Report highlights how much work needs to be done

This has been acclaimed as a seminal year for women’s team sports – the year that made everything different. In women’s football, 2017 brought record numbers watching the European Championship, with a peak of four million in the UK for England’s semi-final, and a record attendance for the FA Cup final too.

Booming interest has heralded substantive progress off the field. In October, the Norwegian Football Association agreed to equalise pay for male and female footballers, a measure previously only adopted by Iceland. It has been followed by significantly improved deals for women’s footballers in Denmark, Holland and Sweden, while New Zealand is also close to agreeing an equal-pay deal. After the success of the European Championship, Uefa believes women’s international football will be approaching self-sufficiency by 2020.

Against this backdrop, the new Fifpro report highlighting the scale of inequity in football pay between genders is a salutary reminder of how far the women’s game has to come. Worldwide, half of all women footballers in top divisions get no payment at all. In the Women’s Super League in England, 88 per cent of players earn less than £18,000 a year. That is 0.7 per cent of the average salary for male players in the Premier League, which is now £2.6million.

For women’s football, the lack of adequate support has consequences way beyond the players themselves. Most fundamentally, the lack of investment hinders the women’s game from developing greater quality and depth, and encourages players to retire prematurely.

While it is easy to berate the so-called ‘small seven’ clubs in the Super League for their lack of support for women’s football, some teams are altogether worse. In 2016/17, Manchester United recorded revenue of £581million. Spending £500,000 of this – less than 0.1 per cent – would be enough to develop a competitive women’s side. Yet United, like Real Madrid, still do not have an adult women’s team at all.

Female players are not only denied the chance to play for such superclubs. They are also still routinely prevented from playing in international tournaments: worldwide, half of all nations in Fifa did not even bother entering their women’s national teams into the current qualification cycle for the 2019 World Cup.

It amounts to disinterest in female football, at best; at worst, active suppression of the game to evoke the Football Association’s 50-year ban on English clubs allowing women to use their pitches, which lasted until 1971. For all that has changed in women’s football since then, too much still remains the same.

Players are denied the chance to play for superclubs and in international tournaments