Prepare the spandex: women’s football superman Gianni “I have four daughters” Infantino is here to save the day.
The president of Fifa has threatened a broadcasting blackout of the Women’s World Cup in the “big five” European countries of England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France, blaming bids for the broadcast rights for the tournament that he said were a “slap in the face” to the players and “all women worldwide”.
Speaking at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, Infantino repeated his call from October for broadcasters to up their bids, saying: “To be very clear, it is our moral and legal obligation not to undersell the Fifa Women’s World Cup. Broadcasters should put their action behind their words, because they rightfully criticise organisations for not paying women and men equally … otherwise we’ll simply not sell these rights at these undervalued prices to them.”
What a man. And surely now a shoo-in for the rather bizarre Male Football Ally of the Year award at next year’s Women’s Football Awards, with this year’s inaugural shortlists sadly already announced.
Why the sarcasm and frustration at Infantino and Fifa for what seems like a perfectly sensible thing to say? Because there is a heavy dose of irony in the architects of the chronic underfunding of women’s football, and a real lack of ideological as well as financial investment in it, speaking up against the undervaluing of the women’s game.
It is almost four years since chants of “equal pay” rang round Lyon’s Groupama Stadium after the US lifted a fourth Women’s World Cup title. Far from the start of a campaign, that was the crescendo of it. Finally, in March of this year, Infantino announced that Fifa would make the prize fund for the women’s competition match the men’s by 2027, with the 2027 Women’s World Cup prize pot equalling that of the 2026 men’s edition.
When it comes to undervaluing women’s football, Fifa has paved the way, underserving 50% of the world’s population despite being a not-for-profit body empowered to govern world football.
In terms of broadcast rights, the longtime bundling together of the rights, and commercial rights, for the men’s and women’s World Cups, up to and including the 2019 World Cup, has meant that Fifa has engineered a culture which has attributed no value to women’s football. Previously, broadcasters and sponsors got a two-for-one deal, with the women’s tournaments thrown into the mix as a bonus. All the value in those deals was attributed to the men’s tournaments. Never mind that 1.12 billion viewers watched the women’s World Cup in 2019, about 31% of the 3.572 billion who watched the men’s in 2018 – the prize fund for the women’s tournament was 7.5% of the men’s.
Fifa and Infantino are panicking, because if broadcasters and commercial partners don’t flood money in they will have to dip into their hefty coffers to meet the commitment to equal prize money. That was not a commitment made out of the goodness of their hearts, for equality and fairness and the good of the game; it was a result of protest and pressure and has been timed so that the new money coming into the game comes into their orbit.
If Fifa and Infantino really care about women’s football, and investment in the World Cup and the integrity of their flagship tournament, they should do more to address the calendar issues that have resulted in a club v country row over the release of players for the tournament amid concerns for their health, and invest heavily in research around the crisis in anterior cruciate ligament injuries that has robbed the tournament of some of the world’s best players.
