Is women's soccer worth as much as men's?

There seems to be almost unanimous support (in the largely liberal media outlets I tend to read, at any rate) for the US women's soccer team's legal suit alleging wage discrimination. I'm not so sure.
I would usually be gung ho for anything to do with women's equality, but I think we have to be a bit careful about what precedents get set along the way, and about providing excuses for a potential backlash, which might actually put the process back more than it advances.
The point here is that women and men should be paid equally for equal work. Now, the US women's team have actually been substantially more successful than the men's team in terms of winning matches and competitions, and I'm sure that they put in at least a much effort during their performances. But the men's game generates much more money from TV rights and match attendance and, however much you might like to believe otherwise, top-level soccer today is a business, it's about the money. The situation is complicated somewhat by the fact that, according to the US Soccer Federation itself, the women's team is actually expected to generate a $5 million profit, as compared to a $1 million loss for the men's team, regardless of gross revenues.
If a corollary is helpful, it seems to me that the situation is a bit like comparing a National Hockey League team with a Canadian Hockey League team, and claiming that the CHL team deserves equal pay because they regularly win in their league and put in just as much effort. Unfortunately, they are just not as good as a NHL team, and hockey fans are less likely to want to pay big money to see them. Or you could take the example of British Premier League and Championship League teams, or for that matter any other sport where there are different level and the higher levels get paid more than the lower levels. Professional tennis is one of the few major sports which has gone the route of equalizing men's and women's pay, largely due to the pioneering activist work of Billie Jean King.
So, I think it behooves us to take a bit of care here. We probably don't want to get into technical analyses of whether women's soccer is as fast, skillful or as "good" as men's (like it or not, due to biological reasons, there are very few sports where women could compete against men on their own physical merits), or even whether their game is as entertaining or exciting (there may conceivably be a case for that). But we should probably take a good hard look at why women's sports attract fewer viewers and sponsors, and see what can be done in that arena.
In the meantime, would you pay more for an inferior product at the supermarket because it was made by women? Perhaps, as a matter of principle, similar to buying fair trade coffee, or if you were a supporter of affirmative action or positive discrimination. But you would probably be in a small minority, and the market as a whole would probably not support you.