I disagree with you on a number of counts. First, the HS ban was critical to its failure, and there is no legitimate basis for believing otherwise. Club after club left for that express reason. Those clubs realized they were losing their customers, becoming less competitive with their competitors and would eventually go bankrupt If they stayed. Once they lost most of the best clubs due to the HS ban, GDA went into an irreversible death spiral. The amount of money USSF made (or didn’t) was irrelevant to GDA’s failure because, even if USSF were raking in billions, it would not have changed the fact that the HS ban would eventually put the clubs that participated in it out of business.
Second, you are wrong about the MNT being their main moneymaker. For many years the WNT has driven USSF’s main sources of revenue and profit, namely the Nike and VW contracts. USSF’s misogynistic accounting practices that fail to give the women credit for that, in the hope that it will dupe people like you into believing the MNT drives revenue, doesn’t make it true. Winning the WC continues to fill USSF’s coffers through those deals. All you need to do is look at the advertising backlash after USSF’s misogynistic court filings went public to realize that. Furthermore, the WNT has also caught or passed the MNT even with TV and ticket revenue.
USSF also has not done a poor job developing the MNT as a moneymaker. It is just a terrible entertainment product. The team is bad, lacks anyone with even the slightest shred of personality, and there doesn’t seem to be any real hope in sight going forward. The “next generation” can hardly find the field at their mostly middling level clubs and most of them still can’t displace the weak sauce players who couldn’t even qualify last time around. And although the men are not the reason Nike paid that much money to USSF, it has done everything that could possibly be done to build the MNT brand. If Nike could not help USSF wring more value out of the MNT, it cannot be done.
Claiming the WNT shouldn’t be paid equally because USSF can’t find a way for the turd that we call the MNT to generate as much revenue is about as misogynistic as it gets. Claiming (inaccurately) the WNT doesn’t drive USSF’s main sources of revenue is also pretty misogynistic. The fact is the women are responsible for much more of USSF’s revenue, and also the most profitable revenue. You can believe what you want, but the reality is that USSF is going to pay dearly for your way of thinking.
www.npr.org
