Cindy Parlow Cone, president of U.S. Soccer, spoke with the Scholar Media Team’s Laurelle Maubert ’25 and Content Manager Sarah O’Carroll before her Food for Thought talk this spring. On this episode, Cone shares about historic equal pay agreements she led as president, her goals for the federation, and advice for female college athletes.

Cone is the first female president of U.S. Soccer and the first former player of a senior U.S. National Team to serve in the role. She is also the youngest player to win an Olympic gold medal and a Women’s World Cup title.

In May 2022, U.S. Soccer, the United States Women’s National Team Players Association, and the United States National Soccer Team Players Association agreed on collective bargaining agreements to achieve equal pay for women soccer players.

A UNC–Chapel Hill alumna, Cone was a four-time All-American for the Tar Heels. She later served as assistant coach at Carolina, leading the women’s team to four NCAA titles.

Food for Thought is a breakfast and conversation series held on Friday mornings at the Foundation. You can learn more about the initiative and RSVP for upcoming events on the Morehead-Cain Network.

Listen to the episode.

Music credits

The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

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The Catalyze podcast is a series by the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The show is directed and produced by Sarah O’Carroll, Content Manager for Morehead-Cain.

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Episode transcription

(Sarah)

Cindy, thank you so much for joining Catalyze today before your Food for Thought talk at the Morehead-Cain Foundation. We also have Laurelle from the Scholar Media Team, who’s excited to interview you. And Laurelle, I’ll hand things off to you now.

(Laurelle)

Awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah. So my first question for Cindy is, you became the first female president of U.S. Soccer in 2020, and you were also the first to hold the position who had previously played for a senior U.S. National Team. How have these two things made you such an effective advocate for the sport?

(Cindy)

When I ran for vice president, I did so because I really felt like it was important for a player to be in the room, or a former player—I wasn’t playing anymore, a former player to be in the room when decisions were being made about our sport. And so I put myself forward for the vice presidency. Little did I know, shortly thereafter, the president would resign, and I would immediately jump into the president position.

(Laurelle)

That’s awesome. Thank you. Next question. So the sort of subject of your Food for Thought talk today is equal pay for female athletes. And under your leadership, you negotiated a historic Collective Bargaining Agreement with both national teams that made the U.S. the first country to achieve gender equality. This has been a goal of past U.S. Soccer presidents but was never achieved. What do you think were both the actions and the characteristics of both you and others who are involved in this deal to help take it across the finish line?

(Cindy)

Yeah, so as a player, I was a part of the equal pay fight, so I’ve been in this equal pay fight for over 20 years. And I think coming into the presidency, I think finally there was someone in this position who really understood what the women were going to, why they were so angry and frustrated, because I was in their shoes. I was fighting their fight. And so to be able to be in a position to actually impact change was really important for me. And so, for me, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Look, it took me two and a half years as president to reach equal pay. So it’s not like I became president, and it happened overnight. There was a lot to be worked through. You know, negotiating one Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) is challenging. Negotiating two Collective Bargaining Agreements at the same time with a litigation in the balance because we had settled the women’s litigation. But in order for that settlement to go through, we had to figure out the CBAs for both the men and the women’s teams. And I give a ton of credit to my staff, to the women’s national team and their players association, to the men’s national team and their player associations, because we all got to together and figured out how to move forward.

And the process wasn’t simple. You feel like everything’s coming together, and then the next moment you feel like everything’s falling apart. And then everything starts to come back together, and then you’re like, oh no, it’s not going to work. But we kept coming back to the table. Everyone kept coming back to the table because we all wanted to figure this out and figure out the path forward. And I am just so excited about where we landed and the path that we’re moving towards.

(Laurelle)

Thank you so much. Next question is obviously so for this achievement, it was for U.S. Soccer, but do you hope that maybe seeing the US soccer team succeed in doing this that you can hopefully inspire other sports to do the same?

(Cindy)

Yeah, we all know that equal pay isn’t just a women’s soccer issue. It’s not just a women’s sports issue. It’s an issue in every industry. But what I’m excited about is not only what we’ve been able to accomplish here at U.S. Soccer with our men’s and women’s teams and their player associations, but we’re already starting to see the ripple effect of what we’re doing. And so I think that’s really exciting for all of us. And we know that not everyone around the world can do what we did in terms of reaching equal pay. But the important thing is that everyone continues to make progress, and we’re starting to see that ripple effect, which is really exciting.

