization’, which according to Young is ‘perhaps the most dangerous from of oppression’ (Young 2011a).

If national football associations were to commit to paying male and female footballers the same, then this would send the message that these footballers have equal sporting and professional value, i.e., worthy of professional and economic respect. There is good reason then for national associations to commit to equal pay for women’s footballers in order to express the message that women’s football is just as valuable as men’s football, and the labor of women deserves the same wage and professional and economic respect as men’s labor.

However, while this argument may show that it would be morally good for national associations to pay their male and female players equally, it is far from clear that it shows that they are required to do so. It is commonly accepted amongst moral philosophers that there is a distinction between what would be morally good to do and what is morally required. Some acts are beyond the call of duty, or supererogatory to use the technical term.⁷ For example, many would accept that, at least in most circumstances, I am morally required not to kill another human being. However, while sacrificing my life in order to save someone else’s would be a very worthy thing to do, it is not commonly seen as something that I am morally required to do. It is an act that we should praise and admire people for doing, but not blame or criticize those who do not. What the existence of acts of supererogation tells us, is that there are some acts that there are moral reasons to perform but that are not morally required. In other words, there are acts that we have good reason to perform from the moral point of view but that we do not have a moral obligation to perform.

Is there any reason to think that the expressive power of equal pay would not only generate a moral reason for national associations to commit to equal pay but also a moral obligation to do so? At least initially, the answer may appear to be ‘no’. The reason for thinking this is that if this reason would generate a moral obligation in this case, then it would seem to generate an obligation for club sides to commit to equal pay as well. After all, they are also in a position to send a message about the equal worth of men and women’s football. If the opportunity to send a message about the equal worth of men and women’s football generates a moral requirement to commit to equal pay for national associations, then it should do for clubs as well. However, it strikes many as implausible to think that all clubs have an obligation to pay their men and women’s team the same. This view is even shared by some who endorse equal pay for women at the national level . For example, the former Olympic swimmer, Sharron Davies, who is a strong supporter of gender equality in sport, conceded: ‘You can’t pay a female footballer £300,000 a week if they aren’t getting the gates to support that’ (Killelea 2016).

The upshot of this is that it may still seem implausible to some to think that national associations have an obligation to commit to equal pay due to the expressive power of this act alone. In the next section, however, we will develop our argument further to provide a reason to think that many national associations not only have a moral reason to commit to equal pay, but also a moral obligation to do so.

From moral reasons to moral obligation: duties of reparation

While the previous section focused on the forward-looking moral reasons that support equal pay, this section focusses on moral reasons grounded in the history of many national associations’ actions and attitudes towards women’s football. Many national football associations have played an important role in hampering the development of women’s football. This case is particularly clear in England. In 1921 around 150 women’s teams existed in England (Williams 2007). High profile matches attracted crowds of tens of thousands of people (Williams 2007; Tate 2013). In one particularly popular match played at Goodison Park on Boxing Day of 1920 between Dick Kerr Ladies and St Helen Ladies, 53,000 people attended the match with an estimated 14,000 more people unable to gain entry into the ground (Tate 2013). On the 5 of December 1921, though, the English Football Association responded by banning women’s football from their members’ grounds, claiming that, ‘The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and it ought not to be encouraged’ (Tate 2013, 227). The English FA was far from alone in this. Women’s football was forbidden by national football associations in all Western countries between the 1920s and 1970s. This ban profoundly hampered the development of women’s football. Given this, it is unsurprising that today women’s football has less commercial value than men’s football.

The role that national football associations have played in hampering the development of women’s football is important for three reasons. First, it means that national football associations are not in a position to appeal to commercial value as if it is an external force beyond their control. Instead, those football associations that have frustrated the development of the women’s game are largely responsible for the difference in commercial value between men and women’s football.

