‘We must sell women’s game better to boost prizemoney’

Fifa boss Gianni Infantino says football’ s global governing body will change the way it sells the rights for the Women’ s World Cup in order to raise the prize money available to the game’s female stars.

The total prize fund at the men’ s World Cup in Russia last summer was more than £300million, with almost as much made available in terms of assistance for their preparations and travel and compensation payments to their players’ clubs.

When the 2019 Women’s World Cup kicks off in Paris on Friday, the 24 teams will be playing for a total prize pot of under £24 million, with a further £16 million in preparation payments and club benefits.

This will be the first Women’s World Cup where clubs are compensated for releasing their players and prize money has been doubled from four years ago. Taken all together, Fifa is putting up £39million this month, more than three times the amount that was available in Canada in 2015. But that has not stopped calls for much great equality in terms of prize money..

Speaking to reporters after he was re-elected for another four years as Fifa president, Infantino explained that the huge difference is based on “how the Women’s World Cup rights were commercialised”.

He said: “We sell you the rights to the men’s tournament and then say you can have the women’s tournament, youth events, beach football and so on, on top. That means we didn’ t exploit their full potential.

“If you think about the men’ s World Cup getting three and a half billion viewers and that was worth Us $6 billion. Well, that means the women’s tournament, with one billion viewers, should get Us$1.5billion, right?

But it doesn’ t. It gets much, much less… so we’ll need to look at that.”