Professionalism and Pay in Women's Football

Talkin' about real money: Payrolls, CBAs and salary caps around the world

For those of you who dropped by after my Women’s Football Finance post, thanks! Here’s another women’s-soccer related post for you, covering “the other half of the story” - what the players are making, or should make, or will make as things develop, along with the story of the game professionalizing around the world and what that looks like. Who’s making big money, who’s getting by, and how is that changing? Where and on what terms do players have job security? What does it mean to be a “professional league”, really? Or to have a “professional environment” at your club?

If you haven’t read it, here’s my previous post on the game’s underlying economics: club revenues, league audience growth (in broadcasting and attendance), team ownership becoming a hot commodity, trends and the big-time leagues. I won’t recap it, but if you haven’t read it, it might offer some helpful background (including why I care about this topic and think it’s important).

The Financial Rocket Ship of Women's Football

I plan to write a third installment, on the economics of the national-team game. Eventually. Among other plans.¹

TLDR: Women Ballers have now “Made It”

Look, I’m long-winded; being so costs me less than hiring an editor would. But as a preview, here’s the main points that we’ll get into:

• The top of the pyramid is getting meaningfully higher, with 7-figure deals now being thrown around by the US and Europe’s top clubs to recruit elite talent.

• The base of that pyramid is also being broadened: Rapidly-rising minimum salaries ($20-30k in a few places), likewise for average salaries ($40-50k in some European leagues, and upwards of $125k in the NWSL). With new teams forming (and leagues professionalizing globally), the # of pro jobs available is expanding.

• The proliferation of CBAs around the various pro women’s leagues is driving those changes and salary floors. Each offers meaningful minimum salaries and roster sizes, mandates (most of) the trappings of professional sports teams, and means that the days of players having a bartending gig on the side are mostly over - at least in those leagues, for those good enough to make it there.

• Pro players are still subject to the iron law of compensation for performers: you eat what you kill. We should expect pay and payrolls to continue to rise, but be disproportionately slanted toward the most marketable stars, and dependent on the continued growth of the audience / market for the sport.

• Beyond the professional ranks are thousands of first-division players in other countries, a majority of whom have to blend a football career with an outside job or studies. Taking the leap to professionalization eliminates these stresses and conflicts, yielding a better on-field product that is more attractive to fans, and can “generate its own oxygen” economically. But the clubs or FAs have to lead.

In short, revenue growth will mostly benefit the top players, absent non-economic forces intruding. It is those CBAs that are creating livable pay and conditions for the average pro women’s footballer, by forcing clubs to share the gains more broadly.

Paid? I’d play this game for free!

Women’s soccer was banned in many of the world’s biggest soccer countries, from roughly the 1920s to the 1970s. It was forbidden for women to play football, even for charity matches. At the time the bans began, matches were selling tens of thousands of tickets, so there was no doubt about the fan interest and market potential. In 1967, a carpenter in Kent in the southeast of England, Arthur Hobbs, thought this was all nonsense, and staged a women’s tournament which became the precursor to the FA Women’s Cup. National associations for women’s football formed (in defiance of the men’s FAs), a non-FIFA Women’s World Cup was organized in Mexico in 1971,² and gradually the first wave of the feminist movement re-opened the sport to women.

Although there had been female professionals before and immediately after the ban era, the hiatus prevented (or at least stalled) the development of player training clubs and large club fanbases in parallel to that of boys/men, and so pro women players were few and far between. Those who did play were more like mercenary guns-for-hire than pursuing any sort of stable and prosperous career. But with the passage of Title IX in the US in 1972, substantial resources began to enter women’s soccer through the college system, bootstrapping a presence for the US for the game, despite lacking the baseline of the sport’s cultural importance as in other countries.³ Even the USWNT, which became a source of American national pride, was distinctly unprofessional for a decade or so,⁴ right up until their 1999 Women’s World Cup run to glory gave them the cultural cachet (and budget) to change the game.

With Sweden’s Damallsvenskan becoming the first women’s pro league in 1988, that began to change. As my last post detailed, 25 years and lots of failed ventures later, women’s soccer finally was able to start supporting full rosters of women who were all paid to play. But even as the NWSL launched in 2013, there were still only 2 other leagues in the world where most women were paid - Sweden and Germany - and even there, some clubs had partially-amateur rosters and minimal payrolls. Frankly, the NWSL’s initial minimum salary of $6,000 only amounted to semi-pro status for the numerous players who received it. So the advent of a league where (1) all the players make enough to live on, and can thus devote themselves fully to soccer without having to take side jobs, and also (2) the teams bring in enough money to pay players a living wage and still grow and survive, is actually a very recent thing, as we’ll explore.

But recent though it may be, that world is now upon us, and there is no better evidence of it than the 2022 collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NWSL and its Players Association. So let’s look at women’s football again, but this time from the perspective of the players.

Status Symbol: Professionalism and FIFA

Starting in 2021, FIFA hired Deloitte to produce a “Women’s Benchmarking Report” annually, now in its 3rd edition⁵. They surveyed clubs and leagues around the world, and did an admirable job of going beyond the most-obvious and most-developed markets for women’s football. The report examines the state of the game - be it pro or otherwise - in initially 25, then 30, now 34 countries’ leagues, with responses from over 300 clubs as well as the leagues themselves. The intended audience seems to be executives at national Football Associations around the world as they consider what’s best for the women’s game, but there are a lot of nuggets in there to enlighten an informed, curious fan.

The first is the steady forward march of professionalism. To understand the report’s data on that front, we first need clarity on our terms.

What’s a “Professional”?

For most of us, the term “professional athlete” implies someone who can fully devote themselves to training and playing their sport, so that they give the best performance that they could possibly muster. But in FIFA’s definition, in the report and elsewhere, “professionals” are those who “Have a written employment contract with a club, and are paid more for their footballing activities than the expenses they effectively incur”. Read that again: it only entails (A) a contract, and (B) having, at minimum, their expenses paid. Now to me, that sounds like the definition of “semi-pro”, i.e. those who make some money from playing, they’re not paying to play, but can’t necessarily make it their primary source of income and devote all their time to it.⁶ Certainly this shift matters - the employment contract gives them various legal rights, plus pride and dignity - but if you can pay players their expenses plus a mere pittance, that’s not a career for them. Luckily, the report also asks the leagues for the % of players for whom “football was the primary source of [their] income” - to me, that’s the real definition of “professional”⁷. So although the report focuses on the % of players who are “professional” under FIFA’s definition, I will use “semi-pro” and “pro” for the two respective descriptions, or “Contracted” and “FPIS” (Football as Primary Income Source) to avoid confusion.⁸ Because the difference really matters in assessing the progress toward making women’s football a peer to other pro sports.

Confusingly, leagues are also variously referred-to as semi-professional or fully-professional, under a blend of the above definitions. The terms are sort of thrown around flexibly in discussions of women’s football, for the convenience of the author’s agenda. The definitions I find to be useful are that a league is semi-professional when a clear majority of players are at least semi-pro (Contracted), and a nontrivial minority make their primary living from the sport (FPIS). And a league is fully-professional when substantially all players are signed to decently-salaried contracts, even if the minimum salaries are not anything impressive. In my view, merely allowing professional contracts does not make your league “professional” - players lacking them must be a rare exception. That doesn’t require 100%, though, as there will always be fringe roster players on short-term deals or trials who get counted as semi-pro or amateur.

For our purposes here:

• I’ll consider a league semi-professional if at least 80% of its players have contracts (“professional” players per FIFA, “semi-pro” or “contracted” per me).

• I’ll consider a league fully-professional if at least 80% of its players report having football as their primary source of income (i.e. are “full-time professionals”).

• For ratios between 60-80%, it’s a gray area, we’ll use some judgment and other signals to sort it out. But below 60%, I think a league clearly lacks the status.

So for example, Argentina’s league “went professional” in 2019, but as of the latest report in 2023, only 60% of players were Contracted and only 57% made their primary income through football (FPIS). So if they’re fielding ~40% amateurs, I’d call them barely semi-pro. Whereas, Spain’s Liga F change to professional status in 2022 came alongside a CBA with their players (which we’ll discuss shortly) that set a meaningful salary floor⁹ for all players on all teams, and they report 99% Contracted and 95% FPIS, so they meet anyone’s definition of a fully-professional league. Players might not be happy with those salary floors, but they are not token amounts, either.

Enough with the Lawyering, Get to the Data

Fine, fine, here’s the Contracted and FPIS status for the 31 leagues who gave it in 2023:

Observations:

• It’s sorted by FPIS %, and the group above our 80% threshold for “fully-professional” includes 7 of the Big 8 leagues we discussed last time (USA, ENG, MEX, FRA,¹⁰ AUS, GER, JPN, but not SWE). Sweden’s numbers are notably low given their lengthy history as a cradle of women’s pro football.

• Above the “pro” cutoff are some newer entrants, too: Spain, Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea, Morocco and Cameroon. The first two are widely reported-on, but the latter 5 I would call “pleasant surprises”.

• It also shows that some countries’ leagues may have been unclear on the question, based on the blue bar (Contracted %) being well below the red bar (Football as Primary Income Source %), particularly S. Korea, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa. Taken literally, that would imply that some players lack a contract, but nevertheless make their primary living from football. Perhaps they went with an interpretation of expressing FPIS as a fraction of Contracted players only, and Contracted as a % of all players. Or a similar misunderstanding. See footnote #6.

• On the far right we have clearly-amateur leagues, including Thailand, Switzerland, Iceland, Costa Rica, etc. And then in the middle is our gray area, the 9 leagues between (eyeballin’ it) pro Japan and amateur South Africa. We’ll need other context to assess their development status.

• I would caution against an interpretation that regards a league farther to the left as “more professional”. Above that 80% threshold, differences between leagues may turn on the whims of whoever in a given league office gathered the data together that day, in between handling a dozen other matters. How are contracts registered? How rigidly are rosters and practice squads tracked? How deeply did they care about data accuracy, vs just clicking submit and getting Deloitte off their back? We don’t know. Basically, these numbers should be read with error bars: large differences are meaningful, small differences are probably noise.

• Also, England for whatever reason didn’t answer most questions for 2023, including these, so we’ve got their 2021 number up there for completeness’ sake.

This is the third year they’ve done the survey, so we can compare year-over-year growth trends, too:¹¹

Just about every country providing data had their FPIS number tick up over the past two years. Several had dramatic, 20%+ jumps upwards: Japan (17% → 74%, as their new fully-pro league launched), Australia (53% → 87%), Argentina (33% → 57%), and South Africa (9% → 36%). Two had substantial drops: Thailand went from 63% down to 7% (I’ll chalk that up to a submission / translation error), and Russia down from 95% to 58%, possibly a matter of definitions, or more likely a “didn’t care the first time around” situation.¹² FWIW, I buy Russia’s 2023 number (58%), given context clues.

The % Contracted trend doesn’t really tell us anything, other than “people really didn’t put a lot of care into their 2021 submissions”. The large jumps up for Argentina and Italy speak to their leagues professionalizing, similar to their jumps in FPIS. The jumps downward, where the blue lines stick up well past the red, I attribute to submission carelessness in the 2021 figures - I don’t think it reflects a mass abandonment of player contracts in those leagues, which is what it would mean if taken literally.

League Context for Professionalism

How much stock should we put in these assertions by the leagues? One clue is to compare their average attendance per game. In the 2021 report, the leagues were asked for their 2019 average attendance (or 2018-19), i.e. the last pre-pandemic season. We can show that plus the 2023 report, which gave 2021-22 or 2022 attendance:¹³

Notes:

• 9 leagues gave numbers for 2019, but not for 2022. 2 gave numbers for 2022, but not for 2019. Only 16 gave numbers both years. It is what it is.

• We can see the financial strength and support of the Big 8 Leagues, with numbers popping out for Australia, England, Japan and Mexico, with France, Germany and Sweden not far behind (and NWSL too high to even put on here).

• Mexico’s numbers were 3,000 and 3,100 respectively (but we knew they were big), cropped for the sake of making the others readable. Unexpected is the report from Nigeria of 3,000 / game in 2019 (!), and 1,840 in China. It’s for this reason I suspect Nigeria’s other stats above are “legit”, along with Spain. Also, the crowd sizes in the Netherlands are outpacing their professionalism.

• Whereas, the popularity of Italy, Brazil, Cameroon and Korea, as suggested by the Pro/Semipro numbers, are not seen here in the form of butts-in-seats. Likewise Russia and Portugal, drawing 200-300 per game: it’s hard to believe that those numbers could support paying fully-professional rosters, or get sponsors excited.

• These numbers are now 4+ years old, and a lot has changed. For example, we know from our last post that Germany and England’s attendance has more than doubled, while Australia and Japan have tailed off a little. But aside from our Big 8, we don’t have more recent annual numbers than this.

