The difference in pay grade for players in the Women’s Super League 1 and the Premier League.
Within this article, it will discuss the difference in the wages between the top 2 male and female football leagues within the UK. I feel this is an issue as I believe that both men and women are doing the same thing which is playing football and the difference in paygrade wouldn’t be different for different genders in other jobs so why is football different.
Following England Women’s third place triumph within the World Cup which was in Canada back in 2015, Women’s football has been on the rise within then in the UK with the WSL being the top league. Tv Coverage is on the up, as is transfer fees, merchandise sold and also social media. However, one thing that isn’t on the rise is the wages. In an article written by Daniel Draper (2017), he stated ‘that as of last season 2016/2017 the top player in the Premier League was Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney who was earning just slightly over 13 million pounds a year. Whilst Rooney was earning that, the Manchester City and England women’s captain Steph Houghton was earning just over £70,000 a year.’ This statistic means that Rooney earned 186 times more than Steph Houghton. Another example to back this up is that (Kelner, 2017:1) says that “Neymar will earn £32.9 million from PSG for the 2017/2018 season and […] his salary is almost exactly the same as 1,693 female players in France, Germany, England, USA, Sweden and Australia.”
Whilst the difference in wages and money is an issue, TV coverage could also play their part in this. Back in March, the BBC announced that they had won to be able to broadcast for the 2019 Women’s World Cup. According to (Martinson, 2017:1) “the UK audience for the Women’s World Cup more than doubled from 5.1 million in 2011 to 12.4 million in 2015.” Despite this, further on in the same article Martinson, (2017) carried on to say that ‘those numbers were small when compared to the Men’s World Cup which attracted 41.7 million viewers’.
There is only one team within the UK that both sets of players are paid equally and this is Lewes FC. Back in 2017 they announced that they would become the first professional or even semi-professional football club to pay the same wages to both teams. In a newspaper article (Christenson, 2017:1) states that “For female players to have the same reward as their male counterparts for doing the same job is a fantastic leap forward for women’s football. This is sends a powerful signal […] to the whole UK football community.”
Overall, I think that professional Female and Male footballers should be paid the same wage as they’re doing everything the same, except getting paid. I do believe the lack of money within the female game can be off-putting to potential players wanting to turn professional as some wages is not enough to live comfortably off.
Reference List:
Draper , D. (2017) Women’s Football Salaries – The Ultimate Gender Pay Gap. [Online] Available from: https://www.farleys.com/womens-football-salaries-ultimate-gender-pay-gap/ [accessed 14 May 2018].
Christenson, M. (2017) Lewes FC become first professional club to pay women and men equally. The Guardian. 12 July 2017: 1.
Martinson, J. (2017) BBC Sport’s Barbara Slater: ‘There’s a transformation in women’s coverage’. The Guardian. 05 March 2017bbc
Kelner , M. (2017) Football’s gender pay gap worse than in politics, medicine and space. The Guardian. 26 November 2017: 1.