A generation of women’s footballers putting a golden boot into the glass ceiling

You only have to have a football-playing daughter to know that the female game is just as dynamic and competitive as the male version. If you had to pay to see a girls’ or a boys’ game, they could charge the same. No difference in audience size, no difference in passion, no difference in entertainment value. Believe me, I’ve been there day and night, rain and sunshine.

So lifelong supporters of female football are unsurprised by the success of the Women’s World Cup. They won’t be taken in by the romantic fancy of women’s sport being ‘easier-going’ or ‘less serious’ than men’s. Anyone who says the World Cup has no swearing, snarling or cynicism can’t have been watching closely.

Even our beloved Matildas have not been averse to the tactical injury allowing players to regroup for a quick sideline chat, such as the crucial moment when Steph Catley went down against Denmark. To praise professional women’s footballers for not exploiting gaps in the rules is not only blinkered but in some fundamental way disrespectful. There’s no lack of competitive fire in the under-14s, and there’s no lack in this World Cup.

The split in perception comes with the onset of adulthood, and the inequality of respect flows, inevitably, from money. The male professional version attracts more commercial activity than the women’s, and therefore the top male players earn considerably more.

By salary, Cristiano Ronaldo is paid (you can’t possibly say ‘earns’) a reported $337 million a year from his Saudi club Al Nassr, according to Forbes magazine, while Kylian Mbappe was paid $199 million and Lionel Messi $111 million last year by their Qatari masters at Paris Saint-Germain.

But … Ronaldo being more than 300 times better – more attractive, more watched, more commercially appealing – than Sam Kerr, whose reported $770,000 Chelsea salary made her one of the highest-paid women? In Australia, Aaron Mooy, whose contract with Celtic was some $2.3 million a year before retiring in June, valued at three Sam Kerrs? Did Mooy really bring in three times the eyeballs, three times the income, three times the spectators? Or is some factor other than simple economics at work?

The Matildas will earn (definitely using that word) $125,000 apiece for progressing to the next World Cup round. For most, who earn between $250,000 and $350,000 a year for their clubs, this will be a nice uplift. But compared to the ocean of money in which the men’s game is drowning, this is but a drop. Football Australia has an equal pay agreement with the Matildas, but at this World Cup they are not getting equal pay, just an equal percentage of a prizemoney pool that is one-third the size.

Actual pay equality is only possible in the regulated areas of the game, such as national representation. The US recently inked an equal pay deal between its men (who sometimes make the second round of the World Cup) and its women (who’ve won four). Many of the teams entertaining us in Australia over the past month have done so for little or no pay or conditions.

In the wild west of club football, equality is a dream that none of the men controlling pay packets is even contemplating.

It’s a myth that this is just the free market in operation. The unreal world of club salaries and transfer fees reflects bizarre market distortions. The influx of Saudi government money that funds men’s club salaries is a deliberate strategy from a country – not a free-enterprise corporation - desperate for a glossy shop window. Their football money reflects their values.

The kingdom is one of the last regimes that can superimpose sexism over the top of market forces because, well, it can. If the Saudis aren’t falling over themselves to secure Megan Rapinoe or Sam Kerr or a women’s LIV Golf league, that’s not them capturing a global market, it’s them ignoring it. Before the Saudis, it was the laundering of Russian oligarchs’ money through football, as ‘free market’ in its spirit as any criminal enterprise. It also reflected the values of male owners with no interest in gender parity.

Club salaries for male footballers are literally disgusting for many viewers, whose stomachs are turned by the sums involved. Whether those viewers switch off makes no difference to the paymasters, whose real economic interests lie elsewhere. Market forces creating the male-female pay gap? Not really.

There is always someone willing to distort a marketplace and lose a lot of money in order to gain some strategic foothold. For the English Premier League, it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky.

In Australia, it’s been a succession of broadcasters outbidding each other to win sports rights, to win an ‘event’. They have gone for male sports, but the extent of their gamble has bloated the gender pay inequality. Broadcast money doesn’t have to be as lopsided as it is between male and female sports, but it’s not called silly money for nothing. It reflects a desperate winner-take-all approach to securing rights, not a calmly calculated balance of
supply and demand.

But when it comes to another measurement of ‘commercial’ value, in off-field endorsements, a more evolved and more equal picture emerges.

Off the field, emerging male superstars don’t earn a lot more than female players who have risen to prominence in a similar time-frame. The women footballers with the biggest off-field incomes, such as Americans Alex Morgan ($US6.3 million) and Megan Rapinoe ($US6.3 million) and Spaniard Alexia Putellas ($US3.2 million), earn close to parity with their male coevals (the legacy billboards like Ronaldo and Messi date from before the surge of the women’s game). Kerr earns a reported $2 million from her sponsors, which places her close to par with males of a similar age, and more than any of the current Socceroos.

Sponsorships and endorsements, coming from a broad sample of companies, resemble a free market much more than Saudi or Russian propaganda exercises or media companies who have lost their heads.

If you really want to anticipate market forces, on Saturday night try to scalp a ticket to Suncorp Stadium, find a party or a pub showing Australia versus France, check the television ratings, add up the merch sold and the tide of passion that is going to flow on and on.

That sound is not just a roar of a packed stadium, it’s the rumble of the earth moving. From today’s excitement comes tomorrow’s commercial power. It’s the men’s game, not the women’s, that is undergoing a market aberration. The next Sam Kerr being valued at one-three hundredth of the next Ronaldo? Don’t think so.

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