Another view into the question of “are they really professional?” can be found in Average Ticket Prices (from 2022 report) and Average Revenue Per Club (from 2021). We’ll contextualize those figures against each country’s median wage:¹⁴

Japan, England and USA are charging as if demand exceeds supply. Norway and Sweden are above the curve too. Meanwhile, they’re all but giving tickets away in Italy, Netherlands, China and Denmark. But then again, we know matchday revenue is only a small slice of each club’s financial resources, which were:¹⁵

Japan breaks the chart here with $1.65M average revenue per club. China is surprisingly high ($1.1M) for how little they’re seen on the global stage, in terms of players playing abroad, or national-team success in the last 20 years; apparently they are throwing money at the problem for that very reason. Some of the other standouts among rich countries are the usual suspects (England, Spain, France), joined by Norway. Among poorer countries, Nigeria, Mexico and Brazil are ahead of their curve, with South Africa right there with them. And the USA, among others, declined to provide a number.

If the median-wage context is too tough to mentally adjust for, here’s a more normalized view: average numbers of non-playing staff per club. This shows full-time Technical (i.e., coaching & training) staff, and Admin (i.e. business) staff, from the 2021 report. Since having staff is more optional than having players, this speaks to the “professional atmosphere” in each league, how much support the players are getting at their club. Although obviously that will vary considerably among clubs in a country.

The USA’s number there for Admin Staff per club is actually 25.4, I just edited it down because it would break the axis otherwise. You can see that the Nordic countries are getting by on shoestring organizations, despite their relative wealth. And that certain countries are investing very heavily in building professional organizations, even if it means funding losses until the revenue catches up - that seems to include Italy, China, Brazil, Colombia, Russia, and even Argentina. And tops of all leagues other than the USA, in terms of support staff, is Nigeria, at over 18 per club.

While we’re talking about staff, we might as well note the number of (full-time) league staff, as well.

Those commissioners are sure doing a lot of grunt work in some of the lesser leagues. Meanwhile, we again see Nigeria (15 league staff, #5 by this measure) reinforcing that it’s a legitimate, financially stable and well-supported league, in spite of any assumptions we might make to the contrary due to gender equity and human development in that country.

The 2023 report also added this country grouping for average revenue per club, albeit without reporting specific numbers for each country:

This edition is notably missing China, Korea and Nigeria, among others.

Those first 3 revenue groups include 7 of our Big 8 (Mexico a bit lower), with Brazil and Spain coming on strong (and Norway just coasting, not really growing). It confirms Sweden’s status as a league with top resources, even if their FPIS and Contract percentages are surprisingly low. It likewise puts doubts on the status of Morocco, Tanzania and Cameroon, despite their strong showings by those measures.

My conclusion of the above is that there are, broadly, a few tiers of leagues when it comes to professionalism and the resources you’d expect to go along with that status:

• Tier 1, The Big Girls: USA (NWSL) and ENG (WSL), plus a few continental peer clubs, have full-time pro rosters, paid B-teams, quality training grounds, large support staffs, etc. Nobody could tour one of these clubs¹⁶ and not be impressed by the professional standards on display, from facilities to coaching. They are categorically different even from the other definitely-pro leagues.

• Tier 2, Fully Pro: The rest of the Big 8 - AUS, SWE, GER, JPN, FRA, MEX - and now joined by Spain and Nigeria. All can afford decent salaries, the clubs make enough revenue on their own to not be constantly worried, fans are numerous and engaged, most players on most teams can be full-time and not take a second job.

• Tier 3, Challengers: China, Brazil, Italy, Cameroon, Morocco and South Korea. There’s good evidence that these leagues are fully professional, but some yellow flags from other directions make me think there’s reason to doubt that the average player in these leagues is actually a full pro. With better data, they could jump up. Top clubs in these leagues (e.g. AS FAR in Morocco) can wrangle with bigger fish.

• Tier 4, Semi Pro: Argentina, Colombia, Russia, Tanzania, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway, Zambia. There may be some fully-pro players or clubs in these leagues, but the frequency is probably low, and most players aren’t paid enough to focus just on their sport. The average player has a contract and is paid expenses, maybe a small stipend, but not enough to live on or avoid having a day job. Tanzania (and arguably Zambia) are reporting numbers maybe in line with a higher tier, but the peripheral data is too thin to draw a firm conclusion on it today.

• Tier 5, Amateur: These leagues may have some pro players, or teams that are more- or fully-pro, but the average player is unpaid. The players mostly all have day jobs. Hungary, Denmark, Iceland, South Africa, Thailand, Costa Rica, Chile, Switzerland, Israel.

This tiering allows us to revisit some of the data above and apply our groupings to it:

Although this data is from a survey in 2021, before Spain and Italy went pro, clearly they belonged closer to the Fully-Pro group even at the time. Brazil and Colombia are candidates to join them, by this measure. China and Russia offer less data transparency, but if we take their numbers at face value, their clubs are investing in pro-level amounts of support staff. And while Germany and Australia have gotten their financial act together since this report, and one might fairly ask what France and Sweden are doing (the latter’s strategic decisions are often suspect). Sweden, at least, reported having much higher amounts of staff redundancies than average as a result of COVID-19, with ~70% of clubs making pandemic layoffs. We can hope they and the others have staffed up in the last ~3 years.

I won’t insult anyone by labeling this meme with league names, but you can guess.

Lastly, FIFA’s report also does not include some countries’ leagues which have reason to suggest might be significant, or decently far along the development curve. Of these, Peru, Vietnam, Ghana, Austria and Czechia are notable in their absence. Ghana is one of the top 10 countries for international transfers; Czechia is ranked #6 in the UEFA Women’s Association Rankings; Peru’s league has 14 teams playing in 10k+ seat stadiums and has been around for almost 30 years. So there’s more to this story than what the report is able to tell. But despite imperfections, the Deloitte report is already a great resource to learn from.

How to Think About This Evolution

To put the forward progress of professionalism in context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the history of the professionalizing of the men’s game. After decades of wrangling over amateur status, the first season of the first league allowing paid professionals (the English Football League) was played in 1888-1889. It was then 35 years until the first fully professional league (i.e. everyone is paid) was established - Austria’s, in 1924. Most of what are today the world’s top leagues began professional play in the 1920s and 1930s. The whole system of promotion and relegation, where teams who win lower divisions move up, and teams at the bottom of upper divisions move down, was a solution to the problem that the proliferation of professional clubs, and fanbases, had outpaced the readiness of national governance and league organizing. They had more teams than could reasonably compete in a league together, and pro/rel offered a solution that was at least somewhat fair to all involved.

The example of (West) Germany is instructive. An explosion of clubs (with many players paid under the table) saw a prewar situation of 16 (!) regional top divisions. Compare that to the US’s situation of high-level amateur / semi-pro women’s leagues today, which between the WPSL / W-League / UWS total over 200 clubs. Only in 1945 did Germany’s DFB start allowing semi-professional status: a small monthly salary maximum of DM 120 (about $5000 / month today), with additional amounts paid under the table. When they finally organized a national league in 1963, it forced a reduction of top-division teams from 74 (!) to 16, and raised the allowable (official) salary to DM 1200 / month, about $4800 at the time or $47k / month today, generous enough to make star players rich without under the table payments. Those were maximum salaries, though - most players would be making far less. And the players’ union was only formed in 1987, mostly to protect the rights of lower-division players; it’s unclear if there was a meaningful salary floor even in the top division prior to that.

Today’s landscape of women’s football is constrained more by economics, than by any romantic notions of amateurism held by the aristocratic people in charge of European soccer governance in the early 20th century (as the men’s leagues were). So as the economics of the women’s game advances,¹⁷ there won’t be the same struggle for a legal framework to pay players what they’re worth. But it also took decades for the men’s game to get there, even in England. We shouldn’t judge women’s compensation against the men’s leagues today, but rather against the men’s leagues at an equivalent point in their development. If we start from the first professionals-allowed women’s league (Sweden’s Damallsvenskan, in 1988), it was 13 years until the first fully-professional league (WUSA in 2001), and 25 years until the first financially-stable fully-pro league (NWSL in 2013), compared with it taking 35 years in the men’s game. They’re ahead of schedule! Which might be small comfort to fans and players today, but it does suggest that “we’re doing our best!” isn’t just cover for apathy.

Pay and Payrolls

All this talk about contract status and league stats is nice, but ultimately what we really want is to see women’s footballers get paid, and paid well, for putting on a show worthy of any other pro sport. Right? This is the natural order that sports fans expect: Top stars should make a fortune, average players in top leagues should make a very good living, and at the secondary leagues and developmental levels of the sport, players should still make enough to have dignity and be able to devote themselves to it as a career. But that’s a lot of “should”s, and to merely assert it - e.g. “the women are underpaid! Look what the men are making!” - gets the cause and effect backwards.

Making a Living Killing

In most jobs, there’s some function you perform, men and women can almost always do an equally good job, and therefore everyone doing it should be paid the same. You’re on a widget assembly line? Everyone around you, who’s similarly situated, should be similarly paid, regardless of gender. But that logic breaks down when we’re talking about performers, people in the entertainment business, because they’re not merely employees, they are also “the product”. Pro athletes are not interchangeable. If you’re a product, then what you earn is proportional to what people are willing to pay to see you (live, or on TV), or to have you sponsor something. Much like bonus-heavy pay for salespeople, the term is “you eat what you kill”, i.e. you’re paid based on how much money you, personally, bring in the door for your employer. It applies around the entertainment world, from movies to music to TV and even beyond. Or in the words of an industry insider:

“The central axiom in sport is that talent follows money, eyeballs follow talent
and money follows eyeballs. “
- Phil Carling, Head of Football, Octagon Worldwide, quoted by FIFPro

The logic of that phrase suggests that as the financial situation of the women’s football industry keeps advancing, so too will the pay, both at the top, median and bottom rungs of the prestige ladder. It’s not magic, it’s just economics. We can track that progress through many measures. And sooner or later, that feedback loop will close the gap by enough that the “shoulds” will grow less strident,¹⁸ and everyone will agree that sufficiently talented women’s soccer players can make great money, and the real challenge will be just getting in the door to do so.

But let’s put “should” aside for the moment, and just focus on “is”. What do we know about the state of pay in the women’s game today?

Payrolls and Financial Context

Deloitte’s June 2023 annual review of football finance did a deep dive on WSL clubs, and particularly their payrolls. It noted a growth from 2020-21 of average club wages being £1.5M ($1.9M), a crazy 92% of revenues, to 2021-22 with average club wages at £2.1M ($2.7M), down to a slightly-healthier 78% of revenues.

Brighton is “upside down”, paying more than they bring in

So the first thing we might ask ourselves is, “are those numbers good or bad? how can I even judge?”. The second thing we need to ask will be whether they reflect a short-term investment for a long-term payoff, or look more like a spending arms race that will leave its losers financially ruined.

Benchmarking vs Men’s Pro Sports

To take that first question, before we judge a payroll ratio as “healthy”, we should at least look at some other benchmarks. Firstly, note that these WoSo wage costs include not just players but also coaching, training and business staff - so, the entire club’s payroll - and thus are harder to compare to leagues that publish payroll data but only for the team’s playing roster. But we can take a crack at putting this in context.

In the American “Big 4”, the revenue share going to players is roughly 50-50:

• The NBA has collectively-bargained to give players 51% of basketball-related income; it had been 57% in their 2005 CBA, but then 22 of 30 teams lost money and the league engaged in a lockout in 2011 before the sides agreed on the lower number, which as far as I can tell persists today.

• In the NFL, it’s roughly 47-48%, with the denominator likewise not including some things we’d call team revenue such as stadium naming deals, gambling revenue or corporate hospitality at games. The NFLPA says 48% is a minimum.

• The NHL sets it at 50%, with some escrowing but fewer sketchy carve-outs.

• MLB does not have a set ratio in their CBA, and the results put it around 45% of revenue, but historically if you include benefits it has been closer to 50%, and if you further include the minor leagues (which the MLB clubs subsidize, so it’s a real cost to them) it’s closer to 56-57%.

How can we gross these numbers up to be comparable to the all-in wage cost ratios published in soccer? We have a few clues. This 2018 article on the NBA got some inside data, and gives percentage ranges for team staff costs (coaching, training, medical) at 10% for small-market teams and 6% for large-market teams; some teams also include their 2nd-team (G League) expenses of $3-5M in the number. It also lumps executive salaries / business staff, which is still payroll, into “business operating expenses”, alongside rent, insurance, and debt service, all of which would not be part of any team payroll ratio; but for the sake of comparison, those numbers run at 16-18% of the total. Let’s guess that business/executive compensation runs at 4-5% of team totals and thus ballpark 10-15% of total expenses as what to add onto player compensation; this would mean the NBA is at 60-65% of total wage cost as a % of revenue.

In the NFL, the league’s only publicly-owned team is the Green Bay Packers. Their 2022-23 and financial reports put their “team” expenses (distinct from “players”) at 9.5-10.1% of revenues; “sales, marketing & fan engagement” comes in at 12%, and “general and administrative” around 12-13%, a minority of which would probably be staff costs. If we make some assumptions¹⁹ we could figure that 15-20% of revenues go to non-player salaries and benefits, so 63-68% of the total.

