Everyone’s Making Money On The Women’s World Cup—Except The Women

One of the world's biggest sporting events is about to return in a big way, the Women's World Cup, kicking off on July twenty.

And one of the co hosts, Australia. Ticket sales have been so hogh.

The biggest stadiums are being pressed into action.

The tournament is already being billed as the grandest ever.

There are count down for the Women's World Cup, and so is of course, the US women's national team, considered to be the team to beat.

As you heard their excitement is building across the globe for the twenty twenty three Women's World Cup. On the fabulous finish from Trinity Roping, there are two goals all the time. There are more teams playing this year than ever before, Viewership both live and on TV are expected to break records, and the level of play has never been higher. Fucking from Cook when.

It go all away.

The broadcast. This year's US team includes four time World Cup players Alex Morgan, Kelly O'Hara, and Meghan Rappino, and she recently announced this World Cup would be her last. When the Women's World Cup takes off next month, the US Women's national team we'll be shooting for an unprecedented three peat.

The US women aren't going for that historic three peat win. No men's team or women's team has ever accomplished that.

Would I be happy with anything short of thirst Fred win. No, absolutely not so. No shortage of things that are the most and the highest. But you know what's not the most and definitely not the highest the money these world class athletes take home. We all know about the persistent pay gap between men and women. In the US. Women still typically earn about eighty two cents for every dollar earned by men, and that divide is notoriously wider in

The best performing women's team in the World Cup this year will take home six point two million, split among the players. The sixteen worst performing teams and the men's World Cup all get nine million each.

I'm Weskasova today on the big take. Everyone's making money off the Women's World Cup except the women. Jenna, So good to see you.

Thanks for having me, happy to be here.

Okay, you're excited about the World.

Cup, so excited, can't wait.

Well, I'm really looking forward to it too, but I have to say your story through a very big splash of cold water on my enthusiasm.

I'm sure.

Yeah, there's a lot of factors on the other side ahead of the game that people have been watching very closely, and that will be really interesting to see how everything pans out.

Well, Jenny, you right that the twenty twenty three Women's World Cup is the most anticipated female sporting event ever, Like, why do you say that? What do you base that on?

By nearly all metrics, interest in the Women's World Cup has pretty much skyrocketed, whether we're looking at viewership from previous tournaments, whether we're looking at tickets sold versus attendance. There's now more sponsors than ever.

Here's Meghan Rappino herself speaking about the anticipation around this year's World Cup.

If you're not tuning in, sort of missing out on a massive cultural moment, you're going to see the best product on the field, and that's because players are going to be able to be put in a position to actually do that and just focus on the game and go out there and provide the entertainment of everybody wants.

I mean, I think it's pretty accurate to say that the Women's World Cup is at the top of its game right now.

And what do they expect the viewership to be? Like, give us a basis of comparison of just how big it's going to be.

In the previous World Cup in France in twenty nineteen, there were over one point one billion viewers across the whole tournament and they're expected to exceed that by quite a bit. And that's driven by a couple of factors.

And so that's like TV viewership right, yes, correct? And then what about people who attained in person? What is that like?

Oh?

Yeah, they're also hoping to break records from ticket sales too. They've currently sold over one million tickets and the goal is to sell over one point five And here's another measure of just how popular women's soccer has become. For the first time this year, there's thirty two teams competing all around the world, and that's the same number of teams that had competed in the men's tournament last year. Previously, there was anywhere between an eight to sixteen number of

And yet, Jenna, you found looking at all these numbers that despite all the money and excitement behind Women's World Cup soccer football, depending on where you live, there's still this persistent wage gap between female players and male players.

So this is an issue that FIFA, the governing body of international football, has really made a cornerstone of prioritizing in this tournament and future tournaments. The Cup prize for the women this year has swelled to over one hundred and ten million. It was thirty million in the last one, so we're talking big games here, but that still really pales in comparison to what all the men are earning.

So some numbers for you.

The World Cup prize in Qatar last year was over four hundred and forty million, and that.

Was for the men's World Cup, and that was for.

The men's tournament, correct, And so.

What does that translate per player, per winning team.

The top winning players are going to be guaranteed to take home around two hundred and seventy thousand, which in terms of women's soccer is a very meaningful salary. A number of players make that amount of money over the course of a year.

