The head of group planning at Manchester United, Francesca Whitfield, has called for a European-wide hard salary cap in women’s football to improve competitiveness.
There are no financial regulations in the Women’s Super League apart from a soft salary cap.
Speaking at the first Women’s Football Summit held by the European Club Association, Whitfield said: “We should be looking to adopt financial regulation much earlier in the women’s game than we did in the men’s game to stop that gap widening.
“Currently in the WSL we have a salary cap system which is 40% of revenue but that includes parent club income, meaning the larger clubs naturally benefit from shirt deals on the men’s side and that’s creating a gap that is affecting the product. This can’t be something that we just address domestically, this has to be something we address on a European level.”
Uefa’s financial fair play rules were introduced in 2009 when the governing body discovered more than half of European clubs had financial losses and 20% were believed to be in financial danger. The rules allow men’s clubs to incur losses of €60m over a three-year period and commit to a spending cap on wages, transfers, and agents’ fees to 70% of total revenue by 2025-26. It was later conceded that it would be hard for clubs to hit those targets and so a gradual implementation was agreed, with the percentage set at 90% of revenue in 2023-24, 80% in 2024-25 and 70% in 2025-26.
Meanwhile, the Premier League’s separate rules allow for total losses of £105m over a three-year period.
“We can’t simply emulate or replicate what we did on the men’s side,” Whitfield said. “The game is in a different space and we need to ensure that we can invest but we equally need to attract investment and smaller clubs are not able to invest at that level, so how do we encourage them to do so if it’s not a fair playing field? They can’t possibly ever be competitive with how things are.
“As an example, something like an anchoring system where that creates a more level playing field or even something akin to US sports where you have a hard salary cap and then perhaps franchise players that sit outside of the salary cap because that puts a lid on the transfer and wage inflation that we are seeing and is contributing to the gap between the larger and the smaller clubs. That will only get worse and affect the future of the game.”
Whitfield also expressed frustration that Manchester United are having to “spend enough to keep up and challenge our counterparts”, adding: “The minute one of those will spend a bit more or is prepared to pay a record transfer fee, then we have to match that and that is where the question becomes: ‘What is the right level?’”
The comments come after United announced the exit of the England striker Alessia Russo this month at the end of her contract. Russo was the subject of two world record bids from Arsenal in January and it is believed there were frustrations at United’s late offer to match the deal on the table from Arsenal in the penultimate week of the season.
However, Whitfield said wage and transfer fee costs outstrip revenue growth and that it was “difficult to know when that might catch up and when the revenue will come organically in the women’s game”.