The same guy who did Sportico’s MLS and NWSL valuations, Kurt Badenhausen, has looked at MLB in the past, too. He points out that the Atlanta Braves make their numbers public (historically a part of Liberty Media); For the first 9 months of both 2022 and 2023, their baseball operating expenses were ~81% of baseball revenue, while “selling, general & administrative” (SG&A) was an additional 15-16% in both years; the team reports a 5-10% accounting loss after depreciation. A little math on their statements suggests the Braves spend ~70% of revenue on salaries.

In men’s soccer, the payroll ratios are somewhat notorious for being uncapped and unregulated by anything other than ownership’s capacity for enduring financial pain; a perusal of Swiss Ramble’s decade-long chronicling of this (old site here) can suffice for proof. As a result, the vast majority of clubs are routinely unprofitable, and are run more as vanity projects (With the hope of recovering one’s investment by selling at a bigger number to the next vanity owner) than as businesses committed to making a return. Deloitte illustrates this in their latest (June 2023) review of football finance:

That’s an average loss of € 30M / year / club for French first-division clubs, each of the last 3 years. Italy a bit over €20M / yr loss per club. The cause? Trying to keep up with the Premier League’s Joneses on payrolls is culprit #1:

That suggests that for healthy leagues in a healthier year (2020-21 had pandemic-related exceptional constraints), somewhere in a 60-70% band makes sense and should yield profitable clubs (England, Germany, with Spain slightly above), while getting up to 80%+ makes your league a financial basket case. That doesn’t mean we can lay this situation at players’ feet, since the clubs have to decide what contracts to offer, and nobody is forcing them to do anything. It just means clubs are giving into temptation rather than pragmatism and long-term planning - with a healthy portion of league managerial incompetence to compound things. But the clubs in that 60-70% band are doing fine, on average. Some of Europe’s 30 biggest clubs (per Deloitte’s latest men’s Money League data) are well below that: Eintracht Frankfurt bottoms at 41%, Napoli at 42% (thus posting a record profit), AC Milan 45%, Tottenham at 46%, Arsenal and Manchester United at 51%, Real Madrid 54%, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund at 56%, even Manchester City is at 59%. They are the big winners, while everyone else is frantically trying to spend money they don’t have trying to keep pace or catch up.

MLS is a massive exception to this “winner-take-most” financial situation. To ensure that every team in the league can usually make money, the league imposes a fairly strict salary cap²⁰, and as a result having player expenses far below other larger leagues - this 2019 article claims it was then around 28%, having been <20% prior to 2012. Those numbers do not include benefits and other forms of player compensation, and the compared-to leagues don’t clarify whether these are player-roster-only figures, but regardless, MLS is the example of the bottom end of what soccer teams can get away with spending on talent.

The Big 2: Pay in the WSL and NWSL

So to return to the WSL club-by-club chart above, we can now draw the conclusion: paying out 92% of revenues in 2020-21 was insane, and even going down to 78% in 2021-22 was nearly as insane, and very unsustainable. The business justification, I’m sure the clubs would say if asked, is that they are investing in growth. That’s a reasonable thing to say in principle, because even the non-club investors in, for example, the NWSL, are doing the same thing: They’re building stadiums, hiring large staff to drive large pools of season-ticket holders and sponsor deals, some of them surely losing money at first as things get going. The idea is, we (the owners) have to spend money to get our fanbases to the point where the clubs are financially stable and profitable. The rapidly advancing attendance numbers in NWSL (and rising club valuations) prove that there is a credible investment thesis, one that can pay off.

But that logic doesn’t extend to the player payrolls, necessarily: you want to be able to afford a roster of full-time pros, and you might need to pay whatever is necessary to get a few marketable stars,²¹ but you don’t have to spend more than that on talent, because the justification ends there. Spending more than that on payroll is done solely to put out a better team and win more games. That might please the fans, and thus have some degree of ROI to it, but it hits diminishing returns (see the above ruinous arms race in men’s football), and so we’d have to call it '“vanity” if done to a degree above that ~70% benchmark. Which WSL is still at, despite a supposed salary cap.

The WSL also exhibits the top-heavy financial pattern visible in most top football leagues around the world. Since the clubs’ financial statements usually include not just staff wages/benefits but also an employee count, we can look at average pay per-employee, to get a feel for the compensation levels:

We can see that Chelsea (which spent almost $6M on wages and benefits, $150k per-employee), along with Arsenal and Man City, are a big leap above the rest. And that they’re paying ~3x better than the bottom half of the league, who hover around $2M in personnel expenses and average $38k per employee. And that (from the height of the blue line above the comparable green bars) they also employ more people on the footballing side, reflecting greater resources in coaching, strength and conditioning, nutritionists, mental health, and so on - reinforcing and persisting the edge they have on the field.

NWSL doesn’t publish club-by-club revenues or payrolls,²² so if we want to estimate their health, we have to make certain assumptions. The earlier-mentioned Kurt Badenhausen put out his 2023 NWSL club valuations last October, and with it an estimate of club revenues. These totaled ~$112M for the league’s 12 teams, or $9.4M per club. The salary cap for the 2023 season, meanwhile, was at $1.375M, with an additional $600k in “allocation money” available²³, for a total max payroll of $1.975M. A reasonable assumption would be that clubs used half of that allocation-money max on average, implying that player pay averaged $1.675M per club - which would only be 18% of club revenue. Minuscule, given the accelerating financial status of the clubs. We can’t make the same assumptions as with men’s pro sports that the rest of non-player staffing costs amount only to 10-15%, because we know they’re spending to grow. We know (above) that NWSL clubs in 2019 averaged 25.4 admin staff and 8.4 technical/coaching staff, which more than exceeds the size of their first-team roster. But even if those staff average $50k each in salary + $10k benefits, that’s just another $2M in staff expense, or a total of 40% for staff costs. You might assume staff and salary growth in the 4 years since 2019 and arrive at a rough figure of 50% for staffing costs. And we can note the 2024 cap reflected that revenue growth, as it nearly doubled to $2.75M. But that would likely just keep the total staff costs around that 50% figure. And so unless I’m way off, that’s much, much lower than comparable leagues anywhere, and suggests NWSL is being run under very tight cost controls.

Monopolist Behavior?

The idea that the richest women’s football league in the world would also be the stingiest with pay, as a percentage of revenue, is perhaps surprising. A reasonable person might suggest that this derives from abusive monopoly power. Monopolies, as capitalists can tell you, are arguably the primary path to profits, and regulators correspondingly worry about their power to extract excess value from consumers. But the NWSL is not obviously a monopoly (it competes globally for talent, domestically against men’s football and other sports, and even within US women’s football, is facing emerging competition; it doesn’t really have much pricing power).

A different idea from economics might help resolve the gap: market share in an industry usually follows a power law distribution, which is one where the leader (#1) is not merely a little better off than #2, but has a substantial % edge over #2, which in turn has a substantial % edge over #3, and so on down. You can see this in, for example, market share of songs on the Billboard Top 100:

Or perhaps for a more-durable advantage, we might look at market share among sporting goods, or foods:

Basically in most industries, being #1 is a much greater financial advantage and return, relative to #2, than being #2 is relative to #3 (and so on). Down below the leaders, everyone is competing furiously, has no particular differentiation in brand, and thus likely doesn’t make much profit. So even if you’re not a monopoly, if you can muscle your way into a leadership position in an industry, you can still extract value.

What I think we’re seeing is that the NWSL is motivated to increase player pay, but only to the extent that it keeps them ahead of WSL as the #2 women’s football league, and ahead of the WNBA as the #2 women’s sports league in the US. They don’t have to outbid the WSL for every player, nor do their clubs have to be way more attractive as a women’s sports sponsorship opportunity than the WNBA teams - they only have to be a little more attractive, or pay a little better. Their economics are dictated by what their closest competitors can do, and any difference between that and what they could do if pressed, can be kept as profits. And until and unless they get pressed on pay, they can take those profits and build stadiums, market to build fans and fill those stadiums, and other growth-oriented activities.

Players will get a bigger slice of the pie almost by-default, to the extent it keeps the league as a world leader and allows the NWSL to sell a story about women’s empowerment and such. But beyond that share, the league doesn’t have much financial incentive to spend more on player payrolls, even though they could. So I expect the next NWSL CBA, in 2027, to be an absolute financial doozy.

The Big Fish

We can see this thesis proven out by the top contracts handed out in the last 5 years or so. Before 2019, the league was struggling to reach any sort of stability, and probably didn’t think much at all about “staying ahead” of WSL or any other league.²⁴ In 2019, two-time NWSL MVP Sam Kerr butted up against the league’s then-maximum salary of $50k, and decided to sign with WSL club Chelsea for a reported $500k / yr, i.e. ten times as much. Combined with the high spend of other world-leading clubs like Barcelona and Lyon paying $600-700k to the very best players in the world, the narrative changed about where the world’s top talent wanted to play. Planet Football asserted that the WSL “pay[s] its players significantly more than the NWSL”. Australia’s annual player survey found that “the league players most wished they could play in” had switched from the NWSL getting a majority, to now 62% saying WSL and only 11% naming NWSL. The WSL has 31 broadcast deals of which 29 are international. I myself noted a growing amount of crowing by European soccer fans and publications, claiming that Europe was restoring itself to its rightful place atop women’s football. That the NWSL couldn’t afford the best players anymore, or even that its tactics are outdated.

Well, if Europe’s emergence in 2019-2022 was A New Hope, we’ve now arrived at The Empire Strikes Back.²⁵ With its brand as a global leader at stake, and with its emerging financial edge even over huge European clubs willing to deficit-spend, we can see the NWSL’s response in the form of the new top-end contracts for star talent:

1. Dec 2021: Alex Morgan traded to SD, where she signed for $250k x 2 yrs
   (Marca claims it was for $450k/yr but that seems unlikely)

2. Jan 2022: Christine Sinclair re-ups with Portland for $380k x 1 year
   (allegedly; source is sketchy and there are reasons to doubt the number)

3. Feb 2022: Trinity Rodman re-ups with Washington for $281k x 4 years

4. Jan 2023: Marta signs with Orlando for $400k x 2 yrs (up from $41k in 2017)

5. Jan 2023: Megan Rapinoe re-ups with Seattle for $250k x 1 yr (some say $447k others $473k, and some say she made $400k / yr in her 2020-2022 deal)

6. Mar 2022: Sophia Smith re-ups with Portland for $300k x 3 years

7. Jun 2023: Naomi Girma re-ups w/ SD for $200k x 3 yrs (then-league max)

8. Dec 2023: Maria Sanchez re-ups with Houston for $375k x (3 or 4) years

9. Dec 2023: Crystal Dunn signs with Gotham for >$400k x 3 years

10. Jan 2024: Mallory Pugh, re-ups with Chicago for $500k x 5 years

11. Jan 2024: Portland sends a $318k transfer fee to Chelsea for Jessie Fleming, and they are probably not paying her less than that annually

12. Jan 2024: New club Bay FC pays a transfer fee to Manchester City for winger Deyna Castellanos and signs her to $450k x (3 or 4) years

13. Feb 2024: New club Bay FC pays Barcelona $162k for their striker Asisat Oshoala, and pays her an as-yet unreported but probably fat salary, on a 3+1 year deal

14. Feb 2024: New club Bay FC pays Madrid CFF a world-record $788k for winger Racheal Kundananji, nearly doubling the previous world record, and signing her to $500k x (4 or 5) years. If Bay were a patron at a bar, the bartender would have cut them off by now.

While this surge in long deals with big announced salaries may be as much a PR move as a financial one, it is a clear upward trend, with clubs flush from the massive 2023 attendance and new TV deal. It is also still clearly far less than they could choose to pay for the world’s top talent, collectively, if they wanted to. Over at Barcelona, 2x Ballon D’Or winner Alexia Putellas is in a dispute where the club is offering her €800k and she wants €1.5M per year (up from her current €600k). Although I have no inside info, her leverage may well be to solicit offers from NWSL clubs, for whom signing her would be the coup of all women’s football coups, and who credibly have the money to scare Barça’s boardroom.

Now, that’s just for the league’s top, most-marketable stars. And it’s not a totally one-way trend of NWSL keeping its top talent and adding more global stars: e.g., last month Arsenal signed USWNT right-back Emily Fox out of the NC Courage, and USWNT midfield mainstay Lindsey Horan has been at Lyon for several years after a big transfer. But looking at the numbers overall, the NWSL is clearly now making an effort to keep its top stars, and spending for global top talent when it’s willing to come.

How the Other Half Lives

An excessive fraction of media attention in women’s football today focuses on the NWSL and WSL (and Barcelona / Lyon), to the exclusion of other leagues. But if that’s the top of the pyramid, we do know something about the other tiers, too. The Deloitte benchmarking report, in 2021 (and sadly not since) asked leagues for category breakdowns of their average club’s revenues and expenses. We covered revenues in the last post, but I’ll re-post the revenue-category breakdowns here:

For the expense side, we have a slightly-different set of 23 leagues giving data²⁶, and they break it down as player payroll, vs support staff and other categories:

So we can see that even just purely on player wages, there is considerable variation between the leagues.

• The overall average across ~285 reporting clubs had player payroll at 38% of costs.

