The trophy of the Women’s FIFA World Cup seen in the course of the 73rd FIFA Congress on the BK Arena in Kigali, Rwanda
| Photo Credit: Reuters
The Women’s World Cup is getting 300% enhance in prize money for this yr’s event.
The $150 million fund for the primary 32-team event is a large increase from the 24-team edition in 2019, and 10 occasions what it was in 2015.
Some of that prize money should be devoted to paying gamers, FIFA president Gianni Infantino mentioned Thursday after being re-elected by acclimation by 2027.
Infantino additionally once more expressed his anger with broadcasters for providing too little for TV rights. He mentioned FIFA is not going to promote broadcast rights for the event in Australia and New Zealand on the costs at the moment being provided.
“Women deserve much, much more than that and we are there to fight for them and with them,” he mentioned.
Female gamers worldwide have been preventing for equal pay and equal respect with males’s nationwide groups, together with the defending champion United States, Canada, France and Spain.
Infantino set a goal of equal prize money for women and men at their subsequent World Cups, in 2026 and 2027, respectively — a tricky process when the 32 males’s groups shared $440 million finally yr’s World Cup in Qatar.
The FIFA president angrily focused broadcasters, a few of them public service channels funded by taxpayers, who he mentioned provided up to 100 occasions much less for rights to the ladies’s event.
Infantino first raised the problem in October in New Zealand, and insisted FIFA nonetheless wouldn’t promote at these costs with ladies’s football drawing audiences maybe 20-50% lower than for males’s video games.
“Well, offer us 20% less, 50% less. But not 100% less,” Infantino said in closing remarks to the FIFA Congress. “That’s why we can’t do it.”