Over the past six months, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been increasingly vocal about the "disappointing" amount of money several major broadcasters across Europe have offered to pay for the rights to the 2023 Women's World Cup.
Last year, at the official tournament draw in Auckland, Infantino lambasted a number of organisations for offering "100 times less, even more than 100 times less in some occasions" for the rights to broadcast the women's edition compared with the men's.
"We are not going to accept this," he said at a media conference.
"We know that the viewing figures for these broadcasters in some big footballing countries for the men's World Cup or for the Women's World Cup are actually very similar … meaning their commercial income is very similar for men and for women."
And while he did not name names, he implied that some of the culprits were countries that regularly criticised FIFA for not offering equal prize money across the two tournaments.
"In some countries, they are quite good at telling us … that we should give more emphasis on equal opportunities, on equality, on non-discrimination, on treating men and women in the same way," he said.
"Which is, of course, what we have to do, and we try to do that to the best of our ability.
"It's important that everyone puts actions, as well, behind words and we all start to treat women's football the same way."
Earlier this week, Infantino doubled down on his criticisms. And he has now threatened to withhold the broadcast rights from Europe's biggest footballing countries — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — as a consequence of their respective media organisations' low-ball offers.
"To be very clear, it is our moral and legal obligation not to undersell the FIFA Women's World Cup," he said at a meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.
"Therefore, should the offers continue not to be fair, we will be forced not to broadcast the FIFA Women's World Cup into the big five European countries."
If you just scoffed at the president of FIFA — an organisation that just staged a men's World Cup in Qatar — talking about "moral obligations", you're not alone.
The irony, of course, is that Infantino is now running into the consequences of his own actions, and the actions of FIFA, over the past four decades regarding investment in women's football.
First, the major reason this discussion is happening at all is because, for the first time ever, FIFA has decided to commercialise the 2023 Women's World Cup separately from the men's tournament.
Historically, both tournaments have been bundled together and sold as a package to broadcasters and other commercial entities. As such, there has never been a true valuation of either edition as a standalone product, with the assumption being that the men's tournament was the one that attracted the vast majority of the money these organisations paid.
"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," former Matilda and FIFA executive Moya Dodd told Nine Entertainment.
"Effectively, the industry was trained to pay big money for the men's World Cup and to treat the women's equivalent as worthless. At the same time, the women were told they didn't deserve equal 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."
Indeed, according to Infantino's own comments, the women's tournament attracts at least half the number of viewers of the men's, meaning the true value of the Women's World Cup from a broadcast perspective should be far greater than what is currently being offered.
One billion people tuned in to watch the 2019 women's tournament, and FIFA expects closer to 2 billion will watch this year's edition, which will kick off on July 20. Comparatively, about 5 billion people "engaged" with last year's men's World Cup in Qatar.
In that sense, FIFA has no-one to blame but itself for not unbundling these commercial deals sooner, while also not making it clear how much more value the women's game actually had beneath the surface in order to rebalance and fairly distribute the bundled broadcast payments.
The small amounts now being tabled by broadcasters, then, is not what the Women's World Cup is truly worth, it is simply what they have been led to believe it's worth after decades of chronic underinvestment and opaque commercial strategies from its global governing body.
The second major irony is in Infantino's appeals to the "moral obligations" of profit-driven media organisations.
Despite effectively being a non-profit organisation, FIFA is just as driven by revenue generation as the broadcasters it is currently criticising. Earlier this year, FIFA projected that it would make about $US11 billion ($16.47 billion) over the next three years — a cycle that includes both the women's and men's World Cups.
It also suggested that roughly $US435 million would be spent staging the 2023 tournament in Australia and New Zealand, which is less than one-quarter of what it spent in Qatar.
There is clear hypocrisy in FIFA lecturing these organisations about "doing the right thing" when it is not even abiding by that principle. Take prize money, for example: While FIFA has tripled the pot for the 2023 tournament, the money being offered to women is still vastly outstripped by what is increasingly offered to the men's tournament.
By virtue of its own projected revenues, FIFA is more than capable of redressing the historical underinvestment in the women's game that it has been the primary cause of.
Not only can it equalise the prize money offered to competing teams, but it can also redistribute the inflated amounts it regularly pours into the men's game if it truly wants to lead with "actions" and prove the value it claims the women's game actually has.
Indeed, that FIFA continues to haggle with domestic broadcasters instead of simply taking its product directly to consumers through its own FIFA+ and social media platforms suggests it is just as motivated by money as the organisations it is calling out.
The final, and perhaps most glaring, irony is that Infantino's solution to the under-valuation of the Women's World Cup by these companies is threatening to take it away from them altogether, ultimately making the women's game less visible in some of its biggest markets.
One of the key reasons the 2023 tournament has been awarded to Australia and New Zealand in the first place is because the World Cup offers an opportunity to grow women's football in underdeveloped regions across Asia and Oceania.
Football's Europe-centric financial ecosystem means these regions have struggled to keep up, with time zones a major factor when it comes to broadcast and commercial rights, and thus the amount of money that filters down into the rest of the pyramid.
The same dynamics are at play here, with July's tournament scheduled to take place in unfriendly time slots in Europe's major footballing nations.
And while Infantino has said different time zones are no excuse, it is a reality that broadcasters must grapple with, not only in terms of viewership numbers but also advertisement dollars. Organisations don't want to pay money advertising to an audience that isn't awake half the time.
However, if FIFA was genuine about its desire to grow women's football in under-developed markets, it could just as easily — and perhaps more effectively — turn its attention to the regions that the two co-hosts actually exist within, particularly Asia, which has the biggest untapped commercial population for football anywhere in the world.
Simply making women's football less accessible in Europe as a kind of punishment for a financial and cultural apathy FIFA itself has created defeats the entire purpose of the exercise and undermines the governing body's stated goal of trying to grow the women's game.
So if Infantino is genuine about addressing the historical handicaps that have held women's football back for decades, the first finger he points should probably be directed towards himself.
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