Gender Pay Gap: the justification
- Beth Pritchard
- Feb 4, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 23, 2020
The popularity of the 2019 Women’s World Cup and recent decisions across the country from football boards have highlighted the subject of inequality in pay between male and female footballers.
An issue in both international and domestic football, the controversial topic is now often debated. There are arguments on both sides as to whether female footballers’ pay should be increased - or male footballers’ decreased - in order to establish parity.
The Issue
Looking at the financial statistics truly emphasises this inequality in pay and breaking down this data in the United Kingdom, United States of America, and in the World Cup prize money, suggests the question: ‘Why are female footballers paid so much less than their male counterparts?’
The women’s 2019 Best FIFA Player, Megan Rapinoe’s net worth is $3m - her senior career started in 2006. Lionel Messi, the best men’s player, is worth $400m - his senior career started just three years earlier.
Whilst on the face of it these statistics show just how significant the difference is, the full picture is much more complicated. Footballers’ wages are compiled of a plethora of different income streams - such as basic salaries, signing-on fees and squad bonuses - and therefore the pay gap is difficult to calculate and evaluate as pay varies between players within the same team let alone those in different leagues.
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The real reasons
Amidst discussions of equal pay in all professions - and legislation which requires equal pay for the same work - an economist explained the reasons provided for women getting paid less:
they take career breaks and work fewer hours when they have children
they choose occupations that require less skill
they are less likely to value their work and to ask for a pay rise
unconscious bias towards paying men more
sometimes direct sexism.
In football, some men online would have you believe women are paid less because they aren’t as good at football.
In fact, it seems that women are paid less because the women’s game brings in less money. In business terms, women’s football is a loss leader. Often the most successful women’s teams are supported financially by their male counterparts.
Football clubs have three main income streams - aside from the income raised by selling players. These are:
Ticket sales
Broadcasting fees
Competition prize money
For each of these categories, the income for the women’s game is currently lower than that of the men’s.
Ticket sales
The average attendance for a Women’s Super League game in the 2018-19 season was 965. With adult ticket prices often sitting below £10 for these games, the teams bring in under £10,000 from sales per game.
The average attendance for a men’s Premier League game last season was 38,168, meaning the women’s attendance was just 2.5% of the men’s. Additionally, the ticket prices for women’s games are significantly cheaper.
For context: For the 2019-20 season, Manchester City Women are charging £6.50 for a standard adult ticket. Manchester City men’s team charge a minimum of £35 for an adult ticket and average attendance of 54,400.
Broadcasting Fees
A large proportion of money that goes into the sport is the result of broadcasting fees, where men’s football brings in a considerable amount more than women’s in the UK.
For the 2019-2022 seasons, the Premier League attracted a record £9.2m income from selling the rights to broadcast games, including an increased amount from overseas companies. Sky alone has paid over £3.5bn for the three years, averaging £9.3m per game.
As for the Women’s Super League, organisations like Sky and BT are not as interested as they are in the men’s games. Overseas broadcasters have bought the rights, however. WSL matches can be viewed in Australia, Mexico, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
The FA itself is broadcasting WSL games live this season on the ‘FA Player’ app, thus not making money from broadcasters such as Sky and BT for external broadcast. The only broadcaster showing the games within the UK is the BBC, which airs one match a week on BBC iPlayer.
In France, one TV broadcaster, Canal+, has paid €6 million (£5.4m) over five years to show matches in the country’s women’s league. Averaging £1 million per year, that’s around one ninth of the amount that Sky Sports pays to air a single Premier League game.
Despite a record 11.7m people in the UK tuning in to watch England Women in the World Cup semi-final in July 2019, that was still 14.8m fewer than the number who watched England’s men’s team lose to Croatia in the semi-final a year prior.
Until the number of people watching women’s football increases, it is not as financially beneficial for broadcasters to show the WSL or England Women matches. However, arguably, more women’s matches need to be broadcast in order to attract more viewers and a ‘chicken or egg’ scenario ensues.
Competition Prize Money
Whilst there is a huge difference in the prize money between the competitions, it is more complicated than to say the fund should be increased in the women’s competitions to create equity. It’s important to look at the revenue in relation to the prize money.
The total revenue of the men’s 2018 World Cup was over £4.5bn (£4,656,240,000)
The £315m spent on prize money consisted of less than 7% of the income.
The women’s 2019 tournament brought in around £100m (£101,600,000)
The teams received 23% of the revenue as prize money.
With FIFA left with a smaller portion of the revenue to reinvest in the game, proportionally it is hard to say that the amount given in prize money is too low.
The disparity is still quite shocking.
The prize money for the men’s World Cup 2018 Final was £30.2m.
For 2019 Women's World Cup, the winning team - the USA - took home £3.2m.
That is around 10% of the men’s total despite the fact FIFA doubled the pot from the women’s competition four years prior.
The total prize fund for the whole of the men’s competition was £315m
The lowest amount paid out to a team being £6.3m for teams losing in the group stages.
In the women’s tournament, the total was just £24m.
In the UK, the prize money for the men’s FA Cup totals £30.3m, with the winning team receiving £3.6m. In the women’s competition, the winners earn £25k - 6.9% of the men’s - and the total prize fund is only £305,213.
So, whilst in football women earn less than men, it’s not because they don’t play to the same quality or they don’t work as hard. It’s because, until more money is injected into the women’s game, it cannot produce enough revenue to justify the business case for paying the female players the same amount as their male counterparts.
However, until the womens’ game gets the same levels of investment and visibility as the mens’, ticket sales and broadcasting income will continue to be lower, thus the cycle continues. It will take forward-thinking broadcasters and sponsors to take drastic steps and provide the necessary investment to break the cycle. Until then, the disparity will continue, albeit with baby steps towards equality as football fans realise that the womens’ game is as skilled and as entertaining as the mens’.
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(Feature Image: FIFA)
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