Women’s World Cup prize money increases 300 per cent to $150M

The Women’s World Cup is getting a 300 per cent improve in prize cash for this yr’s event.

The $150 million fund for the primary 32-team event is a large enhance from the 24-team version in 2019, and 10 occasions what it was in 2015.

Some of that prize cash have to be devoted to paying gamers, FIFA president Gianni Infantino stated Thursday after being re-elected by acclimation by way of 2027.

Infantino additionally once more expressed his anger with broadcasters for providing too little for TV rights. He stated FIFA is not going to promote broadcast rights for the event in Australia and New Zealand on the costs at the moment being supplied.

“Women deserve much, much more than that and we are there to fight for them and with them,” he stated.

Female gamers worldwide have been combating 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 cash for women and men at their subsequent World Cups, in 2026 and 2027, respectively — a tricky job when the 32 males’s groups shared $440 million ultimately yr’s World Cup in Qatar.

The FIFA president angrily focused broadcasters, a few of them public service channels funded by taxpayers, who he stated supplied as much as 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 soccer drawing audiences maybe 20-50 per cent lower than for males’s video games.

“Well, offer us 20 per cent less, 50 per cent less. But not 100 per cent less,” Infantino stated in closing remarks to the FIFA Congress. “That’s why we can’t do it.”