• Average total payroll (players + coaches + admin) is 68% of costs, though because most clubs lose money, it is probably a higher percentage than that as a fraction of revenues. Longer-term, I expect most leagues to stabilize in that 60-70% band representing financial stability in mature sports leagues.

• Australia is the only pro or nearly-pro league that spends 60% of revenues on player wages; average for the pro leagues is more like 45%.

• Japan spent even less on players than than what (we assess) the NWSL does, a mere 10% of club expenses; however, this data was from before they became a fully professional league in the 2021-22 season.

• Taking total payroll (player + staff costs), a few leagues get above 80%, our “very unhealthy” threshold: Australia, China, Colombia, and in the amateur ranks, Iceland and Thailand. Nigeria and Sweden are in a danger zone.

• Non-Playing staff (coaching + medical + admin/business) seem to average 20-25% of spend among pro and nearly-pro leagues, roughly in line with what we estimated for the mature men’s pro leagues as a benchmark. The numbers range more widely for the amateur leagues, where revenues and spend are going to be volatile because they are not fully operating as businesses in the first place.

• The semi-pro and amateur ranks seem to often spend more on coaching than they do on player compensation. That surprised me. But maybe those who would coach a team like that could get another job as an assistant at a more-professional men’s or youth club, if they weren’t offered a proper salary, whereas the players have few alternatives within the industry (and mostly have second jobs anyway). In other words, the players are “the product”, but the coaches are employees like in any other industry, more interchangeable, and so the pay is more standardized.

• You would think matchday ops costs would be proportional to attendance / matchday revenue, but you would apparently be wrong. There is clearly some correlation - see high spend in Mexico, Nigeria and Germany, middling spend in Brazil and Australia, and surprisingly low spend in France, Sweden and Norway. Surprises to me include China spending pretty robustly (reinforces their claims of attendance and revenue), same with amateur leagues in Costa Rica and Hungary, while South Korea is spending 21% of the budget on matchday despite reporting only 300 fans per game.

• In my view, nobody is doing enough marketing, but at least we can say that Germany, China and Netherlands are trying. Some clearly are not, including Australia, France, Mexico and Brazil. Some marketing spend will be sponsorship activations, depending on how they counted it for reporting - in which case, it’s a “spend money to make money” situation.

Where we have these breakdowns as well as club revenue numbers, we can make some assumptions²⁷ and back into an estimated payroll and avg-per-player salary numbers:

Assumes club expenses are 110% of revenue, and a 20-player roster

Again, we can throw out the Japan number, as it’s surely very different today. China (highlighted) is hard to believe,²⁸ and frankly both the revenue and the wage % are suspect in my eyes (But if they’re true, that’s awesome!) And we lack sufficient data for the biggest leagues, including USA, ENG, GER, SWE and Spain. But this still tells a story: even in nominally fully-pro leagues, the average player compensation is still only like 30-40% of the country’s median wage. In Australia (and Norway, and Korea) it’s even worse than that. This has likely improved somewhat since the data year (2021). And we should note that if a league has well below 100% FPIS (Football as Primary Income Source) for its players, then it may well be that some fraction of players get essentially nothing, but for those FPIS players, the pay is meaningfully better than this suggests.

But even as an estimate of what the league average player gets, what her experience is,²⁹ it still suggests that football is not a viable career unless (A) you’re a star within your league, or (B) you can somehow play in the world’s top leagues (still a rare thing for non-stars coming from abroad). The median player in these leagues, even if lucky enough to be a salaried professional football player, is making poverty money and probably can’t sustain that for more than a few years in her early 20s. No surprise, then, that most players who aren’t in the NWSL / WSL tend to take second jobs to make ends meet. Chasing the dream is fine, especially in your 20s, but it doesn’t put food on the table. And this situation frankly isn’t that different than in the men’s game: there may be some immensely well-paid players at the top of the game, even in relatively poorer countries… but for every 1 of them, there might be 100 semi-pro or amateur guys with stars in their eyes thinking they’ll be the next Jamie Vardy. The main difference is the number of available well-paid jobs for men in the first place, ones where you can have a career for 10 years before moving on.

Stories of Progress

A headline of “most women’s football players aren’t well-paid today” is unsurprising - a dog-bites-man story. The encouraging and notable part is how that is changing, i.e. what we can see for a trend.

The deepest study of salary data for women’s pro sports is by Sporting Intelligence, which in 2017 did a special women’s-sports issue of their annual sports-salary survey. At the time, they estimated that 1,287 women worldwide were professional footballers (on a definition I would support³⁰), compared to 137k men (106x the women’s count). And it obtained salary info for a dozen professional women’s sports leagues including 7 football leagues (7 of our Big 8, in fact, with Japan absent as they were then years away from going pro). In 2017, the pecking order of average salaries looked like this:

All credit to Sporting Intelligence, who did some great original research for this

That’s right, in 2017, the NWSL ranked behind *checks notes* the Danish handball league. And was 4th among women’s football leagues, behind France (surely buoyed principally by Lyon), Germany and England, but already ahead of Sweden and Australia, which predated it by many years. With the exception of the NWSL, however, the leagues seemed to have only 50-60% of players on pro contracts (semi-pro, by our measure).³¹

With that as a baseline, let’s look at the NWSL over time. The league sets a salary cap each year: for 2023 that was about $1.4M (with a maximum salary of $200k), plus $600k additional “allocation money” teams can use on players above that amount, usually to pay marketable stars. While individual salaries have not been published, we can estimate some averages. And for all the glamour of their present media deals, the NWSL’s first years were absolutely ramen-noodles-for-dinner years for the average player. Courtesy of Equalizer Soccer, we can chart the league’s minimum, estimated-average and maximum salaries³², as percentages of the country’s median wage each year:

The story jumps off the chart, to me anyway:

• When the league launched, they were paying everyone except the national-team players (whose pay was subsidized by US Soccer)³³ essentially token amounts.

• Minimums got better in 2017, but things really turned in 2020 when the league introduced Allocation Money, and that plus a big rise in salary cap took the league-average salary to $40k, about 60% of median wage.

• Starting with the 2022 CBA, the league minimum reached around 50% of median wage (and will stay there, as the number is contractually fixed through 2026).

• The league’s middle class has had quite a last couple years. Even with the expansion of rosters to a minimum of 22 players in 2023, the salary cap rises have driven the estimated average salary to approach the country’s median wage in 2022 ($67.5k), meet it in 2023 ($76k), and for 2024, if teams spend to the cap³⁴, it will be $125,000 per year, which is 161% of US household median income. That’s the average! That’s what a graduate from a top MBA program initially makes!

• The league’s maximum cap charge (which basically hand-waved away the higher salaries of USWNT players those first few years) has largely ceased to exist. It was supposedly $75k in 2022 and $200k in 2023, but I can find no mention of it for 2024, and I suspect there is no maximum anymore. After all, the league wants to now be able to offer whatever it will take to keep the world’s best talent in-house.

Those current league minimums of $36-40k from 2022-2026 aren’t amazing for the players who will earn them, but given the team-subsidized housing benefit and transportation perk, plus various other benefits, it’s absolutely livable in your 20s, or in a 2-income household. Meanwhile, the average number is staggering to me: it represents a 9x jump from 2017, representing a 34% annual growth rate. MLS, by comparison, has a minimum salary of $67k, and average player cap charge (so, not including designated players) is $438k. $125k average in NWSL is still several times lower, obviously, but it’s now in the same order of magnitude - and we’ll have our first NWSL players earning more than the MLS average this year, if we didn’t already.

Italy, meanwhile, is a good example of a still-developing league where we can look at the growth curve. Based on the federation’s reports, the trends of fan interest, sport participation, social media followings and TV ratings are all going in the right direction. Alongside it are payrolls. Prior to the law changing in 2020, the previous semi-pro in Italy era was embarrassingly paternalistic. As of 2017, league-champion Fiorentina had a total team budget of € 800k. In 2019-20, the payroll for the full 12-team league was € 4.4M, or € 367k average per team. In 2021-22, the last year of “dilettantismo”, it was € 6.3M (€ 525k average). In 2022-23, the first year of full professionalism, and subject to a league minimum salary of € 26k³⁵, it rose to € 10.1M with now only 10 teams (€ 1.01M each), which for a pro roster of 22 players means an average of € 46k, higher than Spain and leaving plenty of room to both bring in top talent and also have budget left over for a payroll middle-class making above the league minimum. We don’t have per-club data, although chances are Roma and Juventus dominate the rest, in the manner of their neighbor leagues. But those salary minimums and averages seem “healthy” for a league in its first pro season: the 26k league minimum is 62% of Italy’s €41.9k median wage (above even the NWSL’s minimum, as a percentage anyway), and the league-average 46k is actually above Italy’s median wage! Even those on minimum deals are making money they can live on if they’re careful.

More globally, a Eurocentric (59% UEFA) panel of players reporting their salaries in late 2019 showed progress in monthly compensation between 2016 and 2018: a jump of between 50-80% at clubs, and a rise of 16-43% from national teams, depending on how you calculate it.

Elsewhere beyond Europe, data is more anecdotal, but speaks to the same rapid-development trend. In Mexico, prior to the 2018-19 season, there was a league-mandated salary ceiling of 2,000 pesos ($117) per month, a collusion for which they were later fined by labor regulators. For 2018-19 that was raised to 15,000 pesos ($750) per month, and since that season it has been uncapped. By 2021, players on $100-200 / month was reportedly present but uncommon, and the typical range of pay on a Liga MX Femenil roster was between $300 and $7,000 per month, with ~$1,500 / month ($17k / year) being the average for foreign-born players. That’s good progress.

Former player Naty Cardenas told her story this way:

“[Initially] I was paid around $180 a month; it was a real struggle, but my love for the sport made me stick through it, and sure enough, after signing to a different club, my income grew, and I was able to focus on playing,”

The league is very tight-lipped about salaries, but in testimony to Mexico’s Senate late last year, they shared that the average pay was 35,000 pesos per month, or about $24.5k USD / year - which would be roughly TEN TIMES the estimated number from the 2021 FIFA survey (above), and equal to 147% of the country’s $16.7k median wage - putting it within range of the NWSL’s ratio. While the 2021 number may have been an under-estimate, we also must conclude that the clubs have made a lot of progress on women’s-team revenue in the last few years, and much of that has flowed down into player payrolls. As a result, this has stemmed the tide of Mexican players going to the NWSL for a payday.

Sidenote: The Mexican Senate’s source documents also claimed this average salary was, at the time, 8th among global women’s leagues - but they don’t mention numbers, or who was ahead or behind. If anyone can find their data, please share!

We also have data from Australia. The A-League Women’s Players Association runs a survey after the season, and they got 174 players from their 12 clubs (at least 11 from each) to respond on a range of topics. The whole thing is fascinating, but for our present purposes, it gives the league’s salary-cap³⁶ numbers:

This is in Australian dollars (1 USD = ~1.50 AUD), but translating to USD, it means that the league’s payroll floor/ceiling has gone as follows:

• 2021-22: $211k - $302k payroll range, min salary $10.9k, average per-player $12.1k for a 22-player squad (and each contract being 23 weeks long)

• 2022-23: $258k - $336k payroll range, min salary $13.8k, avg per-player $15.0k for a 29-week contract (24% growth year-over-year)

• 2023-24: $336k - $403k payroll range, min salary $16.8k, 35-week contracts (25% year-over-year growth)

Are those numbers impressive by NWSL / UWCL standards? No. But this post is about the women’s game growing to respectability, and for that, 25% growth in pay for 2 years running is nice to see. If you view them in the context of Australia’s per-club revenue and spend numbers, which 2 years ago looked kinda grim by the standards of fully-pro leagues (above), this suggests that they’re not in such a bad way anymore.

Non-Salary Benefits

FIFA’s report gives a view into the non-financial benefits that the athletes receive, too. While I don’t have much to compare this to on the men’s side, nor do we get league-by-league breakdowns, it’s worth noting that across 316 clubs in 34 leagues, those clubs offered perks at the following rates:

• 67%: health insurance

• 59%: food allowance (I assume this is usually a travel per-diem)

• 57%: housing benefits

• 36%: gym membership (presumably if they lack one at the club)

• 25%: education scholarships e.g. to university

• 23%: vehicle benefits

• 18%: relocation payments

• 9%: other

• 8%: N/A, we don’t provide our players with non-financial benefits

Some of these are surprising on the low side (33% make their players play without health insurance?!), but some might be truly substantial and easily ignored. Housing benefits, for example, I know from the NWSL included free group housing for players, which can amount to a lot of monthly expense (for normal people) that they didn’t have to spend. All told, depending on how these are structured, the value of these benefits may sometimes approach the total salary of some of the league’s less-well-paid players. It’s difficult to know whether the “player payroll” reported in the data above includes benefits and career support, or whether they’re an alternative expense category for the clubs - and if that’s done consistently. So this is another area where I hope we get additional detail in future editions, because it certainly matters as to the players’ overall well-being and financial stress.

