Yet you should have. Both issues are important.

“Some of the players in the N.W.S.L. get paid so little that they have to have jobs on the side to support their families, and that’s not right,” said Cheyenne Payne, who turned 11 on Monday and who recited so many details about women’s soccer that I’d swear she studied for my interview.

Abigail Cole said it was “just wrong” that she had to watch N.W.S.L. games streamed on YouTube because the games are rarely televised. Amaya Dalton said it was “just unfair” that pay for the best men and women was so different.

How different? U.S. Soccer pays about $54,000 per national player, on top of national team pay, to compete in the N.W.S.L.; the other N.W.S.L. players earn salaries that range from $7,200 to $39,700 for a season that runs from April to October.

Where does that leave a player like Raquel Rodriguez? A Sky Blue midfielder, Rodriguez was the college player of the year at Penn State last season and represented her native Costa Rica in last summer’s World Cup. She said her country’s federation doesn’t pay her, and has yet to fork over the $2,000 bonus she and her teammates were supposed to get from reaching the World Cup. With her federation’s former president embroiled in the FIFA financial scandal, she acknowledged she may never see that money.