The US women’s soccer team won the 2015 World Cup this past Sunday. If you’ve been living under a rock, you might not know that this was the third World Cup win for the US women’s team and was complete with the first hat trick, scored by Carli Lloyd, in a World Cup final since 1966. It was also the most watched soccer game in the USA ever. I repeat, ever. Over 26 million people tuned in to watch the US beat Japan 5-2, but while the win was a historic victory for the Women’s team, the massive viewership is actually the most impressive outcome of the game.

The Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) was one of the first professional women’s leagues in the world, if not the first, when it was founded in 2000. It folded, after accumulating more than $100 million in losses, in 2003. Only one year before it’s last match, WUSA was the centerpiece of the 2002 British romantic comedy Bend It Like Beckham. I remember this, because I was 10 years old and obsessed with the movie. In it, an 18-year-old Indian woman, Jess, defies her family’s wishes by playing soccer with the ultimate goal of making it onto the professional world stage – something only available in the US at the time. Clips of Mia Hamm are interspersed with pleas for women’s athletics to be taken seriously. Ironically, the film came just in time for fans to watch WUSA go under. 

Since then there has been Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS), founded in 2007 and dissolved in 2012, and, most recently, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). The newest to take on the challenge of women’s professional soccer, NWSL began play in 2013 with 8 teams. But even with 10 years of growth and development since WUSA, the NWSL still faces huge monetary restraints, offering a minimum salary of a meager $6,842.

The US won, and that’s awesome, but it barely begins to address the disparities between men and women’s professional sports. The Women’s World Cup might have been able to pull viewers, but it raked in only $17 million in ad dollars for Fox, while ESPN made out with over $500 million from last year’s Men’s World Cup. And, while the winners of the Men’s World Cup walk away with a cool $35 million, the women are awarded only $2 million. This is, according to FIFA, partly because there have only been seven Women’s World Cup tournaments as compared to 20 Men’s World Cup tournaments, but if the men are so much more established and deserving, why are the women’s matches getting more views?

I was never a big soccer player, trading it out for field hockey in the sixth grade, but I loved Bend It Like Beckham because it made me believe that it was possible to be respected as a professional female athlete. The rise of women in the Olympics has sent a similar message, showing that, when given the opportunity, women can dominate just about anything. But having women on TV playing sports isn’t enough. There is no way that things will even approach fairness until Carli Lloyd is compensated for her successes in the same way a male player would be. Congratulations to the US team on an amazing win, but to all the people patting themselves on the back because women’s professional sports have suddenly ‘made it’ – we aren’t even close to finished.