Salary Caps

Left to their own devices, the pay for women’s footballers, like men’s footballers, is entirely up to the clubs and their own ambition and budgets. We’ve seen how those ratios look when they’re healthy (40-50% to players, 60-70% on payroll overall), and how clubs can bankrupt themselves by exceeding it. Unlike global men’s football, North American sports leagues have long adopted a precaution of instituting salary caps: maximum player payroll amounts that each team has to stay under. This has the dual benefit of restraining any team from spending themselves into oblivion, as well as leveling the competitive playing field. Big-market teams will thus make outsize profits, but their ability to simply buy titles and success is far more limited. The NFL and NHL have fairly strict salary caps, the NBA has a “soft” cap with Byzantine, kafka-esque rules to e.g. allow teams to retain their own stars, and Major League Baseball is nominally uncapped but institutes a tiered “luxury tax” for exceeding certain thresholds, whose proceeds are distributed to non-taxpaying teams. MLS, as covered, is nearly unique in men’s pro soccer in having a salary cap.

Salary caps are not, of course, to the benefit of players: any club who would have paid more for a player but-for league rules, is spending less than they would have, to the detriment of the player. Given the historical setbacks in establishing women’s soccer as a viable pro-sports business, it made sense for the players in the early years to give teams a lot of leeway in this regard. They are one view into a league’s financial health, and to the extent that they help all clubs reach a level of on-field success and financial viability, they’re probably (but debatably) a good thing. They are now more common in women’s football than they are in global men’s football: per the Deloitte report, 7 out of 34 surveyed leagues (21%) have a salary cap, up from 17% (5 of 30) in 2022, with Morocco and Sweden joining the list. I expect that frequency to expand (perhaps even among the men), because the upsides are obvious but the downsides can be mitigated by good collective bargaining.

Today, the NWSL’s salary minimums, and roster sizes, are set by collective-bargaining agreement with the players - but salary maximums, team salary caps, and other constraints, are determined solely by the league’s own judgment. We shared the NWSL’s cap numbers earlier for what they say about average player salary, but viewing them in isolation, they have gone from $200k in year 1 in 2013, up to $2.75M today. Here’s that annual growth rate:

We can’t necessarily assume that a cap of $X means teams are spending to $X, and there are cap-rules shenanigans here around national-team players not counting (until 2022); Australia has similar exclusions. But the picture this shows is a league that was growing OK for a few years, and then from 2019, has taken flight.

Australia’s cap was shown earlier: it went from $300k USD 3 seasons ago to $400k for this 2023-24 season, with exclusions for now-5 (originally 3) “marquee” high-paid stars per team. That figure was $100k USD (A$150k) in 2015, and $200k USD (A$300k) for the 2017-18 season (which also introduced the first minimum salary). They also have team salary floors roughly 20% below the cap; that’s a mechanism sometimes seen (e.g. in the NFL and NBA) to ensure players aren’t solely getting the downsides of a cap, i.e. that the intent really is competitive balance.

In Sweden, salary caps are new as of the 2023 season, at least per the Deloitte report - I can’t find any further evidence for or against it, partly because I don’t read Swedish. For the 2013 season, somebody on BigSoccer said their 12 clubs spent SEK 69.8M, which at the time was about $10.7M USD, equivalent to about $1.15M per club today - solidly in the middle of the world’s pro leagues, even without assuming further growth since then. Perhaps we’ll get more details soon.

England’s WSL, meanwhile, has something of a fake salary cap. Per the league rules, clubs must keep their player payroll (including bonuses, appearance fees, and various benefits) under 40% of their club’s annual revenue. However, as noted by the sports lawyers over at Sheridans, housing accommodations provided by the club are counted for a maximum of £5,000 (so spend beyond that doesn’t count), payments by the FA for national-team duty don’t count, any bonuses or prize-money distribution from Cup competition or UEFA Champions League participation doesn’t count either, and most of all, in-kind contributions from parent clubs (e.g. allocated revenue from shared sponsorship deals) are basically counted as revenue however a club likes. In practice, there is no meaningful cap, though complaints about its weak scope come from both big teams and smaller teams. This 40% rule has been in place since 2014, prior to which a hard cap existed (teams limited to 4 players paid over £20k); reintroducing one could be blocked by the players after they won greater representation through their union.

The salary cap is but one element of the competitive structure of the WSL under review right now. Last year, an independent government-commissioned report led by former player Karen Carney published its analysis of how to support and grow the women’s game in England. All commentators are taking its recommendations seriously because the UK government is likely to endorse and insist upon them to the FA. And while it covers many topics, from supporting grassroots youth development to enabling more international players on rosters to ticketing practices to parental-leave policies, a few recommendations are more relevant to us:

• Establishing a minimum annual salary sufficient to avoid players going part-time

• Accounting clarity, including specific disclosure of solidarity funding from a parent men’s team, and breakdown of revenue attribution from shared sponsors

• A dedicated TV-broadcast time window free, from competing men’s broadcasts

• They recommend against making the top 2 divisions a “closed league” (i.e. relegating teams out), believing it improves the drama and fan interest, and instead suggest that “appropriate financial regulations and licensing to prevent financial recklessness is preferable“

Reading the tea leaves, in trying to solve the problems of competitive balance, incentivizing investment and preventing financial calamity, the stakeholders in England seem likelier to find a salary cap palatable than they are to implement a closed league or other more-fundamental changes to league structure.

The Nigerian league, the NWFL, declared that it had a salary cap in both the 2022 and 2023 Deloitte reports. It’s difficult to find any detail on it, but in a country with GDP / Capita of just over $2k USD, the threshold for “living wage” for a professional is more readily achievable. As of 2018, some teams were owned by states (i.e. regions), and paid better, while some privately-owned clubs may pay only intermittently as funds can be raised. In 2022, the league had trouble conforming to a N150k ($100) monthly salary minimum as it was introduced, with some clubs having players at a quarter of that, or no pay at all. But if it takes, that minimum would amount to 55% of GDP/Capita, which is roughly where the NWSL got to with its 2022 CBA. I suspect that a salary cap would frankly be the least of the league’s concerns.

Finally, in South Korea, the WK League likewise claims to have a salary cap. According to an American playing there, Paige Nielsen, the teams are all backed by companies, and so the players are employees of that company - and paid accordingly. The teams may in fact be run without regard to profitability. However, there is a maximum wage, which was established with the league in 2009, and has remained the same since: 50 million won, equal to $37.4k USD / year. According to the head of the players’ union, many players reach that salary after about 5 years, and then can’t increase their earnings any further. So there might not be a salary cap per-team, but there is one per-player, and arguably that’s even more restrictive. But even if so, there are many footballers around the world, even in top leagues, who would be delighted to earn that paycheck.

Side Hustles

That Australian Players Association (PFA) report also gives a closer view into players’ choices to get a second job (or not). They report that in mid 2023, 60% of players had held a second job that season, down from ~70% the previous two seasons, and about equal to the last two pre-pandemic seasons. And in no great surprise, those who did have to work more outside of football were less happy about it:

Why do we care? This actually goes to the root of why the professionalizing of leagues is so important. In supplemental (anonymous) commentary in the Australian survey, the players candidly gave color to how this moonlighting affected their football, mental health and their ability to balance their time:

“Only able to work night shifts due to morning trainings, so it’s very hard to get adequate sleep after a night shift.”

“If my work and football commitments clash, I am expected by my coach to skip work (where I get paid more and am respected more), and I am expected by my boss to skip soccer, and neither care if you suffer financially or reputation wise for it.”

“It is difficult having to work an extra 40 hours a week just to get by, when many of my teammates don’t. This impacts my ability to perform, and takes away from what I am able to put into football, as well as takes away what I’m able to get out of it.”

“I just feel like there’s no time for anything else except football. Sometimes I feel tired and burnout enough playing the sport yet alone stressing out about outside commitments. Having to focus on life outside of football and money it has a real impact on mental health.”

The PFA made a great point about the risk and opportunity the issue presents:

The league’s economy is built on the quality of the football product and compelling stories.
If players and staff are not able to commit themselves fully to their craft, its progress is stymied. Full-time professionalism should be framed as an investment, not a cost.

In other data on that front, FIFPRO (the global players’ union) and the Chilean players’ union ran a ran a survey (summary here) of 1,100 first-division South American players in 7 countries (not including Brazil), last December. There were a number of interesting observations,³⁷ but on the subject of job-holding, 43% held second jobs in total. Regarding pay, 27% were fully unpaid, 49% got paid but less than the legal minimum wage, and only 24% were paid more than minimum wage.

To FIFA’s credit, their (Deloitte’s) 2023 benchmarking report made “multiple job holding” a focus area, discussing the challenges that it presents. They surveyed 700 players who averaged age 26, across a fairly diverse set of 12 countries, and found:

• 27% held a second job, ranging from 5.3% in Brazil to 77.8% in Australia³⁸

• 60% said they had a second job on a non-permanent contract, and 20% said they had a secondary full-time job (overlap with the previous bullet is unclear)

• Of those with any type of secondary job, 49% earned under $5k USD from it

• 36% were also undertaking further education while playing

• 23% reported they took unpaid job leave to fulfill football commitments

• 72% perceived themselves as playing in a professional environment with a remunerated contract, however:

• 52% said that their football-related expenses were greater than their football income (putting them outside even FIFA’s definition of “professional”)

This represents progress from FIFPro’s first study in 2017 (full paper, or very good summary here), which was deeper (3,300 players in 33 countries). In that snapshot 6 years prior, only 18% had a written contract and got at least their expenses paid (“semi-pro”, or FIFA’s “professional”),³⁹ compared with 69% in the 2023 Deloitte report.⁴⁰ 67% reported having a second job in 2017 (down to 60% in 2023). Those players reported an average of 27 hours / week worked in the 2017 report; for professional players alone, it was 20 hours / week. Likewise, 45% of players reported blending football with pursuing further education (down to 36% in 2023).

We also know something about “dual career support” that some clubs offer to their players. Most players are young and may have forestalled their education or developing other professional capabilities that they will later pursue, in order to focus on football. Recognizing the need for players to transition to other careers at some point, the Deloitte 2023 report gives stats on the forms of support offered by clubs:

It’s hard to gauge how much this makes up for otherwise-meager salaries in most of the world’s leagues. This might just be another dimension of “the rich getting richer”, with most of that support or benefits coming from the leagues that are already doing well and paying well. There’s some indication that it’s better than that - e.g. in the South American survey, 70% of players regarded the club’s provision of benefits and professional environment as “good”, 27% “normal”, and only 4% “bad”. But it does reinforce that we can’t just solely by salaries and payrolls. Which brings us to:

ABCs of CBAs

So the sport is bringing in steadily more money. If in entertainment, the rule is “you eat what you kill”, then the eating has been getting better. But if un-mediated, that rule also means the marketable talent bringing in that money - the stars - tend to eat the lion’s share of the gains as they percolate to teams’ payrolls. But this isn’t Broadway, or even the Women’s Tennis Association; it’s a team sport. And the less-celebrated players who provide the competitive context for the stars to shine want their cut, too. And as we know from every other pro sport, once the sport’s finances permit it, one of the first things the players want is a collective-bargaining agreement (CBA).⁴¹ In women’s football, what the players want out of a CBA above all is better pay and guarantees, putting a reasonable salary floor under the league’s non-star players. A close-second goal to that: to curb the most thoughtless humiliations and unprofessional elements of their environment, of which there can be many.⁴²

Back in 2019 when there first started to be a pie worth dividing, NWSL player leadership was largely in the dark about the NWSL’s evolution of their league rules and pay structure, and lacked influence over it. But then in 2022, the NWSL and its Players Association agreed on a new CBA, by far the most generous of its kind (though not the first), and it in fact deserved all the hype that it got at the time. It can be read in full on the NWSL PA site, but in summary it provides:

• Minimum salary of $35k in 2022, rising to $40k by 2026

• Signed players per team: minimum 22, maximum 28, plus up to 4 on supplemental contracts

• Minimum bonuses of ~$5k per player for individual or team achievements

• 50% of the revenue / prize money for any international club competition to players

• 10% revenue sharing of media deals from NWSL if the league is profitable, starting in 2024, to add proportionally to player pay

• A road per-diem from $81/day in 2022 to $97/day by 2026⁴³

• Team-provided housing (max 3 players / house) or a stipend equivalent

• Relocation benefits for players moving teams

• 100% pay during pregnancy and maternity leave

• Commercial air travel for road games more than 350 miles from home

• Restricted free agency after 3 years of service and full free agency after 6 years⁴⁴

• Grievance dispute process, disability benefits, standards for hotels and working conditions, and various other typical union stuff

To say that the minimum and average salaries (plus all the perks and working-condition stuff) is revolutionary for women’s professional sports would be an understatement. 25 years into the WNBA, its players are around a $60k minimum salary, $120k average salary (up from $75k in 2017), and $230k max salary, with a salary cap of $1.4M. So the NWSL is quickly shooting past their only benchmark in women’s team sports, in their 11th year.

Later in 2022, Italy’s newly-professional women’s league, Serie A Femminile, concluded a CBA broadly similar to the NWSL’s. It contained one thing often lacking in other such CBAs - maternity leave guarantees - along with pension contributions, a career-transition fund, and professional-environment provisions.

