In 12 days it’ll all be over bar the counting. When the Women’s World Cup ends in Sydney on August 20, organiser Fifa will start paying out the minimum $30,000 per player it guaranteed ahead of this tournament.
The payments, rising to $60,000 per player in teams making it to the knockout stage — hello, Banyana Banyana — and climbing to $270,000 for the final, will go to each of the 23 players in the winning squad directly for the first time. They won’t have to wait for payments to trickle down — or not — from domestic federations.
“[It means] those who are sweating for 90 minutes or more to give us joy, by giving them a minimum — no matter how the level they reach in this competition — of $30,000 back home,” Fifa secretary-general Fatma Samoura told ABC Radio in July. “This money represents for many of those players ... a yearly salary.”
That’s sadly true. A 2019 pay survey by player body Fifpro put the median net club monthly salary for female players (excluding the 3.6% of participants not receiving any money at all) at €2,425.
And yet Fifa’s $110m prize payments to federations (of which $49m is ring-fenced for players) is still just a quarter of the $440m in payouts it made for the men’s World Cup in Qatar in 2022. Fifa is aiming for pay parity by 2027. It’s got a long way to go, having offered just $30m in direct prize money at France 2019, $15m at Canada 2015, $7.5m in 2011 and $5.8m in 2007.
Of course, the organisation has its own prejudices to overcome. Former president Sepp Blatter floated the idea in 2004 that women players could wear tighter shorts to boost the popularity of the game.
And pay inequality in football is part of a wider picture. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2023, published in June, found that women’s economic participation slipped over the past year — in contrast to measures such as education, health and political empowerment, which all closed the gap with men slightly.
A handful of footballing countries have committed to pay their women and men players equally: Norway (second on the WEF’s 146-country ranking this year), New Zealand (fourth), Ireland (11th), Costa Rica (14th), England (15th), Spain (18th), the Netherlands (28th), Australia (26th) and the US (43rd).
It’s always a battle for better pay and conditions — as Banyana Banyana’s pre-World Cup dispute with the SA Football Association (Safa) shows. Australia’s first national captain, Julie Dolan, who played between 1978 and 1988, recently pointed out the game’s second-class start in the country. “We were baking cakes just to get money to travel to tournaments; players were leaving their jobs because they couldn’t get time off,” she said.
Low pay reflects the perceived value of women’s sport more widely. In July I paid just A$80 ($52) for five tickets to see Australia’s women take on France in a pre-World Cup friendly in Melbourne. This weekend I paid A$192 for four tickets to see a preliminary round men’s Australian Rules football game at the same stadium.
Until 2023 Fifa bundled broadcast rights for the women’s World Cup in as a freebie for broadcasters buying the men’s World Cup. In May, Fifa president Gianni Infantino called lowball offers for the women’s tournament a “slap in the face” to players and threatened not to broadcast the World Cup in the countries in question.
But Moya Dodd, a former Australian vice-captain, called out Fifa’s hypocrisy. “Effectively, the industry was trained to pay big money for the men’s World Cup and to treat the women’s equivalent as worthless,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “At the same time, the women were told they didn’t deserve prize money or equal pay because they didn’t bring the revenues. It’s actually quite outrageous.”
Meanwhile, the numbers are growing. Fifa says an average of 25,476 fans attended the 48 first-round matches in the current World Cup, a 29% increase from attendances at France 2019. So who should win?
The biggest payment to women goes to the US team, after the country’s governing bodies reached a world first agreement to equalise fees and bonuses across the men’s and women’s teams last year. Under the arrangement, prize money for the 2022 men’s and 2023 women’s World Cups is pooled and split evenly among male and female players.
The US women are out of the running for World Cup glory thanks to a thrilling game with Sweden, but perhaps the Americans have won already.
• Bleby is a senior reporter with The Australian Financial Review, based in Melbourne.
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