Is the gender pay gap narrowing in the football world? Not five years ago, Stoke City’s women footballers would find that their pre-season training sometimes involved removing rubbish from the football pitch at a former working men’s club in central England. Today, litter picking is in the past for the team — they are receiving respectable salaries, instructions from a full-time coach and the opportunity to train at the same GBP multi-mn facilities that the men’s team enjoys.

The shift for Stoke City is a reflection of a wider shift in women’s football, which has been booming on a global scale: This year’s Women’s World Cup attracted record-breaking crowds and television audiences, according to the BBC. The championship also attracted a total of 30 sponsors — the biggest number for the event in history — with headline sponsors including Unilever, Budweiser, and McDonald’s.

Despite the popularity boom, the revenues just aren’t the same: Despite the big-brand names in the headlines, revenue made from these same commercial agreements is estimated at just 18% of last year’s men’s competition, according to Time. This summer’s competition reeled in USD 300 mn in revenues, which pales in comparison to the men’s World Cup in Qatar last winter, which saw USD 1.7 bn in revenues. Even on a team-by-team basis, massive gaps persist: Real Madrid’s women’s teams generated EUR 1.4 mn in revenues in the 2021-22 season, compared to EUR 713.8 mn from the men’s team in the same season, Reuters reported, citing Deloitte data.

The women’s game has struggled to compete when it comes to broadcast rights: Although audiences for women’s sporting events have been showing significant growth, with football alone accounting for nearly three quarters of viewing hours for women’s sports, “there is still much to be done around growing women’s sport,” Women’s Sport Trust CEO Tammy Parlour said. In England’s Women’s Super League, broadcast rights for the next three years were sold for just GBP 25 mn — a tiny fraction of the price paid for Premier League broadcast rights, according to the Washington Post. In the Women’s World Cup, broadcasters from Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy had offered USD 1-10 mn for broadcasting rights to the championship — again, a fraction of the USD 100-200 mn range offered for the men’s tournament, FIFA President Gianni Infantino had previously said. Infantino stressed that broadcasters have a “duty to promote and invest in women’s sport.”

We’ve seen more and more women’s teams rising up against the inequality: From Nigeria to Canada, South Africa to the UK, stand-offs between teams and their football associations have been rife, with fights ranging from bonuses to basic equal pay. In an analysis of 22 women’s teams in Europe, the highest monthly salary is as little as EUR 18k, while the lowest is EUR 40, according to a European Club Association report (pdf). “Salary is one of the biggest costs [for clubs], even though salaries in women’s football cannot be compared to those in men’s football,” the report says. FIFA has maintained that equal salary payments is the responsibility of the football associations themselves, with the governing body only taking responsibility for the disbursement of prize money to the associations, which are then expected to distribute the funds among players. Several African women’s teams boycotted events and spoke out against unfair wages and outstanding payments ahead of this year’s Women’s World Cup, according to DW.

But it’s not just the associations. Branding and marketing are also part of the problem: Brands generally aren’t as willing to put their money behind women as they are with men, although women can bring a different — and sometimes higher — value. According to Nielsen Holdings, while women footballers tend to have fewer followers than their male counterparts, their engagement is almost always greater, meaning they can influence a wider audience. A clear example of this phenomenon is Aston Villa’s Alisha Lehmann, who has a following of 13.9 mn on Instagram, exceeding any others from her country — including tennis prodigy Roger Federer. Her 6.99% engagement translates into a media value over USD 300k per post, compared to Spaniard Sergio Ramos with 53 mn followers but only a 1.8% engagement rate, making his reach close to Lehmann’s.

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