On Monday, 4 November 2019,
Australian media outlets announced a historic deal brokered between the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) and the Professional Footballers Association after a year of negotiations. This new arrangement will see the Matildas (the Australian women's soccer team) and the Socceroos (the Australian men's soccer team) evenly splitting the sport's commercial revenue,
rather than each team receiving a cut of their own generated revenue. This follows a number of other nations arranging similar collective bargaining agreements.
This change has been described as a major win for women's sport, but detractors have been quick to point out some logical and ethical inconsistencies. Chief among these is
the Matildas' highly publicised 7-0 loss to a team of teenage boys from Newcastle in 2016 which raised questions about the standards of Australian women's soccer. At that time, goalkeepers Melissa Barbieri and Mark Bosnich engaged in an online exchange, during which Barbieri argued it was not the intention of female soccer players to be paid the same as their male counterparts.
This debate is an addition to the growing list of global gender-based sporting controversies that span decades. In 1973, retired 55-year-old self-styled tennis hustler, Bobby Riggs lost to Billie Jean King in a match dubbed the "Battle of the Sexes"
— the
subject of a 2017 feature film of the same name. 44 years later, outspoken former tennis champion
John McEnroe attracted criticism for disputing that Serena Williams was the world's greatest tennis player. Speaking to multiple outlets, McEnroe suggested that Williams
would be ranked 700 on the men's circuit. In recent years, gender issues have been complicated further by an array of transgender controversies in sports such as
Australian football,
martial arts, and
teenage wrestling. There have also been persistent attempts to
exclude Caster Semenya from women's athletics for having high levels of naturally produced testosterone.
Comment: Never let the facts get in the way of a good progressive narrative. Anyone who tries to use facts is hateful.
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