Monday, March 26, 2018

US Soccer Federation CEO Salary Data in the Context of US Non-Profits


Update: In today's (27 Mar) Washington Post Sally Jenkins has a hard-hitting piece on executive pay in the U.S. Olympic organizations.

The graph above shows the total compensation of the CEO of the US Soccer Federation. The USSF is a non-profit registered as a charity in the state of New York. Here are the numbers and sources:
  • 2014 $654,907 (IRS 990 2014, pdf)
  • 2015 $694,745 (IRS 990 2015, pdf)
  • 2016 $809,640 (IRS 990 2016, pdf)
How does the USSF CEO salary compare to other non-profits based on the size of the organization? 

In 2016 Charity Navigator looked at 2015 data on the salaries of CEOs at 4,587 charities from the IRS 990 submissions (report here in PDF). From this report graph of salary versus organizational expenses can be seen below. From the 2015 USSF IRS 990 we see that expenses were just over $110 million. Based on this data I have annotated the graph with a red star to indicate the data point that occurs at USSF expenses and CEO salary.
The USSF CEO is one of the highest paid chief executives of any non-profit in the United States. The Charity Navigator report notes: "66 charities paid their CEOs between $500,000 and $1 million" (and 10 paid more than $1 million). This would place the USSF CEO close to the 99th percentile of non-profit executive salaries.

In New York specifically, Steven Hall & Partners looked at all non-profit CEO salaries (in 2014, report here in PDF) for charities registered in New York, finding: "Among organizations with revenues greater than $40 million, median total compensation for the top executive was $458,140." The USSF CEO is again well above the median based on this survey.

Charity Navigator found that from 2008-2014 non-profit CEO compensation increased by less than 3% per year. The USSF CEO saw a raise of 4.9% from 2014 to 2015 and 17.3% from 2015 to 2016.

Bottom line: The US Soccer Federation CEO is among the highest paid chief executives of any charitable, non-profit organizations in the United States.

Other sports NGBs:
  • US Tennis Association 2016 (IRS 990 pdf)
    • $253.9 million in expenses
    • $1.39 million, executive director 
  • USA Track and Field 2016 (IRS 990 pdf)
    • $36.2 million in expenses
    • $1.60 million, CEO
  • USA Swimming 2016 (IRS 990 pdf)
    • $40.5 million in expenses
    • $1.33 million, president and CEO
  • USA Gymnastics 2016 (IRS 990 pdf)
    • $32.4 million in expenses
    • $671,000, CEO
  • US Olympic Committee 2016 (IRS 990 pdf)
    • $257.5 million in expenses
    • $1.08 million, CEO

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Updated NGB Scorecard Values for US Ski and Snowboard, Moves to the Top of the Rankings

Note: I am posting this update here as we work through some technical issues with our NGB project site at the Sports Governance Center at CU Athletics. We will update that site with the new scores ASAP, thanks for your patience.

Last year, we released the first set of scores for the governance of US Olympic national governing bodies (NGBs) based on evaluation metrics developed by the 2015 Sports Governance Observer of Play the Game. We applied these metric to 22 US Olympic Sport Federations. We will be releasing the scores for the remaining NGBs later this spring.

Since releasing the initial set of scores, we have received feedback from the U.S. Olympic Committee and more than a dozen NGBs. One of the organizations that we heard from was US Ski & Snowboard which provided us with an update on their governance practices, the information that they make available on their website and several challenges to our rankings. You can see their response here in PDF.

Our team used the Ski and Snowboard response as the basis for an updated scoring of Ski & Snowboard with respect to the 36 SGO indicators. Our methodology was the same as first applied: A team of three researchers independently evaluated and scored each of the 36 SGO indicators. Then, for the few indicators for which there was a significant difference in scores among the team, the team met to reach a consensus score.

The full set of rankings can be seen on our homepage and the Ski and Snowboard update is summarized in the table below.

The original aggregate score for Ski and Snowboard was a 66.1, for which we gave a D. The updated score is 80.1, earning Ski and Snowboard a B-. Perhaps more importantly, the updated score vaults Ski and Snowboard to the top of our initial rankings.

Here is how Ski and Snowboard ranks in each of the four categories:
  • Transparency = 92%, A-
  • Democratic Processes = 79%, C+
  • Check and Balances = 86%, B
  • Solidarity = 64%, D
We have learned from the USOC that many of the SGO indicators overlap in important respects with the USOC internal compliance standards checklist for the NGBs, but there are also SGO indicators which are of less relevance to USOC and the NGGs. Further, the SGO indicators were originally designed for evaluating international federations and are being applied to US Olympic NGBs. Even with these limitations, the SGO evaluation framework provides a useful, high level tool for evaluating governance from an independent perspective, based solely in publicly available information.

