FIFA is blamed for Women’s World Cup rights values after ‘outrageous’ broadcast blackout threat
Infantino said that broadcasters from those territories had offered only £800,000 — £8million ($1m-$10m) for the Women’s World Cup compared with the £80m-£160m ($100m-$200m) for the men’s.
But Moya Dodd, a former Australia international and ex-FIFA Council member, called Infantino’s comments “outrageous” and said FIFA was part of the problem.
“Now that FIFA has decided to sell the rights separately, it’s no surprise that the buyers don’t want to pay the same big numbers twice,” Dodd told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Effectively, the industry was trained to pay big money for the men’s World Cup and treat the women’s equivalent as worthless. At the same time, the women were told they didn’t deserve prize money or equal pay because they didn’t bring the revenues.
“It’s actually quite outrageous. For FIFA to now say that all women’s revenues will go straight into women’s football overlooks the fact that the value of the women’s rights have until now been used to inflate the value of men’s football.”
Speaking to the Unofficial Partner sports business podcast, she added: “I think it’s a bit rich to be scolding the broadcasters for underpaying because when you look at the history, FIFA itself never put any value on the women’s rights.”
Dodd said that instead of threatening broadcasters FIFA should review all of its bundled deals and attribute a fair proportion to the women’s game.
“If in fact the Women’s World Cup gets 50 to 60 per cent of the viewers of the men’s, as FIFA says, that should amount to a sum in the billions,” she said.
Infantino confirmed in March that the total prize money for the Women’s World Cup this summer would be five times the pot at the tournament’s last edition in 2019 — a move that global players’ union FIFPRO described as “significant progress … on the pathway to equal prize money”.