This is just for one month of play.

So Megan Rappino, who is a player for the US women's national team, she makes around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars over the course of one year for her base salary. And another important provision that FIFA has also added is that every player is guaranteed to take home at least thirty thousand dollars, so regardless, they will be compensated for this tournament. And that wasn't the case when the tournament first started in the nineteen nineties. There was no cup prize for anybody.

How does the payout to the top performing women's team compare to say, like the payout for the worst performing men's.

Team, the gap is still massive.

The best performing women's team in the World Cup this year will take home six point two million split among the players. The sixteen worst performing teams and the men's World Cup all get nine million each.

And just to put that another way, the winning team in this year's women's tournament is set to receive ten point five million dollars total, and as we mentioned, six point two million of that is earmarked for distribution to its players. In comparison, the winner in last year's men's World Cup, which was Argentina, netted forty two million dollars total. But if you look at the salaries you talked about, Megan Rappino, who's a big star, makes about two hundred

It really depends on the country.

In the US, it's somewhere between like seventy to one hundred thousand. There's guaranteed minimum salary levels. In the US, that guaranteed level is around thirty five thousand dollars. Again, and that's for one year's worth of play thirty.

Five thousand dollars, And you say FIFA has really made this a priority. I guess my first question is why why are they concentrating on this so much?

When you look at most men and women's sports in the US. On the women's side, they generally say it's not fair to compare the men and the women. The WNBA says this a lot. The National Women's Soccer League also says this a lot. They say the men's league is older, don't compare them between the two. It's not a fair comparison. We're doing our own thing and we're working on it. When it comes to FIFA, that messaging

Is it realistic to think that they can shrink that enormous gap in just a couple of seasons.

There's a long way to go, for sure. This tournament on the women's side has shown tremendous interest and tremendous investment from other areas, whether it be corporate sponsors or different partners. Like I said before, there's more sponsors than ever now with the Women's World Cup and shoring up better deals like that is what's going to be the thing that's going to narrow that gap.

So let's talk about the sponsorship numbers. How does World Cup Soccer make its money?

So the World Cup really makes its money by selling media rights. So you go to a broadcasting company, whether it's the BBC or Fox or Telemundo, and you say, I will give you the exclusive rights to air this in a certain country, but you have to pay me x amount millions of dollars And.

What does that amount to worldwide for the Women's World Cup.

It's a difficult question because historically the men and women's media rights have been bundled together. So FIFA has sold them to a broadcasting company and you just get access to both.

That is a huge revenue driver for FIFA.

It's projected to account for over a third of their revenue in the next four year cycle and from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty two, FIFA brought in over three point four billion dollars worth of revenue, all due to media rights. But this year was the first year that FIFA decided to sell the rights separately. Because the interest of the women's game has boomed in the last several years, FIFA made a commitment to say, hey, we want to

Hundred million, and then what about the men's rights.

So it's hard to parse exactly the numbers for what the men's broadcasting rights are worth, but we know that offers for the women's rights we're coming in at about five to six percent of what the men's rights are actually worth.

After the break, FIFA wants TV networks to pay up. FIFA, it takes in all this money for the broadcast rights, but then how does that money reach the teams and then reach the players.

Yeah, so there's no direct tie in the contracts between the women players and FIFA that mandates that x percentage of the revenue money directly goes to players. But FIFA has said in order to reach this equal parody and cut prize, better media rights need to happen for the women. The president, Infantino has promised that as they get these bigger media rights, they will be able to pay players more.

If we know there's so much interest in this game in high viewership, which means the broadcasters are going to be able to sell lots of advertising and probably sell it at pretty good prices, what's the hold up with them paying more for something that is demonstrably so profitable and so popular.

It's difficult to pin down an answer. The president of FIVA has just been saying, these broadcasting companies are trying to lowball the women because previously they haven't had to put a dollar figure because again, this men and women's tournament was bundled together. Previously, they were bundled because at a certain point, interest hadn't boomed for the women's tournament, and so it was just sort of easier to sell

So you would think that given the popularity of this sport, FIFA would just say, no, you got to pay us more for the rights, because the networks are going to want to broadcast these games, aren't they.

