“I think we’re done with: Are we worth it? Should we have equal pay? Is the market the same? Yada yada,” the American midfielder Megan Rapinoe said, adding: “We — all players, every player at this World Cup — put on the most incredible show that you could ever ask for. We can’t do anything more, to impress more, to be better ambassadors, to take on more, to play better, to do anything. It’s time to move that conversation forward to the next step.”

Yet the basics of the United States team’s financial arrangement with U.S. Soccer will not change immediately, decades of inequity hardly wiped clean with a flurry of goals. The team’s collective bargaining agreement, which sets the players’ salaries and working conditions, runs through the end of 2021, and the players are explicitly forbidden from engaging in a strike over its terms. Some of U.S. Soccer’s partnerships, with Nike and with television networks like ESPN and Fox, have years to run, and since they bundle all the national teams together, assigning a value to one or another is impossible.

Still, the women’s team’s activism has produced results. U.S. Soccer agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement with its women’s players two years ago that included higher salaries, richer bonuses and improved working conditions. And other countries have followed that lead: the Netherlands, the rising power that lost to the Americans in the World Cup final, has set a goal of pay equity for its men’s and women’s teams by 2023.

Last year, FIFA doubled the prize money for this summer’s Women’s World Cup, to $30 million, and last week its president, Gianni Infantino, pledged that he would seek to double it again in time for the next edition in 2023. (The women’s total bonus pool remains a fraction of the $400 million that the 32 men’s World Cup teams — which for the first time in a generation did not include the United States — split in 2018.)

For now, the American players’ best hope to close a significant compensation gap may be to exploit their soaring profile away from the field. When the team negotiated its new contracts with U.S. Soccer in 2017, it carved out some marketing rights that in previous decades were either granted to the federation or merely left unexplored. Those have proven quite valuable.