We are in contact with other NGBs and look forward to future updates for other US Olympic organizations.

UPDATED SCORES


US Ski and Snowboard 22-Mar-18
Old Scores New scores
Transparency
1.01 4 5
1.02 5 5
1.03 5 5
1.04 1 3
1.05 4 5
1.06 3 5
1.07 2 4
1.08 5 5
1.09 5 5
1.1 5 5
1.11 5 5
1.12 3 3
Average: 3.92 4.58
Sum: 47 55
Democratic Process
2.01 5 5
2.02 5 5
2.03 3 3.5
2.04 1 2
2.05 3 4
2.06 4 3
2.07 5 5
2.08 2 5
2.09 1 2
2.1 4 5
Average: 3.3 3.95
Sum: 33 39.5
Checks and Balances
3.01 4 4.5
3.02 4 5
3.03 4 4.5
3.04 4 4
3.05 2 4
3.06 3 3
3.07 5 5
Average: 3.71 4.29
Sum: 26 30
Solidarity
4.01 3 3
4.02 1 5
4.03 1 1.5
4.04 1 2
4.05 4 5
4.06 1 1
4.07 5 5
Average: 2.29 3.21
Sum: 16 22.5

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

The Revenue Red Herring in the US Soccer Equal Pay Dispute

Yesterday, Hope Solo visited my big class at the University of Colorado, Introduction to Sports Governance, and discussed the equal pay issue that is currently the subject of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dispute between  a group of US women soccer players and the US Soccer Federation.

In this post I'll discuss what I believe to be the central red herring at the center of this dispute: the idea that differential revenues attributed to men's and women's teams should be used as a basis for the differential compensation of individual athletes under US Olympic sport national governing bodies. Before I proceed, let me emphasize that this post reflects a policy analysis, and not a legal analysis. I'm a policy professor, not a lawyer.

The issues are complex, but let's start with the relevant organizations. The US Soccer Federation is one of 47 organizations in the United States that serve as a "national governing body" for an Olympic sport. USSF exists under US law, the so-called Ted Stevens Olympic Act (or Amateur Sports Act of 1978).  The Stevens Act (here in PDF) created an organizational framework for Olympic sports, centered on the US Olympic Committee and the establishment of national governing bodies for individual sports.

Among the goals of the Stevens Act are:
to obtain for the United States, directly or by delegation to the appropriate national governing body, the most competent amateur representation possible in each event of the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, and Pan-American Games.
It would seem fairly obvious that by "most competent representation possible" the law is referring to sporting competence as exhibited in international competitions. We want athletes who are the world's best, who can win tournaments and medals. That is what the Olympics are about and medal counts are, for better or worse, an important criterion in how national governing bodies are judged.

In their pursuit of sporting success, the Stevens Act imposes certain legal requirements on the USOC and national governing bodies, among them:
For the sport that it governs, a national governing body shall provide equitable support and encouragement for participation by women where separate programs for male and female athletes are conducted on a national basis.
This requirement is unambiguous, though lawyers surely will no doubt parse the precise meaning of "equitable support and encouragement." For purposes of this discussion, let's define "equitable support" in financial terms as "roughly equal" with "equal" defined as a mathematical term that can be measured in dollars and cents.

The EEOC complaint filed in 2016 (here in PDF) by several US women soccer players alleges that the compensation for women US national team players "pales in comparison" to that of US men's national team players. The complaint lists a long set of issue for which men and women are compensated differently (at the time of the filing), ranging from the World Cup competitions to daily per diem rates (e.g., men get $75 per day internationally, women get $60).

In a response to the EEOC filing, lawyers for the USSF focused on the relative revenues generated by each team of players as a primary basis for their argument against the complaint. The USSF acknowledges that there may be disparities in pay, but argues that these differences are justified based on differential "production."
. . . to the extent that there are differences in compensation paid to WNT and MNT players, those differences do not establish a violation of Title VII or the Equal Pay Act. Under both statutory schemes, where a payment that differs by gender is being made “pursuant to … (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production[] or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex,” there is, by definition, no violation.
This is important.

The USSF is defining "production" in terms of dollars generated by each team, and not by sporting success. The primary justification offered by USSF for any differences in compensation is: "the greater amount of revenue produced by the MNT."

