The Australian women's national team won its equal pay fight. What can the USWNT learn from the Matildas? (Photo by Hannah Peters - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

While the U.S. women's national team continues a decades-long battle with the U.S. Soccer Federation over alleged wage discrimination, Australian soccer has been making headlines for a very different reason.

The men's and women's national teams of Australia just approved a new collective bargaining agreement that offers equal pay across the board, down to the cent. It has been hailed as a groundbreaking step for equality in soccer, and yet the representatives who helped negotiate the deal tell Yahoo Sports it wasn't the Herculean task it may seem.

“In the end, it really wasn’t tough,” says Kathryn Gill, the deputy CEO of Professional Footballers Australia, which negotiated the deal. “Everyone involved is incredibly proud of what we've achieved.”

It's not as if the Matildas, as the Australian women's team is known, didn't butt heads with their federation. Four years ago, the Matildas boycotted a pair of sellout games against the USWNT and publicly accused their federation of disrespecting them.

So how did the situation go from boycotts to equal pay? And how can the USWNT and U.S. Soccer learn from what happened Down Under?

What equal pay looks like in Australia

The Matildas’ boycotts, which were taken directly from the playbook of the USWNT in the 1990s and 2000s, worked in getting the attention of not just the Australian federation, but the country at large.

“It was the catalyst that changed the way women's sports were treated in Australia, if I'm honest,” says Gill, a former player.

When Professional Footballers Australia, the union for the Matildas and the men's national team (known as the Socceroos), began looking at each team's next contract, gender equality was atop the priority list.

“Our starting point was we didn’t want gender equality to be the men's standards dropping,” says PFA CEO John Didulica. “We wanted it to be about elevating the standards of the women's program, and that took a lot of work to design a model that was affordable yet didn’t compromise on delivering high performance for the women in line with what the men had been receiving.”

It helped that the Socceroos quickly supported the idea without the need for a hard sell. (In fact, USWNT goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris called out the USMNT’s lack of vocal support last week.) They saw the upside of supporting the Matildas and uniting with them, Didulica says.

But achieving equal pay meant scrapping the previous model of agreeing to fixed salaries and appearance fees from the Australian federation.

View photos Australia's all-time leading scorer, Tim Cahill (4), and other men's players were quick to support the women in their equal pay fight. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images) More

The PFA developed a new revenue-sharing model, where the national teams would equally share about a quarter of the federation's player-generated revenue. The money would be distributed via different structures the men and women set, but the amount of money available would be exactly the same, and the top-paid Socceroo would earn the same as the top-paid Matilda to the cent.

The deal is a “leap of faith,” Didulica says, but it puts the players firmly in control. If the teams perform well then revenues will grow, the teams can capture the upside, and everyone will win.

“Before, there was a winner and a loser,” Didulica says of the old model of fixed wages. “If the federation overperformed, the players got a lower share. If the federation underperformed, the game suffered because the players would be paid a disproportionate amount.”

The new collective bargaining agreement goes beyond compensation, though.

The men and women will receive the same business-class or five-star travel accommodations. Each team will also be required to have the same number of full-time staff and resources available to players.

Commercial opportunities between the two teams will be made equal as well.

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