The absurdity of the “equal pay” narrative in U.S. soccer only begets more absurdity. Now, professor Amy Bass thinks the NBA and WNBA should bankrupt themselves.

Writing for CNN, Bass plays the usual misleading notes about the alleged pay disparities between the men’s and women’s national soccer teams. She complains that the women earned less money for winning the World Cup than the men do for their below-average performances, even though the women were paid more between 2010 and 2018 than the men.

Bass also complains that the women’s prize pool for winning the World Cup in 2019 was $30 million and the pool for winning in 2023 will be $60 million, while “the men are looking at least $400 million.” That disparity is explained by the fact that the men’s World Cup in 2018 was watched by more than 3.5 billion people. Indeed, the same amount of people watched just the championship game (1.12 billion) as the entire women’s World Cup in 2019, according to FIFA.

But never mind all that. Since the women’s team was able to use a public pressure campaign (with the help of sympathetic media) to badger the U.S. Soccer Federation into a new deal, Bass thinks all sports should do the same. In her words, “We must set aside the idea that women should be paid only if and when their play is valued — commercially and culturally — as much as the men.”

This equity welfare for women’s sports would only serve to bankrupt women’s leagues across the country. Take the WNBA, which is half-owned by the NBA. The WNBA generates roughly $60 million in revenue (not profits), and according to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the women’s league has lost an average of $10 million every year it has existed.

The team with the lowest roster payroll in the NBA this past year was the Oklahoma City Thunder, with $82 million spent on their roster. The second-lowest team was the Memphis Grizzlies, who spent $117 million on their roster. One NBA roster is worth more than the entire WNBA because the WNBA runs a deficit, while the NBA (which already subsidizes the WNBA) brings in some $8 billion in revenue.

In other words, Bass thinks the NBA and WNBA should bankrupt themselves. No matter how few people watch the WNBA or how much money the league already bleeds, the NBA and WNBA owners should dramatically increase salaries out of the goodness of their hearts and the purity of their social-justice souls. That doesn’t even touch on other women’s sports, such as the 70% of women’s soccer clubs in 30 leagues across the world that operate at a loss.

The fact is that the value of sports, both “commercially and culturally,” is what determines player pay. Women’s leagues simply do not compare to men’s leagues in terms of viewership, and therefore, it would be impossible to achieve “equal pay” without immediately bankrupting the leagues themselves. The desire to compare women’s sports to men’s only highlights the shortcomings of the former.