(Laurelle)

There were many myths and misconceptions for a while of why equal pay for athletes was not possible. Obviously, this accomplishment for US soccer proves otherwise. But is there any one big misconception about why this couldn’t possibly be a possibility that you would like to debunk?

(Cindy)

I think there are a few things that I don’t know that they were like misconceptions, but just that people just didn’t understand. So one of the challenges to reach this is, for every game that U.S. Soccer controlled, so all the matches that we control and we get the revenue from, we had equal pay on. But the big discrepancy was the FIFA World Cup prize money. So during the litigation, it was looking at the 2018 and 2019 World Cups, where the 2018 men’s national team that won that received $40 million or 38, and then, the women’s national team in their World Cup a year later, the winner received $4 million. So massive discrepancies between what FIFA awards the men’s World Cup champion and the women’s World Cup champion. And so the challenge for U.S. Soccer was that, hey, we, we can’t make up that difference because we want our women to win every four years, and we can’t make up that difference every four years. And so the men had their Collective Bargaining Agreement, and the women had theirs, and they were not on the same cycle, so the men’s Collective Bargaining Agreement was up, so we would negotiate that. And then a couple of years later, the Women’s Collective Bargaining Agreement was up, so we would negotiate that. And so this kind of had an alignment of the stars, because while we had done some negotiating with the men’s national team on their CBAs, there wasn’t a CBA in place. So when the women’s national team’s CBA was up, we now had two teams that were out of contract. So my big goal was to put them all on one contract and have both players associations agree to one contract. We didn’t quite get there. There are differences between our men’s team and our women’s team, and they wanted different things, so we understood that. But as far as compensation, we were able to reach equal pay, including FIFA World Cup prize money. And I give a lot of credit to our men’s national team and their Players Association to coming on board to that, because any way you look at it, the men’s national team had to be willing to give up money in order for us to reach equal pay.

(Laurelle)

With this incredible victory for U.S. Soccer, particularly for female athletes now kind of complete and under your belt, what other initiatives and goals do you have for the sport that you hope to accomplish?

(Cindy)

Oh, man, so many. I think, first and foremost, to increase access to our sport. I want to change how people see our sport and see sports in general, honestly. If we change the way we think about it and think about soccer and sports as a birthright, how do we change how we go about it? And so, I really want to increase access. Obviously, I’m in the soccer industry, so specifically to soccer, I want to increase access to soccer. So we’re about to host the FIFA Men’s World Cup in ’26, alongside Canada and Mexico. And one of our big goals is to try to figure out a way to, anyone who wants to play our game can either walk, ride their bike, or take public transit to a safe place to play soccer. And soccer doesn’t have to be eleven per side on a beautiful green grass field. It can be two versus two in a backyard, it can be five versus five in a gym and futsal. So there are lots of different forms of soccer. But I really want to increase access to soccer, and not just access, but equal opportunity to succeed in our sport as well.

(Laurelle)

Thank you so much, Cindy. And thank you so much for being here this morning. We really appreciate it.

(Sarah)

Thank you. Cindy, anything else you’d like to share with the scholar community or perhaps even aspirational professional soccer players at UNC that you might have benefited as a student yourself?

(Cindy)

I think for me, the one thing that I wish I’d done a better job of was enjoying the journey. I was so goal-oriented and so intrinsically motivated that sometimes when I would achieve something, I would just move on to the next thing and didn’t really live in the moment and enjoy that milestone. And so I would say, enjoy the moment, enjoy the journey, even on the downtimes, really sit with that and think about it, and think about how 10, 15, 20 years from now, you’re going to learn from this experience and grow from it. We won the ’99 World Cup, and I didn’t even really celebrate. I was like, “Oh, the 2000 Olympics are right around the corner. I need to start training.” And so I think celebrating those milestones and then in those downtimes, taking those in as well and sitting with them. Whenever I had a downtime, I just kind of seem to ignore it and move on. But I think it’s important to really make sure we’re learning from those moments as well. So enjoy the journey.

(Sarah)

Thank you so much.

(Cindy)

Thank you.