Courtesy of Foreign Policy, a report on how Latin American players are pushing for free expression and equal pay at this year’s Women’s World Cup:

The FIFA Women’s World Cup, hosted this year by Australia and New Zealand, has already delivered big matches—and big business. On just the fifth day of the tournament, and after securing lucrative broadcasting contracts, event organizers had already reached their goal of selling 1.5 million tickets. Latin American countries have had a strong showing thus far: Ary Borges scored a rare hat trick in Brazil’s opening match, while underdog teams such as Jamaica and Haiti have shone on the pitch. Public officials in the region have taken extra steps to promote viewership of this year’s tournament, too: The Argentine government is showing games on public television, while Brazil is giving public employees time off during matches.

Women’s soccer “is the biggest growth opportunity for our sport today,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in July 2021. Meanwhile, the players—many Latin American stars among them—are using a growing spotlight to advocate for political issues from pay equity to freedom of expression.

Activism in this World Cup is distinct from that of last year’s men’s tournament. The tightly controlled environment both inside and outside stadiums in Qatar was designed to stamp out any form of political protest, though the Iranian and German squads made silent gestures in support of Iran’s “Women, Life, Freedom” movement and LGBTQ rights, respectively. Overall, the tournament demonstrated the rising soft-power prowess of many Gulf states.

It’s far easier for players to make their voices heard in this year’s host countries, and the Brazilian national team did so from the moment they arrived, touching down in an airplane painted with an image of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian woman whose death in police custody in 2022 sparked nationwide protests. The plane was also painted with messages of support for feminist demonstrators in the country. More broadly, activism has flourished surrounding this tournament because it has been international, coordinated, and targeted toward inequalities at the heart of the soccer world.

Top of mind has been the fight for better and more equitable pay for female athletes compared with their male counterparts. Members of 25 national squads, including Uruguay, Chile, and Jamaica, sent a letter to FIFA ahead of the tournament calling for it to increase the tournament prize money for female players, among other demands, including better travel conditions for tournaments. It was coordinated by the international players’ union FIFPRO, where former Chilean and Colombian women’s national team players are currently organizers.

FIFA distributed a total of $400 million in prize money at the 2018 men’s tournament but only $30 million at the 2019 women’s tournament, despite it being watched by more than 1 billion people worldwide. In their letter, the players argued that increased financial investment was crucial for creating professionalization and fair opportunity in their sport.

As a result, FIFA announced in June that, for the first time, a minimum of $30,000 would be paid to each woman who participates in the tournament. The payment is a significant amount for South American players, according to Argentine women’s national team defender Aldana Cometti. Even so, when bonuses for top-performing teams are added up, players in this tournament will only receive $110 million in total from a performance-based fund from FIFA, while male players received a total of $440 million for the 2022 Qatar competition. FIFA, for its part, has an estimated nearly $4 billion in reserves and has projected that it will make some $807 million in revenue in 2023.

This push is part of a broader international movement to gain better compensation and treatment from women’s teams’ respective clubs and countries. One FIFA survey of women’s professional clubs in 2022 found that their average player salary was only $14,000. The U.S. women’s national team memorably reached an equal pay agreement with the U.S. national soccer federation in 2022 after years of legal battles. Those disputes were so front of mind during the 2019 Women’s World Cup that the stadium broke out in chants of “equal pay” when the United States won the tournament.

Yet the success of the U.S. team has not necessarily translated to countries where soccer salaries differ vastly. Writing in the Athletic this week, former U.S. player Sam Mewis recalled that she was eager to share the lessons of her team’s successful battle with female players in other countries but quickly realized women elsewhere often faced very different contexts for organizing, from legal environments to the level of support from fans. “I couldn’t share a blueprint for achieving equal pay when, relatively, my personal experience was akin to starting on third base,” she wrote. “I was blown away by what these other women have faced in their own journeys toward a more equitable, safe, and sustainable life in football.”

In some Latin American countries, such as Costa Rica and Brazil, national federations have reached their own pay deals with female players.

At least nine national teams went into this year’s tournament in the wake of disputes—financial or otherwise—with their respective federations. Some athletes, such as former Colombian player Isabella Echeverri, say they believe they were dropped from national team rosters for speaking up about poor conditions. In Haiti, the head of the soccer federation was accused of sexual misconduct and was eventually suspended by FIFA in 2020 but then reinstated by the Court of Arbitration for Sport this year.

While organizers celebrated the announcement of the $30,000 pay floor, last week Infantino appeared to dial back that pledge when he said FIFA would not pay the players directly but pay their national federations—some of which have been accused of withholding pay to female players in the first place. (Brazil’s deal struck with players does not cover World Cup prize money, meaning a significant pay gap remains on the game’s biggest stage.)

More than any tournament prior, this year’s World Cup shows the results of women organizing across borders for their rights. But players have emphasized that there’s still a long way to go.