Second, the accusation of discrimination cannot be straightforwardly countered by an appeal to differing commercial value. Even if football’s gender pay gap simply reflects differing levels of commercial value, this differing value is partially explained by historic acts of discrimination on the part of the national football associations. The decision to ban football clubs from hosting women’s football matches is a clear case of treating women’s footballers in a degrading way. Moreover, the justification given for this ban makes clear that it was motivated by an attitude of contempt for women by claiming that football does not ‘suit’ them. Once we accept that the decision to ban women’s football was an act of discrimination, it becomes more difficult to claim that football’s gender pay gap is not discriminatory. If the lower level of the commercial value of women’s football is, at least in part, the result of a discriminatory fifty-year prohibition of the game, then it is hard to claim that the gender pay gap is not, at least partly, the result of discrimination. Of course, it could be claimed that the pay gap arises from historical discrimination rather than present-day discrimination. But does this really weaken the charge of discrimination? One could equally well claim that due to this history, women still face discrimination in football, and that one way in which this discrimination today manifests itself is in the large differences in payment. However, given that the institution that performed the historical act of discrimination and the institution responsible for the current gender pay gap are one and the same, this is far from a full defense from the charge of discrimination.

The third and most important reason why the national associations’ role in inhibiting the development of women’s football is morally relevant is that it changes the nature of the moral reasons in play. The moral reasons that football associations have to promote the women’s game are not exhausted by the reasons why this would be good for women and in particular good for women footballers. Nor are the associations’ moral reasons to promote the development of women’s football exhausted by their position as guardians of the game in all its forms. In addition to these two sources of moral reasons, football associations also owe duties of reparation to women’s football. According to W. D. Ross (1930, 21) duties of reparation are duties that arise out of the performance of a wrong act in the past. This is important, because this form of duty is generally accepted to be especially weighty. In support of Ross’ claim, suppose that my neighbor has broken his leg and asks for me to help him buy his groceries. Given his need for my help, I have a good reason to help him. However, now imagine that it is my fault that my neighbor’s leg is broken. Perhaps I crashed into him with my car or delivered a particularly bad tackle on the football field. Now it seems that the reasons I have to help my neighbor are much stronger than in the previous case. The reason for this is that I have a special duty, a duty of reparation, to help those whom I have harmed that I do not have towards those whom I have not harmed.⁸ Similarly, given the associations’ responsibility for the underdevelopment of the women’s game, they owe a special duty of reparation towards the women’s game.

The existence of a special duty of reparation towards the women’s game does not by itself ground an obligation for national associations to commit to equal pay. The obligation is to make reparations but there are many forms these could take. However, when we combine this duty of reparation with the argument in the previous section about the expressive power of equal wages, there is a good reason to think that this could generate an obligation to commit to equal pay. After all, this would send the message that these footballers have equal sporting value, which may go some small way to repairing the decades of injustice these associations have committed against women footballers.

In addition to the historical injustice performed against women’s football, we should note that the effects of this injustice continue to harm the contemporary women’s game. If the lower level of the commercial value of women’s football is, at least in part, the result of a discriminatory fifty-year prohibition of the game then the lower wages that women face today is in part caused by the historical injustice. Women footballers continue to be wronged by this historical injustice. As a result of this, those associations that banned the women’s game and as a result are responsible for this continued harm, have a duty to intervene to mitigate the effects of this injustice.

Political responsibility

In addition to the injustices discussed in the previous section, women’s football has also suffered from ‘structural’ injustices. These cannot easily be allotted to persons or organizations, but are upheld by social and organizational structures, which are hegemonic and thus marginalizing and excluding ‘the Other’. To take women’s football center stage, these structures need to be changed. This, Young claims, is a collective and political responsibility.

To this we add, leaders in football show leadership by, first, recognizing their (questionable) role in the history of women’s football, and by taking up the concomitant duties of reparation, and, second, by taking the political responsibility for larger-scale social change by breaking the hegemonic structures. We claim that leaders in football politics should take what Young calls ‘political responsibility’ as the main ingredient of her ‘social connection model of responsibility’ (Young 2011b). This model takes a forward-looking approach, addressing the ‘political responsibility to organize collective action for change’ (Young 2011b, 173) and acknowledging the importance of history in a positive manner: ‘history matters in the social connection model, but not in order to reproach, punish, or demand compensating damages’ (ibid.). Thus, national associations, rather than being made to be feel guilty and blamed, can be urged to take their political responsibility to organize collective action for change.⁹ Thus, we understand the ‘duties of reparation’ as a consequence of the shared political responsibility for social transformation and policy reform, and football institutions as leaders in taking this responsibility.¹⁰ Another outcome of this is that, next to policy reform, leaders take the responsibility for what Young calls ‘dealing with’ the past ‘as memory’: ‘we are responsible in the present for how we narrate the past’. This may have major consequences for both sports and football history. Young doesn’t want to put the blame on persons and institutions, rather she calls for the collective, far-reaching responsibility to make society more just, including by way of a ‘politics of historical narrative’:

