Fox News host Jesse Watters on Monday said the players on the U.S. women’s national soccer team weren’t “helping” their case for equal pay with “unpatriotic” behavior.
“The women are not helping their case by their behavior,” Watters said on Fox News’s “The Five” just a day after the U.S. women won their second consecutive World Cup title. “If you go out and you disparage the president, you act in unpatriotic ways and then complain about not getting paid equally, well, what do you think is going to happen? People are not going to watch.”
{mosads}Watters went on to claim that “many people” told him that they wouldn’t watch the U.S. women’s team play because of what some of the players have said.
“That means the ad revenue comes down, that means their overall revenue comes down, and they can’t divvy up the same amount of money,” Watters argued.
This year’s World Cup final on Sunday drew about 14 million U.S. TV viewers on Fox. That was down from the 25 million who tuned in to the 2015 women’s World Cup final, which occurred during an evening time slot, according to Fox. The men’s World Cup final in 2018 had about 11.4 million viewers in the U.S.
The U.S. women’s national team on Sunday earned their fourth World Cup title following a 2-0 win over the Netherlands. The team’s march to another World Cup victory led to renewed calls from the public and lawmakers for the women to earn as much as America’s men’s national team.
Videos showed loud chants of “equal pay” reverberating from the bleachers at Stade de Lyon in France following the team’s win. Several lawmakers, including 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, also called for the issue to be resolved following the game.
Members of the U.S. women’s team are currently engaged in a gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation, alleging the organization unfairly pays male players far more than female players.
The federation has pushed back against those claims, saying in a May court filing that the pay gap is “based on differences in aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex,” The Washington Post noted.
A report from The Wall Street Journal in June showed that U.S. women’s games earned more revenue than U.S. men’s games in the three years after the women won the 2015 World Cup.
“The women actually do make more revenue, so that’s their lawyers fault,” Watters acknowledged. “They negotiated a horrible deal and they need to re-negotiate that immediately.”