“Revenue Disparity Explains Pay Disparity Between Soccer World Cup’s Men And Women” (Forbes):
The men still pull the World Cup money wagon. The men’s World Cup in Russia generated over $6 billion in revenue, with the participating teams sharing $400 million, less than 7% of revenue. Meanwhile, the Women’s World Cup is expected to earn $131 million for the full four-year cycle 2019-22 and dole out $30 million to the participating teams.
The male/female/Iranian pay disparity isn’t as interesting to me as what happened to $5.6 billion ($6 billion minus the $400 million paid out to men’s teams). Someone other than the teams (management, owners, and players?) ended up with more than 93 percent of the revenue? Can this be true? Why wouldn’t the teams start their own league and bypass the folks who are skimming off 93%?
Maybe Forbes is being sloppy? And it is players who are getting 6.7 percent of the money while team owners and managers get most of the remainder?
Related:
The soccer players are getting screwed, they need to hire some top flight US lawyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Collective_Bargaining_Agreement
“In 2005, players received 57% of the income, and as of the new CBA, they are receiving about 49–50% of revenue.”
Fun fact: US women’s national soccer team was beaten by Dallas under-15 boy’s team. Maybe they should be paid the same as those boys?
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
Club teams are in the multiple leagues and effectively share revenue. World Cup (and Olympics) is a strange tournament where “national” teams compete. National teams are not permanent teams like club teams since events where they compete don’t happen that often.
Players from national teams play in club teams or do other stuff and only show up for a short training sessions before the competition. This is why national teams suck and play worse than any top-tier club team. I.e. Messi needs Barcelona behind him to give him a pass to actually score. When he plays for Argentina, it’s just mediocre game from the mediocre team.
Also club players don’t play full strength in the international games to avoid injury since they don’t earn in these games that much 🙂
Only 1/3 of players in the Premier Leagues (top English tier) is actually English. This is why England can’t put out decent team to any international competition.
Anyway, World Cup and Olympics are mostly prestige things, countries don’t have an option not to send teams and players don’t have an option not to play, thus there is no need to share revenue that much.
But what happens to 93 percent of the money?
Mostly to FIFA
93% of the money go to: 1. The host country, since football infrastructure is never profitable. 2. To national federations (NFAs), to improve the youth sports, hire managers, build football schools etc. 3. To umbrella orgs, like FIFA, UEFA, AfCON etc.
The CEOs of both UEFA and FIFA both were recently under criminal investigations for corruption, and they are girl scouts in comparison to CEOs of NFAs in countries like e.g. Argentina and Russia, that both at some point couldn’t afford to hire a coach, cause all the money went elsewhere.
Imagine an organization comparable with UN apparatus in its size, lack of particular jurisdiction, and one country-one vote democracy, irrespective of even existence of professional football league. It’s modus vivendi is essentially: to let the best players on Earth play football and to collect TV money. Do you really wonder, where the money go?
Every single time NT players bring this up, they’re painted un-patriots, and mostly give up, since they are either already rich anyway, or don’t have any leverage.
You can look at their “financial report” here: https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload/xzshsoe2ayttyquuxhq0.pdf – but it’s about as meaningful, as reading Trump/Sanders twitter.