And that's exactly what's been happening. So FIFA kept rejecting low offer bids for months and months on end, but as we got closer to the tournament, roughly a month out, they still hadn't reached a deal with major European countries, whether it be the UK, Spain, Italy, and so finally FIFA had accepted a bid from BBC, which again we think it's around nine to ten million, which consequently is around five to six percent, as we said before, of what the men's rights are worth.

So we've talked about the discrepancies in pay in media rights, but you also write that the conditions that the players actually play under our different between women and men too.

Yeah, there's a number of struggles that these women have had to overcome to compete in the World Cup. That just haven't been present for any of the men's tournaments leading up. There was a survey done and about ninety three percent think there should be improvement and pay in

Jenner, What have the players themselves said about these gaps in pay and conditions in broadcast rights all of it.

I spoke with a Haiti player, and she was just so thrilled to even be participating in the tournament. She said, I'm so happy to be making history. We're not finished yet, there's more work to be done, and I'm happy.

To be a part of that.

On the US side, there's a little bit of a different perspective. The US has won the World Cup four times now, and I think many of them leading up to it were very angry. They've showed that they can do it. They've showed that they can be champions. By most metrics, you could argue that they're more talented in terms of winning than the men's counterpart in the US.

I mean, you can just look at the numbers.

The women's US World Cup team has won four championships in the last twenty five years. The men's team has actually never won a way World Cup ever.

And these complaints have started to bubble up and become public in a way that they hadn't before.

Absolutely, there were several lawsuits filed by the US women's national team over discrimination of pay, and this all bubbled up and reached a lot of national attention.

The six year battle for equal pay for members of the US women's national soccer team has finally come to an end with a landmark settlement. It's yet another achievement for one of the winningest teams in sports history.

And it ended up last year that in their new collective bargaining agreement that the US Soccer Federation actually etched into their agreement that there would be equal pay. Now, all the men's and women's World Cup prize money in the US is pooled together and then split equally.

So how does that work in real life?

So they take the winnings from the men's team in a given year, and they take all the winnings from a women's team in the given year, and they pull all that money up and then split it directly in half. Half go to the men, half go to the women, and then those teams, amongst themselves, decide to how to split it up among their players.

And that's winnings. That's different from salaries that individual players aren't. Correct in a different world, it would be the men's team that really benefited from this, because the women's team is often the champion. But even though the men's team hasn't won, they still are handing over more money to the team that has won.

Yeah, upon first glance, it sounds like, oh, now the men are just going to be mooching off the champions who are the women, But again, that's unfortunately not the case. Again, the worst performing sixteen teams in the men's World Cup will automatically take home nine million. So actually, this equal pay that's been etched into their previous contract is actually a big payday for the women and is a very meaningful.

Change when we come back. How long will it take to close this pay gap? Is there any talk of the next step they've decided to divide the winnings and make them equal. Is there any movement on the salaries for the players?

Salaries has been a big area of negotiation for both the US women's national team and the men's national team. However, unfortunately the US is already making such strides with this splitting of the cup prize money, and no other country has really done this on a permanent basis.

Canada has an interim.

Deal to do this, but because they're already sort of paving the road, there hasn't been much leverage to push the needle even more forward.

So Jenna, there's this big goal by FIFA to make things right pretty soon. Will we see this gap meaningfully closed in the near future.

It's going to depend a lot on the future of these media rights and broadcasting deals. Right now, it's not looking so bright considering the offers are coming in again around five to six percent of what the men are making. But FIVA has also said they remain very committed to this issue, and again that's a departure from what we've seen from previous heads of other major sporting associations in the US.

As you continue to report on this story and there's a lot happening, what are you watching for? What's the most important thing to keep an eye on leading.

Up to the tournament.

Will be really interested in seeing how ticket sales pan out.

FIFA has made it a goal.

To try to sell over one point five million tickets, which would be a record for any previous women's tournament, and they're at around a little over one point one million right now, so we'll be really interesting to see if they can actually reach their goal. Another metric that we're watching closely is viewership numbers. Viewership numbers is a really strong indicator of what media writes should look like when people are actually have eyes on the game on TV. Screens,

Jenna, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson