The female players get about 20 percent of the revenue the women’s World Cup generates. Men’s players get 7 percent of the revenue their World Cup generates. The reason the men make more is that they generate well over four times as much. If anything, the women are overpaid.
To be clear, the women's soccer players have specifically complained about the "gender pay gap" in the FIFA prize money. They want equal pay to the men, even though the men's World Cup earns 50 or 60 times the amount in revenue. We're talking 6 billion vs 100 some million.
With the US teams the pay gap has actually closed in recent years:
According to figures provided by U.S. Soccer, since 2008 it has paid 12 players at least $1 million. Six of those players were men, and six were women. And the women hold their own near the top of the pay scale; the best-paid woman made about $1.2 million from 2008 to 2015, while the top man made $1.4 million in the same period. Some women in the top 10 even made more than their male counterparts over those years.
"The really significant pay gap, and the one that gets most of the press, is in the World Cup payouts. FIFA, the international soccer organization, will give about $400 million to male players in the World Cup, while female players will make around $30 million. When you hear that male players make 10 times what female players make, this is the figure that justifies the claim.
They want it internationally, where the pay is definitely not close to equal. But that inequality, as
Forbes explains, is entirely due to the astronomical disparity in revenue.
As Dwight Jaynes pointed out four years ago after the U.S. women beat Japan to capture the World Cup in Vancouver, there is a big difference in the revenue available to pay the teams.
The Women's World Cup brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men's World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players. The men still pull the World Cup money wagon. The men's World Cup in Russia generated over $6 billion in revenue, with the participating teams sharing $400 million, less than 7% of revenue. Meanwhile, the Women's World Cup is expected to earn $131 million for the full four-year cycle 2019-22 and dole out $30 million to the participating teams.
So that is $6 billion v. $131 million. The women aren't even in the same universe, in terms of revenue. If the women were paid the same total as the men — $400 million — they would be making nearly four times more than they generate. The men make 7% of their revenue. The women apparently want 400% of theirs. That's absurd, obviously, to say the least.
Megan Rapinoe, humble as always, will settle for just a meager
quadrupling of their prize money. But $30 million quadrupled is $120 million. That would be close to 100 percent of their revenue. Again: The men only make 7%. Already, the women are earning around 20%. Indeed, if we want to be "fair" and "equal," we must conclude that the women are overpaid. Or else the men are underpaid. Either way, on an international scale, if there is a gender pay gap, women are the beneficiaries of it. "
