All Things Being Equal: Understanding the Real Costs of Equal Pay

The story of Women's Soccer’s fight for equal pay as chronicled by counsel and leader of the USWNT’s Players Association.

In All Things Being Equal, Rich Nichols—former counsel for Women’s Soccer—teams up with USA Today HoopsHype’s Sam Yip to detail what transpired during the players' fight for equal pay. Nichols argues that, when deep in the proverbial red zone, the team ultimately lacked the strength and resolve to solidify true equal pay.

The book serves as a wake-up call to show future generations of young girls—and then some—the level of personal and professional commitment required to achieve true equality for women in the workplace. The reader will feel armed with the tools needed to find a seat at the equal pay negotiating table—a chance to observe and feel exactly what went down, step by step, and to feel the intensity of the struggle against the power of US Soccer’s resolve to deny equal pay. The authors describe what it took for the women on the USWNT to even get as far as they did—close enough to the edge of success to actually see the spoils of their labor.

Rich Nichols is a premier pioneering sports lawyer with decades of experience as a businessperson and lawyer in the sports industry. Along with leading the equal pay collective bargaining negotiations for the USWNT, he has represented a plethora of iconic athletes. He practiced law for several years at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and in the early 1980s founded and operated a sports marketing company. In 1988, Nichols purchased, owned, and operated the City of San Francisco Marathon before selling it in 1991 to the International Management Group (IMG). Finally, Nichols has considerable experience in broadcast media as a sports analyst and most recently a television pundit on high-profile issues in the news and sports. He resides in Keller, Texas.

Sam Yip, a sports journalist with USA Today’s HoopsHype, has covered a wide range of sports, from Olympic sports like women’s beach volleyball to the NBA, for outlets like The Guardian, SLAM, and others. He covers games in the NBA and USA Basketball. Additionally, he regularly interviews professional athletes and sports executives. Yip resides in Los Angeles, California.