Twenty-eight members of the world champion US women’s soccer team filed a gender discrimination lawsuit on Friday, a sudden and significant escalation of their long-running fight with the country’s soccer federation over pay equity and working conditions.
The suit, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, comes only three months before the team will begin defense of its Women’s World Cup title at this summer’s tournament in France.
The players involved — stars like Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd and their teammates — include some of the most accomplished and best-known female athletes in the world, and a team that has been a leading force in women’s sports for more than a generation. Carli Lloyd, 10, and the United States National Team celebrated after scoring in the World Cup in 2015.Friday’s legal action is the latest flash point in a year long fight for pay equity and equal treatment by the national team, which has long chafed — first privately, but increasingly publicly — about the compensation, support and working conditions it receives while representing US Soccer.
Those grievances have never been far from the surface; an earlier generation of top women’s players angry about their pay boycotted a tournament in Australia in January 2000, only months after a World Cup victory had made them the toast of U.S. sports. The US women flew on a chartered flight — once an unthinkable luxury for the squad — between matches as recently as last week.
That, too, several US players said, was part of their motivation to press ahead with their suit only months before they turn their focus to retaining their world championship.
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