In Sweden, the league and players agreed to a new CBA only a few weeks ago. It had been a long time coming: the term of their previous (2007) agreement ended in 2013, but they continued operating under it until 2022, and then played without one in 2023 to avoid a lockout; the league then tried to make them negotiate under a union that wasn’t theirs. Sticking points included 90% pay for sick or injured players (including for those with a second job), 100% maternity-leave pay, childcare support, and a pension scheme. Given the strong currents of feminism and solidarity in Sweden, the league’s resistance to these things (And lack of details on e.g. minimum salaries) was surprising.

Absent a CBA, the default division of a football league’s payrolls resembles the Women’s Tennis Association: winner-take-all, stars make bank, and the back half of rosters get treated like cannon fodder. We see this in Europe: Lyon, Barcelona and Chelsea can pay $400-500k / year for stars like Sam Kerr and Alexia Putellas, who get sponsorship deals bringing in another 2-3x their salary… but that comes at the expense of living wages for squad players. The Telegraph reports that many WSL players make as little as $22k, and an average of $47k. Germany, too, looks admiringly at the NWSL CBA, noting its own average pay at €40k ($44k) but lack of a minimum salary.

In Spain, the average was $42k, with 25% of players making under $21k per year - an intolerable enough situation that players went on strike at the start of the current season. Spain has had a long road to professionalism, fighting against a history of sexism pervasive even by women’s-sports standards. While the clubs that led the way with early investment (notably Athletic Club Bilbao, Levante, and Atletico Madrid) draw decently and are well-regarded, as of a few years ago there were “only 5 or 6 clubs who behave professionally”. The rest of the league includes a number of teams hastily thrown together once the federation made Liga F a priority⁴⁵, or who actively neglect their teams; it’s no surprise that they were collectively unprepared for proper labor relations with newly-pro athletes. The strike concluded after the first 2 weeks of league play, with the players agreeing to terms: €21k minimum salary this year, rising to €23.5k in 2 years, with possible increases to that minimum of €2k-4.5k depending on league profitability each year. They left to further rounds of negotiation issues like maternity leave, harassment protocols, and similar professional-environment matters.

Sometimes clubs take matters into their own hands. In June 2019, Dutch club AFC Ajax announced that their women’s and men’s teams would have the same treatment: the same minimum salaries, holidays, health insurance, and loss-of-income insurance. In what is probably no coincidence, Ajax has also gone from having no competitive achievements in women’s football to having their team be a regular participant in the Champions League the last few years.

CBAs Drive Equity and Fair Treatment

In countries lacking a CBA,⁴⁶ the same top-heavy pattern seen in the stars-vs-average-player payroll divide can also be seen among teams, too. Barcelona and Real Madrid pay very well, as do Lyon and PSG in France and Wolfsburg, Bayern and Frankfurt in Germany. But then the same massive disparity in revenue manifests itself again in payroll, with limited exceptions. We covered WSL earlier, with the league’s top 3 teams paying ~$120k per football staff member (as of mid-2022), but the bottom 6 teams in the league average only $38k per football employee - still firmly in “might have to take a second job” range. The same divide is visible in many of Europe’s top women’s leagues: there tend to be 2-3 teams per country that have comparable payrolls to the average NWSL team, and then the remaining 8-10 teams will have tiny payrolls with many players at or near the minimums required by the country’s sport governing body for “professional” players, in many cases yielding below a living wage.

Not coincidentally, women’s leagues lacking a CBA for the players (as of the 2023 Deloitte report) include England, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil - half of the “fully pro leagues” we defined earlier. Leagues having one include USA, Italy and Spain, Sweden, Nigeria and Australia. All pro- or semi-pro leagues in the report have Players Associations (Except China). But only in 4 of these 24 not-fully-pro leagues have those PAs been able to bring clubs and leagues to the table and get a CBA deal done with them: just Argentina, Cameroon, Colombia and Iceland.

Absent from those lists above is France, because their professional status is a bit ambiguous - in a way that illustrates the hybrid state of the game today. They reported having a CBA in the 2023 FIFA report, and likewise stated 87% of players were on pro contracts and 89% made their primary living from football. However, news articles in 2022 about D1 Feminine pay clarified that this is somewhat of a façade. Players are not represented by the UNFP, the labor union for men’s pro footballers. Instead, their labor contracts derive from a national collective agreement for all sports-industry employees, under which they can be full-time or part-time. And as of 2020, out of the 160 players⁴⁷ under those national contracts, apparently half were of the of the part-time variety. How the league can then report that 89% of players have “football as their primary income source”, I‘m not sure. One thing is certain, French women’s footballers do not enjoy anything resembling the protections of a CBA like those in Spain, Australia or USA. That is changing, now: In mid 2023, the federation’s general assembly approved the formation of an actual women’s union, which will come into force in summer 2024. The federation’s ExCom member responsible for pushing the change - Jean-Michel Aulas, the visionary founder of Olympique Lyonnais’s women’s team - adds that by 2026, all players should be on fully-pro contracts. So there you have it, Deloitte: you’ve been lied to. If we were being strict about it, we’d have to downgrade D1 Feminine to semi-pro status.

Despite its semi-pro status in my list here, Argentina’s league regards itself as professional, and is the world’s largest top division, with 20 teams. The FA concluded an agreement in March 2019 with both the domestic league and its players (following a public outcry over the case of Macarena Sanchez). It incorporated women’s players into the CBA for the men, adapted the form contract to cover pregnancy rights, and promised a subsidy from AFA to each club to cover up to 8 players’ salaries (reportedly amounting to about $2,500-3,000 per month per club), and guarantees of teams playing on pro-quality fields, paid for by AFA if necessary. It also set a minimum salary of $365 / month, equal to the minimums guaranteed for the 4th-division men’s league. Two years later, the women’s league became the first in South America to be televised live.

On the crucial issue of minimum salaries, the report notes that while only 32% of surveyed leagues had a CBA, those which did were much likelier to have set a minimum salary (82%) than those who lacked one (39%). Overall, 18 of the 34 leagues apparently offer some sort of minimum-wage rules (most of which were not elaborated on for us - e.g. whether they apply to all players or just those on pro contracts). Meanwhile, only 21% of leagues had a salary cap - which of course is for the benefit of the clubs and competitive parity, as a cap is not in the interests of the players, and indeed is largely unknown in men’s football outside of the USA and Japan.

Complaints addressable by CBAs are by no means limited to pay, either. Unreasonable or capricious behavior by clubs are a common set of stresses of being a good-but-not-great pro player in most of these leagues. It extends from travel (how nice is the hotel, how many players to a room), to practice times and structure (do the coaches care if you have a second job? Are they respectful of work/life balance and family needs?), to contracts generally being non-guaranteed except for stars. Player safety is a frequent topic: Firstly, to build an institutional culture that refuses to protect abuse by non-players in positions of power, and will uncover and eliminate it. Secondly, things like having insufficient or inappropriate stretching or conditioning habits, equipment or facilities - and much more. These stories never make the news, they’re largely imperceptible, but they meaningfully impact a player’s willingness to pursue football as a career, and the dignity it carries with it.

For example, Australia’s CBA was first agreed in 2021, and provided:

• Access to same facilities as the men’s teams (only 1 of the league’s 12 teams is independent), travel arrangements, and medical support, along with other gender-equity provisions

• Guarantees of a player lounge, private gym, changing rooms close to the field, and full-size fields (raising the question, “wait, those were in doubt previously?”)

• Standards and protocols around playing in heat, e.g. when it’s too hot to safely play, and limits on daytime games during summer

• An initial $17k AUD ($11.2k USD) minimum salary; 2023 revisions increased the salary cap, minimum and maximum salaries

• A 32% bump in the team salary floor (since increased; see chart above)

• More foreign players allowed, and a “Scholarship Player” initiative for young players studying while also playing - an increase in their minimum salary too

• Yearly triggers that will cause certain terms to be up for renegotiation every year

While not as financially generous as the (subsequent) NWSL or Liga F CBAs, it did provide meaningful steps forward on the “professional environment” side, which goes some way toward making up a bit of the difference. And there’s evidence to suggest that Australia’s CBA was a nudge to the NWSL to go do likewise a year later. One delegate to the ALW negotiations put it better than I could:

Canberra United midfielder Grace Maher was one of the PFA player delegates involved in discussions. For Maher, the new CBA is a far cry from when her career began.

"When I first started in this league, in 2014, I was paid $500," Maher told the ABC.

"There was no minimum payment, no minimum standards. Even some top, top players were probably on less than $10,000 — and they were high-calibre players that deserved the money they should have got.

"But now, to think that the new kids coming through are able to understand, from an earlier age, that playing football professionally for women has now become a full-time thing at the highest level, that's why this is important. 

"We're seeing a lot of Matildas now playing at the top clubs in the world and, if you're able to receive an actual working wage — although it's only for half the year here — it allows players to continue to work at their football and their education without having to get a part-time job on the side."

Australia’s leagues are unique among high-level women’s football⁴⁸ in that the men’s and women’s leagues are managed together, while also being separate from the national governing body (Football Australia). They share league-level employees, a fair number of sponsorships, and most men’s teams have an affiliated women’s club (which is also true in Mexico). This combined arrangement began only late in 2020, and was done in the name of promoting gender equity. However, as we’ve seen from the club revenue side, it also holds the women’s teams back somewhat, in terms of being able to develop their business and drive revenue through commercial deals that build on the women’s teams as a distinct brand instead of as a throw-in to men’s deals. So while the arrangement facilitated a big victory in the form of the CBA, it is also a double-edged sword that I expect to eventually cause a rift.

I would be shocked if the rest of the Big 8 pro leagues did not follow suit quickly with CBAs containing meaningful salary floors, professionalism guarantees, and maternity-leave provisions. Probably in the next year or two. Once England’s transition to private league management is finished, that’s probably next on the agenda; they’re seeking a big new TV deal, and a lack of labor certainty / strike protection might hold back what they can fetch. Mexico’s legislators are threatening to write equal-pay provisions into law, and so the FMF may believe a CBA would make that effort moot. And even Lyon and PSG probably know that their continued eminence depends on having domestic opponents who aren’t mostly-amateur punching bags. If the clubs and leagues can’t figure it out, sooner or later the players will force them to.

Wrapping Up

If we want to know what’s at stake with the professionalization of women’s football, we might do well to ask the players themselves. FIFPro did in 2019,⁴⁹ and they gave these reasons for wanting professional status:

High on the list is feeling the security not just of a paycheck but of insurance, of parental-leave guarantees, and a feeling of respect. It’s worth noting that if they lack recognition as professionals, in many countries they can’t even join a union to bargain for better conditions. This is backed up by similar motivation rankings in the South American study: out of 10 options, players said their #1 reason for playing football professionally was “to be a professional athlete”, followed by #2 “personal history with football” and at #3, “the pleasure of playing football”. “Economic benefits” ranked only 6th. In other words: they’re doing it firstly for love of the game, and that love will paper over other gaps and flaws.

What this also teaches us is, while sometimes professionalism is a result of there being a significant amount of money involved with the women’s game, in other cases it’s the professional status that leads - it creates the financial conditions to enable women to play the sport at a high level and choose football as a career. In other words, professionalizing can create an ecosystem and feedback loop that then generates the economics to sustain itself. Nowhere has that been more true than in Italy, where federal legislation was required to authorize female professionals, but the league’s (and players’) finances are now advancing by leaps and bounds. Mexico, likewise, has discovered that (male) clubs’ huge fanbases are just as happy to show up and root for a women’s team that’s wearing their crest and competing in their name. However, in most of the world, the tie-ins with the men’s clubs are also somewhat reinforcing the inertia, by relying on their generosity for investment, with decisions being made by rich old men not generally inclined to make that financial bet.

So there is something of a empty-nightclub problem (“nobody will go there, because nobody’s there already”) with getting women’s football to financial takeoff. One side - usually the clubs - has to make the first move. Without revenue, the clubs don’t devote the staff or attention to start generating that buzz, fanbase and thus revenue. Even in the absence of pervasive sexism, we’re still talking about groups of people generally disinclined to make big entrepreneurial bets. However, they have slowly, incrementally been nudged in that direction, and can now rely on evidence of success (as seen in the NWSL, WSL, and other fast-growing women’s leagues), to have confidence that there is, in fact, a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

I hope this post gives a sense of how big, and well-distributed, that pot of gold is today. The optimistic takeaway is that nobody looking at it today can seriously doubt the pot of gold exists, or is growing. The challenge that remains is to (1) convince more countries to join the party, get their market development going, and bring their domestic leagues up to snuff, and (2) get CBAs agreed so that the players’ environment is conducive to treating football as a career, even if the money is not yet great. Getting rich will take years (just ask NWSL), but getting professional is something that can be done pretty fast, and doesn’t cost all that much either. Players will put up with a relative lack of money as long as they’re being treated well otherwise, and if they can see the growth happening. Let’s hope that growth continues.

Credit Portland Thorns / MLS. This was quite the dramatic moment.

