Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday that members of the World Cup champion U.S. Women’s National Team were hurting their cause for equal pay due to “their behavior,” claiming that some players’ disparagement of President Trump was “unpatriotic” and caused American soccer fans to tune them out.
With the president saying he needs to “look at the numbers” to see if female soccer players should earn the same as their male counterparts, Watters said during Monday’s broadcast of late-afternoon gabfest The Five that Trump “does have a point.”
After claiming that the men’s overall World Cup revenue is a “much bigger pot” to split up, the pro-Trump host conceded that in the U.S., the “women do actually make more revenue and they get paid less” than the men. He blamed that on their lawyers.
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“They negotiated a horrible deal and they need to renegotiate that immediately,” he added. The women’s team, meanwhile, filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit back in March.
Seemingly referencing star player Megan Rapinoe’s harsh criticisms of Trump and kneeling during the national anthem, Watters went on to claim that these actions were hurting their case.
“But the point is that women are not helping their case by their behavior,” Watters declared. “If you go out and you disparage the president and you act in unpatriotic ways and then complain about not getting paid equally, well, what do you think is gonna happen?”
Claiming “people will not watch,” the Fox News star asserted that he personally spoke to “many, many people” over the weekend who said that while they “love soccer,” they wouldn’t watch the women’s final because they “didn’t like what they said.”
“That means the ad revenue comes down and that means their overall revenue comes down and they can’t divvy up the same amount of money,” he concluded.
The World Cup final, which the United States won 2-0 over the Netherlands, pulled in 14.3 million viewers in the United States, up 22 percent over last year’s men’s final.