Further, the players, both men and women, seem to have accepted through their players associations that negotiate collective bargaining agreements governing compensation that revenue should be used as a metric of compensation. The USSF response to the EEOC complaint explains:
With respect to the MNT and WNT, the compensation paid each team is based, in part, on predictions regarding the revenue that each team will generate over the course of the collective bargaining agreement.
The USSF invokes an analogy to make its point:
[A]ssume that Player A and Player B are wide receivers of different races playing for the same professional football team. Suppose further that Player A had consistently produced more yards and touchdowns than Player B, and received a more lucrative contract as a result. The fact that Player B came to outperform the Player A over the term of the contract would not remotely suggest in hindsight that the original contracts were the product of a racially discriminatory motive.
From its response, it seems pretty obvious that the USSF is overseeing the US men's and women's national teams as if they were independent professional franchises. (There are important legal points about employees of the same organization doing the same work, that I won't get into here.)

The professional sports analogy used by USSF is simply misplaced. The USSF is a non-profit which operates under the Ted Stevens Act. While it needs revenues to do its work, such revenues are always to be a means, not an end. Under the Stevens Act (here in PDF) the USOC can provide "financial assistance to any organization or association, except a corporation organized for profit" and "may not engage in business for profit." From a legislative perspective, profits are not the point of Olympic sport.

To the extent that USSF views US national soccer teams as businesses generating profits, and uses those profits as the basis for compensation, it may be in violation of the legislative intent of the Stevens Act governing Olympic sports. Recall that among the legislated goals of a US Olympic sport national governing body are to provide "competent representation" (which means success in the World Cup, the Olympic games and other competitions under the Olympic Movement) and "equitable support and encouragement."

With apologies to Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, revenue's got nothing to do with it.

The relative revenues generated by men's and women's national team should have no bearing on their relative compensation. USSF is not a for-profit business. Soccer players who compete in international competitions produce primarily sporting successes (and losses). The revenues that they generate contribute to support the work of the non-profit, but the revenues should always be viewed as a means to achieving "competent representation." It is worth noting that US Soccer has as much as $140 million sitting in reserve, which dwarfs the size of both the EEOC claim and providing the futureequal compensation.

And crucially, under the law, men's and women's national soccer teams are legally required to be treated equitably from a sporting perspective, with no footnote or clause that says equity can be ignored due to revenues or anything else.

So the bottom line here is that the women soccer players' EEOC complaint is in fact flawed. It is flawed not because they are wrong about equal compensation -- they got that right. The complaint is wrong because it has not gone far enough.

Consider overall investment in men's and women's national teams: The data below come from 2013 and  2014, but they are illustrative.

Whatever the relative profits of the US MNT and WNT, data consistently show that the USSF invests less in the WNT versus the MNT. This disparity would seem to be fundamentally at odds with the legislated objectives of the Ted Stevens Act which governs USSF.

To sum up, issues of equal pay in US Soccer are currently playing out in the legal system. However, with Congress now paying greater attention to USOC and its associated national governing bodies, a more appropriate venue for resolving this issue may be through the legislative process

US Soccer is treating the US men's and women's national teams as cost centers that generate profits to justify differential treatment. Not only is this possibly illegal (we shall see in due course), it is all but certainly in violation of the intent of the Ted Stevens Act. 

If athletes also treat the USSF as a professional sport organization, they cede important ground. Consider for instance a court decision in response to a call for dismissal of the EEOC complaint only references the Ted Stevens Act in passing, here in PDF, and proceeds to characterize the USSF as if it were a professional franchise owner.. 

National soccer teams are not professional franchises. Their relative revenues and profits are a red herring. Athletes and their representatives would be on firmer ground if they rejected relative revenues as a legitimate basis for securing athlete payment. USSF is a non-profit under the Stevens Act and is bound to treat men and women equitably. That is the legislated intent of the US Congress and it is time for USSF to be held to that standard. 

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Sexual Abuse Allegations at US Olympic Sports Organizations

There are a large number of sexual abuse allegations against officials in US Olympic sports bodies. While those against Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics are the most widely publicized, there are many others. This tabulation is for my own use, but hopefully of use for others as well.

The Washington Post reports:
More than 290 coaches and officials associated with the United States’ Olympic sports organizations have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct since 1982, according to a Washington Post review of sport governing body banned lists, news clips and court records in several states. The figure spans parts of 15 sports and amounts to an average of eight adults connected to an Olympic organization accused of sexual misconduct every year — or about one every six weeks — for more than 36 years.
Here is an initial tally of media reports (updated 15 March 2018):
If you have further pointers, please suggest in the comments or send me a DM, and I'll update.

Further reading:

Haley O. Morton, License to Abuse: Confronting Coach-Inflicted Sexual Assault in American Olympic Sports, 23 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 141 (2016). (PDF)