A society aiming to transform present structures of injustice requires a reconstitution of its historical imaginary, and the process of such reconstitution involves political contest, debate, and the acknowledgement of diverse perspectives on the stories and stakes. (2011b, 18)¹¹

Following Young, we learn that taking collective, political responsibility for social justice, needs to be fulfilled in multiple ways. What does this hold for football associations, specifically, and their moral obligations (or political responsibility) with regard to women’s football – its contemporary status, its development and future?

Football associations could commit to investing more money in women’s youth football to make up for decades of underinvestment. This may be a way of satisfying the duty of reparation that does not involve making a commitment to equal pay. In response to this worry, it is worth pointing out that there is nothing stopping football associations from investing in both paying women’s national teams more and investing more in women’s development football. In fact, it may well be that fulfilling the duty of reparation requires football associations to do both. Moreover, we should also note that football associations do not necessarily need to invest any money in securing equal pay for their male and female national teams. Rather, as the Norway case demonstrates, they could instead fund an increase in the pay of female footballers with a reduction in the pay of male footballers. In this case their wages would express the equal worth of both sets of footballers without costing the association any more money.

There will likely be some who are not persuaded by these responses and so deny that national associations have an obligation to commit to equal pay. Nevertheless, we think that even those who make this claim should accept that, in most cases, this is the strongest form of argument that can be made in support of the claim that national association have a duty to pay male and female footballers the same. We say ‘in most cases’ because we take it that in exceptional cases, such as that of the USWNT, where the commercial value of the women’s team is not lower than that of the men’s, the strongest argument is that of equal pay for equal work. However, these are exceptional cases. In the vast majority of cases, where the commercial value of the men’s team is greater, we take it that the strongest argument that can be given will appeal both to the duty of reparation owed to the women’s game by many national association and the expressive value that paying both teams the same would have. This argument has the advantage of not being open to the objection that the two teams may differ wildly in their commercial value, as it does not rest upon the claim that this unequal pay is a result of current discrimination – even though unequal pay can be understood as discrimination in itself. Nor is it open to the objection that if this is true for national teams, it would also be true for club teams. The reason for this is that it points to the past behavior by national associations in the repression of the women’s game, rather than appealing to the expressive value of equal pay alone.

Conclusion

We have argued that there are three types of arguments that can be given to justify equal pay for equal play. These are the ‘labor rights’ argument, the ‘expressive power’ argument, and the ‘historical injustice’ argument. This last argument consists of two parts, addressing the duty of reparation that responsible organizations and institutions may have on the one hand and the ‘political responsibility’ of the collective, on the other. We combined the two parts to make the claim that organizations, may want to show leadership by becoming the forerunners in taking this political responsibility and start retelling the narrative of football as an inclusive story and taking other actions to reach inclusion and equality.

The first two arguments are based on the idea that women and men have equal rights, while the third argument claims that national football associations owe the women’s game duties of reparation and/or they should take moral/political responsibility for the women’s game based on its long history of injustice towards the female football players. Consciously seeking to extinguish the women’s game altogether, national football associations cultivated a culture of ‘active oppression’, exclusion, denigration, and marginalization. This hampered the women’s game to such an extent that the women’s game still faces the negative effects. Thus, we conclude that even if a national football association does not owe duties of reparation for acts of discrimination perpetrated in the past by that association, they may be expected to show leadership and take up the political responsibility for social change, with the aim of repairing structural injustices in women’s football. Even if they do not accept blame, then leaders in football still may have a political responsibility for justice and equality, and thus develop policies to address inequalities, including in pay. Discussing the pros and cons of the three arguments, we conclude that a combination of the three arguments works best to argue in favor of ‘equal pay for equal play’. In addition, we believe our arguments support de-gendering the game and the athletic norms underpinning it, as well as investing more money in its professionalization. This would not only further its development but also show women professional respect and recognition for their efforts and achievements.

Correction Statement

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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).