When I used to be within the ninth grade in Austin, Texas, I bought it into my head that I wished to affix my highschool soccer group – by which I imply American soccer and never the game that many of the remainder of the world calls soccer and the United States calls soccer.

It was not that I had any form of expertise for and even understanding of the sport; I used to be merely irritated that solely boys have been permitted to play.

The group coach laughed at my proposal and informed me I used to be not bodily sturdy sufficient, and I grew to become a cheerleader as an alternative.

Jump forward a number of many years to the world of worldwide soccer – sure, what the world calls soccer – and the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been moderately extra profitable in combating gender discrimination in sport.

The favourites to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup at the moment underneath approach in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT, made headlines final yr when the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay each the ladies’s and males’s nationwide groups equally and to award the ladies’s group $22m in again pay. The Federation additionally introduced the “equalisation” of World Cup prize cash.

Despite constantly outperforming their male counterparts, the feminine gamers had been incomes significantly much less cash – enterprise as regular in a rustic that perpetually flaunts itself as a bastion of equality and different noble virtues. According to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, the gender pay hole within the US widened from 20.3 % in 2019 to 22.2 % in 2022.

So a lot for the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which turned 60 this yr. The Center for American Progress calculates that, since 1967 – the primary yr for which related information can be found – “working women have cumulatively lost $61 trillion in wages”.

The indisputable fact that the USWNT’s battle for equal pay paid off makes the group a doubtlessly useful supply of inspiration now for numerous American ladies, notably at a time when girls’s rights are being rolled again throughout the United States.

On June 24, 2022, for instance, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, eradicating federal protections for abortion and, successfully, girls’s jurisdiction over their very own our bodies. Then there’s the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was first proposed a full century in the past, in 1923, however has yet to be enshrined into legislation. The ERA ensures equal rights for all individuals no matter gender, a seemingly elementary idea that’s someway nonetheless too excessive for the world’s self-appointed biggest democracy.

In a 2019 Jacobin journal article printed within the aftermath of the USWNT’s World Cup victory that yr and within the midst of the group’s battle for equal pay, Liza Featherstone noticed: “This week we learned just how awesome the players who make up the US women’s soccer team are… But women shouldn’t have to be this awesome to be paid as well as men” – most of whom, she famous, have been “just okay at their jobs”.

She went on to quip: “The rest of us losers deserve equal pay, too.”

These have been legitimate factors coming from the creator of Selling Women Short, Featherstone’s 2005 exposé of the Wal-Mart retail chain’s systematic discrimination in opposition to feminine staff by way of pay and promotion insurance policies. At the time, she highlighted Wal-Mart’s lack of a unionised workforce as enabling the gender wage hole and different office oppression.

Speaking of unions, the USWNT’s equal pay victory final yr happened on account of new collective bargaining agreements between the US Soccer Federation and the labour organisations representing the ladies’s and males’s nationwide groups.

For these of us American girls who can’t aspire to on-field awesomeness then, the USWNT’s observe file nonetheless gives some useful off-the-field classes in collectively demanding rights in a rustic the place divide-and-conquer capitalism desires you to assume you’re on their own.

For the period of my grownup life, I personally have seen most US sports activities groups as anathema, associating them as I do with gung-ho patriotism, entitled vanity and different pathological conditions tied up with international hegemony.

And so I used to be delighted to come upon an NPR interview from 2020 with USWNT star Megan Rapinoe, the brazenly homosexual midfielder now taking part in her fourth and last World Cup.

In the interview, Rapinoe was requested to mirror on what the US flag meant to her. And in doing so, she provided a much more helpful account of historical past than I ever obtained rising up: “First of all, the country was founded not on freedom and liberty and justice for all… [T]his country was founded on chattel slavery and the brutal and ruthless system of slavery. So let’s all be really honest about that.”

To make certain, such honesty is essential to understanding institutionalised racism and the foundations of putting up with inequality within the US. Under Rapinoe’s lead, the USWNT took up the Black Lives Matter trigger, prompting group ahead Sophia Smith – herself half-Black – to remark: “It’s really cool to see the older players here taking a stand and using their platforms and using their voice to really initiate… change.”

Smith, now 22 years outdated, scored two of the US’s three targets in opposition to Vietnam in each groups’ opening World Cup recreation on July 22.

I watched the sport on a pal’s laptop computer right here in Turkey, the place I’m presently persevering with my two-decades-long quest to avoid the US at all costs. I had watched final yr’s Men’s World Cup on the beach in Mexico, the place I had rooted for Mexico and Morocco and had cried when the US beat Iran.

And whereas I totally supposed to help the Vietnamese girls’s group within the July 22 match, for a cut up second there I discovered myself in probably the most unfamiliar place of rooting for my very own nation.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.