Thanks for reading!

1. I’m also a Wikipedia editor, hence my style of a million cite links and footnotes to back up the narrative I give here. Part of me doing that is because I’m a nobody, not a soccer journalist or authority, so my credibility only derives from that of my sources. But part of it is also that some of this content may get moved over to Wikipedia at some point, and so the links are a shortcut for me to pull in cites suitable for doing just that.

Deal with it. Hey, you don’t have to click through and read ‘em.

2. Although I’ve long believed that the 1999 Women’s World Cup final set an attendance record for a women’s match (90,185), which stood until broken in 2019 by Barcelona, I recently discovered that’s not true: The final of that 1971 WWC, between Mexico and Denmark at the Azteca, apparently was seen live by a crowd of 110,000. Wikipedia offers several cites, one of which even puts it at 112,500. Unless all are very mistaken, then that is still the record, and it has stood for over 50 years! Who cares if FIFA ran the tournament or not, they were fighting the very concept tooth-and-nail at the time, so screw them - 110,000 people paid to watch women kick a ball around, no matter who blessed it. And there are only a handful of venues in the world today that could even plausibly break that record.

3. My last post talked a lot about the undercurrent of sexism holding women’s sports back, so I won’t recap it here, but let me say once and then bear it in mind throughout: one can credibly argue there’s a paternalistic streak in how women’s leagues have approached game growth, (lack of) investment by affiliated men’s clubs, taking marketing in a sexist direction, and similar situations born of bias and condescension. I’m not expert enough to comment intelligently on the sociology, but neither can I write this entire thing and not at least mention: these sexism issues present a hard-to-quantify obstacle for female professionals to get paid, treated better, or their team or sport to get the investment that its underlying economics would otherwise deserve. FIFPro has some data on this, at least.

4. “Most games were played out of the country and the team survived on a shoestring budget, flying to Italy once on a cargo plane, staying in hotel rooms that had no running water and infested with roaches, and living off junk food to avoid eating food they couldn’t identify“ — Gwendolyn Herrin, The Struggles of the Female Footballer, paraphrasing The Girls of Summer by Jere Longman. In a word: yikes!

5. I’ll mostly be reporting out of the August 2023 report (3rd edition), but here are the links to the October 2022 report and the inaugural May 2021 report, from which I draw some trends.

6. This also may mean that when leagues talk about “going professional”, as with Italy and Spain recently, they likely mean under FIFA’s definition - i.e. everyone gets a contract and their expenses paid, but not everyone gets a meaningful salary. As we’ll show shortly, we’ll be able to see this in the numbers - and it shows the need for a CBA, in order to facilitate competition. If a few well-paid stars in the league are playing against opponents half of whom had to work a second shift last night, it’s not really sharpening the same level of skill.

7. This leaves aside the important observation that just because a player might have football as their “primary” source of income, does not mean that they do not also have a side-hustle to bring in more cash and make ends meet (a subject we will get into later). And if you do, can it really be said that you are a “full-time professional athlete?” It’s arguable either way, right? But only once they make enough not to have to do that, can we really say that they’re “just as professional as the men’s leagues”. FIFA’s reports mention the second-job situation a little, and we have some players-union data on it, but it’s an aspect of the situation I can’t fully quantify or track.

Likewise, even the term “has a contract with a club” is fraught in many parts of the world. In the US and Europe, employment terms are usually very clear and well-documented. But in less-developed countries, formal written employment agreements might be the exception rather than the norm, even in regular industries. FIFPro’s recent survey in South America showed that among 1,100 first-division players in 7 countries, 46% had a work contract, 21% had a “written agreement without contract” with the club, 16% had a verbal agreement with the club, and 17% had been registered for competition but had no particular agreement. Alternatively, it’s not uncommon to have a contract (laying out working arrangements), but have it provide no compensation, or even no reimbursement for expenses (thus falling below FIFA’s definition). So while I use the term “Contracted”, that glosses over some nuance.

8. The data nerd in me is also compelled to observe: it’s clear from the response %s that the leagues interpreted the two questions in differing and sometimes contradictory ways. There are some leagues in the 2023 report where “% primary source of income” was greater than “% professional” (i.e. semi-pro), which doesn’t make sense - e.g. Brazil saying 78% of first-team players are professionals, but 96% of players . And in the 2022 report, where instead of primary-income they asked for the % of players who “receive a salary”, sometimes that was higher than a league’s number for “% professional” - e.g. Italy saying 24% of players were professional, but 90% received a salary. So there are some players who don’t have a contract, but are paid a salary? Some who are amateurs but make their primary income from football? For all I know there are unusual situations that apply, like some players getting local sponsorship deals tied to their footballing despite not having a contract with the club. The only explanation that would make complete sense to me is if the primary-income question was interpreted by leagues as “…as a percentage of professional players, i.e. those with contracts”. So if (say) a league reports 60% of players are “professionals” and 80% primary-income, we’d interpret the latter number as “80% of those 60%”, or 48% of the whole league. But absent getting an explanation, I have to just take some of these numbers with a grain of salt. I’ve emailed Deloitte to ask, and if I get an answer I’ll clarify here.

9. It can be somewhat ambiguous when those salary minimums cross the threshold beyond “token amount”. In the NWSL’s inaugural season in 2013, the floor was only $6,000 / year, which nobody can live on, even though it came with housing and transportation benefits; I’d still have to call players making that amount “semi-pro”. But by 2017 when the floor reached $15,000, given the extent of those benefits, I’d judge them to have crossed the line into fully-professional status.

I think a rigorous definition would agree on a threshold of all-in compensation (salary + benefits) as a percentage of the country’s median wage (e.g., many European countries define the poor in their country as those making below 50% or 60% of national median wage). So we’d judge whether the players are fully professional based on league minimums contextualized for cost-of-living. Alternatively, we could use countries’ national poverty line as a threshold , or a “living wage” number. We don’t have complete-enough data to be quite that rigorous yet, but I’m keeping tabs on it, and hope that future reports will let us set a less-fuzzy line on this transition.

10. There’s also reason to doubt France’s numbers and status: the league’s leadership talks of the lower half of the league as being amateur or semi-pro, despite the prominence of Lyon and PSG, lamenting a lack of professionalism. More on that when we talk about CBAs. But Deloitte gave a 87% FPIS figure, and I can’t prove otherwise.

11. The 2023 report introduced several new countries: Tanzania, Zambia, and Morocco, as well as reintroducing Thailand which had participated in 2021 but not 2022. Portugal reported beginning in 2022, but only included this data in 2023. All of those except Thailand are excluded. As are England, Cameroon and New Zealand, for want of consistent answers to these questions across multiple editions, and likewise Chile, China, Israel and Colombia for just the FPIS question. For the % Contracted chart, we’re using 2022 rather than (unavailable) 2021 numbers for Chile and Israel, and using 2022 rather than 2023 numbers for Colombia.

12. We’re also talking about a country whose official institutions lie about trivial matters all the time as a matter of habit, even when it doesn’t matter. Even when they’re claiming something absurd. So who knows, with them. Caveat emptor.

13. I’m excluding the USA here because the numbers skew the chart’s axis. They reported >7k per game in both years. Also, yes, I understand I did a deep dive on attendance in my last post. But that was verifiable, game-level data (from fewer leagues), whereas this here is broader, less-auditable data but for a wider variety of leagues, useful as context vs assessing professionalism.

14. In a few cases, median wage was not available, so I used the (closely comparable) GDP / Capita instead. Some points’ labels with country name were removed, for readability of the others.

15. The leagues of Cameroon, Chile, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, Sweden and USA did not furnish this data to Deloitte for the 2021 report. But we still have it for 22 leagues. And for an in-depth look at the club revenues for two of those missing (Germany and USA), see my previous post.

16. “But Steve“, you say, “Your revenue-side post showed that the bottom ~4 clubs in WSL make peanuts and perform to empty stands - how can you hold them up?”. Yes, but even they are backed by EPL / Championship clubs that are willing to deficit-spend, their player payrolls are well over £ 1M. Brighton had a £ 1.9M payroll against only £500k revenue; Birmingham City had a payroll of only £700k, and got relegated. They are still way more serious and professional shops than the bottom-half clubs even in the Tier 2 leagues.

17. If you want more country-specific history, a good article from 2022 on the advancement of women’s professionalism specifically in Europe can be found here, and likewise I recommend this article for Mexico and this for Spain. Plus the history section in my previous post on women’s football. There’s also books on the subject.

18. I’m not going to fully unpack and critique that recent substack post here, but sometimes this sport seems to attract commentators who reach for the most pessimistic takes they can possibly concoct, like moths to a flame. And I hate Bad Economic Takes. Suffice to note:

(1) He asserts players are “being underpaid due to their gender…”, right after talking about the very payroll constraints that NWSL general managers are now operating under. The GMs don’t get to pocket any savings, dude, nor do they have a magic lever they can pull that says “raise revenue” - if they had more to spend, they’d spend it. Yes, the sport as a whole is under-invested-in due to a blend of history and sexism, and its resultant market power. But we can’t turn that around as an accusation on the clubs; they’re the very ones trying to change that fact! Unless some team is not even trying to win.

(2) He argues that a “moneyball” approach to roster-building (finding undervalued player attributes that let you get more on-field performance out of a given amount of financial resources) is “illogical” in today’s NWSL, and that it would not lead GMs to drive the state of pay forward. This is the “building housing raises rents” fallacy, applied to soccer. GMs can improve their team two ways: spend more money to outbid for better players, or identify player qualities that are under-valued in the player market (or fit their system better). These are not mutually exclusive! They can co-exist! It’s why the Red Sox have 4 World Series titles this century and the Yankees only 1, despite the Yankees having twice the revenue: the Red Sox still had to spend a LOT to win, they just spent smarter.

19. Without going into detail, these assumptions are pretty broad, using US Gov data about the ratios of employee costs to non-employee costs in entertainment businesses (defined broadly). If anyone has more specific data, please hit me up. And I should also acknowledge the huge assumption that the entire NFL spends like the Green Bay Packers, which is deeply suspect as many teams have had reports of massively bloated front-office staffs over the years. But it’s the best we got, in public anyway.

20. Yes, there are now Designated Players and various GAM / TAM shenanigans, but that’s tinkering around the edges, while the important thing is that they have nearly the only constraint on team spending among global football leagues. Japan apparently does similarly.

21. Hence MLS’s Designated Player Rule, to accomplish the “marketable stars” part in spite of a salary cap - a mechanism which I expect NWSL to emulate before long.

22. And I’ve asked. If anyone comes up with decent player-level numbers here - help me Capology, you’re our only hope - please report in, and I’ll adjust the analysis accordingly.

23. As with similar mechanisms in MLS, allocation money in the NWSL is additional payroll capacity that teams can buy into - they can put up to $600k with the league, and then use that money to pay players, or as a tradable asset. It’s not fully clear to me, but it seems that that $600k is effectively charged to clubs twice: first for the right to use it, and then again when they use it to pay players. So it lets the better-off clubs spend some of their higher revenue, but still constrains their ambitions enough to put a lid on expenses and keep a somewhat-level playing field.

24. Not least because they had put up some big Ws on the rare occasions when they went head-to-head.

25. I think this makes Jessica Berman Emperor Palpatine, Emma Hayes as Anakin crossing to the dark side, and… Sweden? into Luke Skywalker? Yeah, I dunno either. We’ll workshop it.

26. In particular, we lose England and Spain (reported only revenue categories), but gain South Korea, Nigeria, Russia and South Africa (reported expense categories, but not revenue). We keep the other 19 countries, who reported both.

27. The two important assumptions are, (1) clubs spend 110% of revenue in total (roughly 65-70% of clubs lose money, 20-25% break even, and 10% make a profit, hence this assumption), and (2) clubs average a roster of 20 paid players. Germany and Sweden don’t give average club revenues, so we lose them here. It’s also worth noting that for the leagues with a meaningful amount of amateur or semipro players, this analysis totally breaks down (because any average would very much underestimate what the pro players are getting), so I don’t even present the numbers for Semi-Pro and Amateur leagues, other than Norway.

28. Part of the issue is my assumptions: the report notes that the average first-team squad size in China is 32 players, while in Israel it was 20. But we don’t have league-by-league roster sizes, so I had to make a default assumption (of 20) in order to get any comparison at all. So we can dial China’s numbers back accordingly - but even if done, their player compensation and ratio to median income are still dramatically higher than anyone else’s.

29. I should also note that there is some evidence of players drawing income from unusual sources. In their 2019 survey, FIFPro noted that 25% of players reported receiving income from sources other than their club or national-team, though they don’t quantify the amounts:

30. Their research in this report was backed up by data from FIFPro, the global union for pro footballers (at least in 70 countries), which had 65,000 members in 2017, and “about 900” of them were women (which would be 1/72 the male number). I trust it because it observes the definitional issues with the term “professional”, and notes their impact on the data in UEFA’s own report from 2017. And Sporting Intelligence defines their estimated count as “the sum of what we know to be full-time players in ‘professional’ leagues plus centrally contracted international players across ‘major’ nations.“ That’s about as good as you could ask for.

