Having undervalued the women's game for so long, FIFA is now complaining that other organisations are, too. The irony is stark, writes Samantha Lewis.
"Which is, of course, what we have to do, and we try to do that to the best of our ability.
If you just scoffed at the president of FIFA — an organisation that just staged a men's World Cup in Qatar — talking about "moral obligations", you're not alone. "Effectively, the industry was trained to pay big money for the men's World Cup and to treat the women's equivalent as worthless. At the same time, the women were told they didn't deserve equal prize money or equal pay because they didn't bring the revenues.
The second major irony is in Infantino's appeals to the "moral obligations" of profit-driven media organisations. There is clear hypocrisy in FIFA lecturing these organisations about "doing the right thing" when it is not even abiding by that principle. Take prize money, for example: While FIFA has doubled the pot for the 2023 tournament, the money being offered to women is still vastly outstripped by what is increasingly offered to the men's tournament.
The final, and perhaps most glaring, irony is that Infantino's solution to the under-valuation of the Women's World Cup by these companies is threatening to take it away from them altogether, ultimately making the women's game less visible in some of its biggest markets.
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