31. In that 2017 report, in exchange for confidentiality, they were able to learn a lot, often including the number of actual professionals in the league. To summarize:

• France: Lyon was paying base salaries of €162k, and PSG €127k, before bonuses and perks. Those two clubs’ total spend was reported as between €12-15M between them. The two accounted for 50-60% of all payroll in the league, and brought the league’s overall salary average up to $49.8k. “Total budgets at the smallest D1F clubs are a few hundred thousands euros per year. Several clubs confirmed their player wage spending was typically in the region of 65 per cent of their total budget. The monthly gross pre-tax average salary is below €1,000 per month at some clubs, well below in one case. While there are 273 players in the [12] first-team squads in D1F, only 153 have full professional contracts, others have part-time deals and one club has no professionals.“

• Germany: Wolfsburg was averaging just under €100k per player (under a total team budget of €3.5M), with Bayern at €85k, and then Frankfurt and Turbine Potsdam at roughly €50k, with 3 other clubs averaging €30-35k salaries, and a bottom 5 having budgets under €1M / year and average salaries of €15-18k. Across the 278 first-team players in the league (23 / club), average pay was $43.7k.

• England: In the final year before the WSL went fully pro, the report counts 367 total players (31/team), which includes reserves and junior players who are still rostered to the first team, but of them only 157 had professional contracts (some of them semi-pro in reality), and those 157 averaged $35.4k salary; reportedly, Man City was paying by far the most, and the other 3 of the “Big 4” (Arsenal, Chelsea, and at the time, Liverpool) being just above that league average. Those big 4 apparently averaged £60k salaries, while the contracted players at average clubs were around £20k, and single digits at the bottom rungs.

• USA: The NWSL’s published 2017 roster rules seem straightforward, but SI’s research suggests that behind the veil of transparency, the published salary caps were actually different for each team, and that average pay ranged from $20.2k at the Washington Spirit to $35.8k at the Portland Thorns, with a league average of $27k.

• Sweden: While Marta was the world’s best-paid women’s footballer in 2014, earning $400k / year at Tyreso, she was very much the exception. Of the league’s 240 roster players, 110 (at the time) had professional contracts, of whom 40 were foreign players. The average salary of $14.2k is roughly 1/9th of what the (less-well-regarded) top Swedish men’s division then paid.

• Australia: Relying chiefly on a report by their player’s union (the PFA), they relate that the average pay was $10.6k USD / year, with 85% of players earning under £3k / season and 25% earning under £300, a token amount. Some players report not even earning enough to get to and from training. The 2017-18 season introduced the first minimum salary (~$9.2k USD for a 23-week contract). This pairs with national-team salaries of around $41k USD.

The Mexican league was in its first year, with salary situation as-reported above.

32. One known inaccuracy here is that until 2020, the national-team players of the US, Canada and Mexico (till 2017) were paid-for by that country’s national federation, may have actually made several times the supposed maximum salary for the league, and counted for smaller, predefined amounts against their team’s salary cap. So while that shouldn’t affect the league’s average too much, it means the average-salary number is an underestimate, and is maybe closer to a median.

Another nuance is that we’re assuming a constant 20 salaried players per team each year. While roster size was up to the team in the early years, the 2022 CBA mandated that in 2022, teams have a minimum of 18 senior players (on conforming contracts), a max of 24, plus up to 4 on supplemental contracts (short-term / non-guaranteed ones with less pay). In 2023, that changed to a minimum roster of 22 senior players and maximum of 26, with those last 4 able to be on senior (CBA-conforming) standard contracts, or supplemental agreements, so for 2023 only, we’re dividing by 22.

33. This difference is not minor. Sporting Intelligence’s 2017 estimate of average pay in the NWSL (inclusive of allocated national-team players, who didn’t count against the cap) was $27.1k. My salary-cap-driven analysis, which ignores those allocated players, projects the average salary of everyone else as having been $15.8k in 2017. That’s only 58% of the full amount. In other words, USWNT (and CanWNT) players consumed 42% of the league’s total payroll, despite composing only 16% of the league’s players. A little math suggests that USSF-subsidized USWNT players therefore were paid ~$86k on average, about 5.5x the $15,750 of non-allocated players subject to the salary cap. We don’t have any other views into actual total NWSL salaries or subsidized national-team players (prior to the subsidies going away in 2022), so that will have to do as an estimate.

34. This is the other big assumption in this analysis: that “maximum payroll” is what the teams will actually spend, or close to it. I think it’s reasonable, for two reasons: firstly, we’ve seen what the revenue numbers have done, so the salary cap exists mostly to prevent teams from blowing huge money in an arms race rather than investing in growth. Second, teams are routinely trading small amounts of allocation money ($40-50k) when trading players, meaning most teams are in search of small extra amounts to spend; if they didn’t want to spend at least near the cap, those amounts wouldn’t be precious enough to trade for talent.

35. That’s the minimum, and no maximum (had previously been a maximum of € 30k). As detailed by an AC Milan blogger in detail, they got support to do this from the government. Their first € 10k of salary is exempt from taxes, according to Marca, and amounts above that are taxed at a lower rate (30%) than normal wages in Italy (50%). The teams were also provided € 20M over 3 years in direct financial support to ease the transition, plus a 1-for-1 tax credit if a club chooses to pay benefits beyond salary, e.g. health insurance, pension, disability insurance, and presumably other typical perks of normal employment. This is not that dissimilar from US Soccer providing salary subsidies and management services to NWSL from 2013-2020, except that the benefits came from men’s football rather than the public purse. Which approach is “better”, I’m not sure, but it’s clear that some sort of financial incentives for the clubs are at the root of most transitions to professionalism and eventual sustainability.

36. Note that in a rule analogous to MLS’s Designated Player scheme, 3 players on each ALW team are excluded from consideration under the salary cap, i.e. the team’s marketable stars who are paid much-better. This may have risen to 4 in 2023, reports differ. And there’s also a “guest player” mechanism for importing foreign stars without salary-cap impact. So a league-average based on this number will under-state the actual average pay.

37. Some examples of other nuggets in the report:

• The 1,164 players surveyed were 96% single, only 3% married, and 96% childless.

• For those with a second job, the most frequent occupations include roles such as coaches, teachers, administrative staff, assistants, salespeople, independent workers, monitoring and assistance positions, as well as their own ventures.

• Of those with a second job, only 39% had an employment contract with that second job (i.e. were formally rather than informally employed), and oddly, only 13% reported making income from that job

• Only 24% of athletes were able to fully devote themselves to football, with no conflicts from a job or studies; 33% were also students, 25% were also employed, and 18% had both a job and educational obligations on top of football.

• Frequency of players holding a second job (avg: 43%) ranged by country from 41% in Chile to 57% in Uruguay; the number is clearly less in Argentina, but they literally forgot to attach the chart for Argentina.

38. This ratio corresponds to the decimal expansion of “7/9”, so it’s possible it’s based on a sample size of only 9, or more likely 18 or 27, footballers. In any case, I trust the Australian PFA’s survey (that answered 70%) more than I do this 78% figure, and same for Brazil’s 5.3%.

39. FIFPro also used a more-inclusive definition of professional, being those who received any remuneration at all for footballing activities; under this definition, the 2017 survey included 60% professionals. But even under FIFA’s more-restrictive definition, the 584 professional players who responded (18% of respondents) included roughly 2/3s of the professionals in the world at the time. FIFA Professional status was reported in 75% of the responses they got from Germany, 57% in England, and 55% in Sweden, followed by Uzbekistan at 48% (!), and USA at 38%; we can take those as estimates of the % of players who were at-least-semi-pro in 2017, i.e. the level of professionalization of the leagues.

The report is lengthy, and full of little nuggets that I had to leave out a fuller discussion of. e.g., 42% of players who played for their national team did not get paid enough by that national team to even fully cover their own expenses. Or, only 38% of players had been asked about their menstrual cycle in relation to their performance. 5% of players had been approached to fix a match, with the risk increasing in countries where the experience of being paid late or not-at-all is more common or severe. And players gave these reasons when asked why they were considering leaving football early:

40. Note that the 2017 FIFPro report was an anonymous survey of players, while the 2023 Deloitte report was a survey of clubs and leagues. There is surely a self-reporting effect to make the clubs look better in the latter, but I think even if you discount the numbers a little bit, it still means there has been substantial progress. Also, the set of leagues covered by the 2017 survey were different (and had varying depth of player responses) from 2023, though there was enough overlap that it’s reasonably comparable. The data is what it is.

41. There is something the league gets out of having a CBA with its players, too, at least in the USA: antitrust protection. By being functionally the only buyer of sporting talent, a leading sports league (in the absence of a peer) is de-facto a monopoly in the US, one whose conduct (such as salary caps) which will run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act unless they fall into an exception. And the biggest and most common exception is if the employer’s relationship with its labor is collectively-bargained. This is why, in the event of a management lockout (upon the expiration of a CBA, to create negotiating leverage against their players), one of the first tactics a union resorts to is to de-certify the union, which restores to them the option of suing their employers under antitrust law. Obviously in Europe and elsewhere the role of unions is very different, and antitrust law varies between countries. But this is part of the reason why the formation of a players’ union and the concluding of a CBA is part of the natural evolution in growth of a sports league. Until the league is financially stable and on a path to profitability, there is no pie worth arguing over how it’s split. But as soon as the pie is real and looking delicious, if the league is lacking a CBA, the industry/market starts looking suspect to antitrust regulars. So, both sides have an interest in having labor relationships governed by a mutually acceptable agreement at that point.

42. Just to name a few prohibited by the NWSL CBA: teams have to treat and pay injured players, must fly to away games >350 miles from home, can’t routinely play or practice on artificial turf, must have an on-site locker room with showers for both home and away teams and at training facilities, and have limits on the number of promotional appearances they can insist that players attend (if the promotion is for a marketing partner, the players also get $300+ per hour for it). Meanwhile, Nigerian national-team players are made to share beds while at a tournament, among other humiliations. You would think having a doctor present at games would be table stakes, but even in Spain, you’d be wrong. There are innumerable ways in which a club or league can be callous in the way they treat players like property - for example, insisting on playing games despite extreme heat or cold, done for the benefit of their broadcast or gambling partners, without considering risks to player health.

43. For context, $90 / day per-diem (which is meals / incidentals; lodging is covered by the team) is darn good. For government employees, it’s $60-75 / day; for private-sector business travel (think: salespeople, or consultants), benchmarks suggest that $80-90 is typical. And if the players don’t spend their full per-diem, anything left over they can keep, and it’s tax-free up to the federal government rates (above) for the visited region. So this is a form of shadow compensation - and one in which all league players are “earning” equally.

44. Readers familiar with US sports leagues will know that free agency is common to all of them, but with collectively-bargained rules about eligibility for it. However, it is the universal default in global football - if your contract is up, you can sign with whoever, for however-much you can get from them. That was always true for NWSL players running out their contract if and only if they wanted to then sign outside the NWSL, but with this CBA it became true within the NWSL as well (which for many players is the preference).

45. Real Madrid, in particular, was dragged kicking and screaming into having a team, agreeing to a merger with a local independent club only in 2020.

46. This post is long enough without it, but while I try to share what’s known about domestic league CBAs, we should also recognize that many FAs have CBAs with their national-team players too. And that those agreements have been bellwethers for driving change in the sport. I’ll get into the USWNT’s situation in a future post, but there are dozens of others, some glorious and some shameful, usually wrangling over the same issues presented here. But the league-level CBAs affect more players, and give (where possible) steady respectable employment to them, so they probably matter more to assessing the state of the game today from the players’ perspective.

47. And if you do the simple math, if 160 players are on even this pseudo form contract, across 12 teams, that means 13.3 per team are signed; if those represent the 89% of players supposedly making their living from football, then that implies almost exactly 15 players are on each team. I suspect this is what the league actually did to give Deloitte its figures for 2023, was divide it by a roster of 15. Needless to say, I don’t recommend trying to play a season of pro football with a team of only 15 players, it will not go well for you. So even under some pretty charitable assumptions, there are obvious data shenanigans here that I, as a data professional, am almost a little offended by, that D1F would pass this off as fact.

48. According to the 2023 FIFA / Deloitte report, some semi-pro and amateur leagues have their country’s FA run both the men’s and women’s leagues, including Argentina, Brazil (!), Hungary, Iceland, Norway, and Zambia. It’s also true for Mexico’s leagues, although they may spin off, much as the English FA is currently doing with its top-2 women’s divisions. And in many more countries, the FA runs the women’s league but the men’s leagues are independent and for-profit, including in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Netherlands and Italy. Women’s fully-pro leagues are only private and also independent of the men in USA, Japan, Nigeria and Morocco (and shortly England, as noted).

49. That survey did assess pay, but compared to FIFPro’s 2017 or 2023 studies, it was far less representative: it covered only 186 athletes in 18 countries, of whom 59% were in UEFA (European) leagues. They also got data from the 24 national federations who participated in the 2019 Women’s World Cup, but still, the signal is more attenuated. So I’m using it mostly for color.