Enough is enough: Fifpro demands action as women’s football’s billion-dollar boom leaves players behind

Women’s football is closing on a billion-pound industry. Too many of the women playing it are still being asked to do so on wages that do not cover the cost of the journey, according to a landmark global survey by the players’ union Fifpro.

More than 800 footballers from top divisions worldwide took part, and the picture is of a sport growing far faster than the protections around the people generating the growth: short contracts, late payments, absent pensions and a mental-health burden that has swelled enormously in under a decade.

The money is real — it just is not travelling

Fifpro projects global revenue in the women’s game rising from around £439m in 2024 to more than £756m within three years. Broadcast deals, sponsorship and record crowds at the elite end have fed that curve, and nobody at the union pretends the boom is a mirage.

The argument is narrower and harder to answer: the wealth is not reaching the workforce. Fifpro describes an industry built around its top 5%, the remaining 95% left in what it calls vulnerable and precarious conditions.

What the players said

Asked what might drive them out of the game early, 59% of respondents pointed at financial reasons. Psychological stress was named by 46%, a share that has climbed from 13% when the union last carried out the exercise in 2017.

Of the women who took part, 57% reported having struggled with their mental health. Half of those said their club had offered them nothing in the way of support.

The arithmetic of being a professional

Fifa defines a professional as a player on a written contract earning more than it costs to play. Applied to a survey group drawn entirely from top-tier clubs, the test makes uncomfortable reading.

Only 78% held a written deal. Around eight in ten were paid by their club, but just 57% said the amount covered the expense of playing. Sixty-two per cent regarded themselves as professionals, with the rest dividing between semi-professional and amateur.

A median of £1,250 a month

Average monthly pay has tripled since 2017 to a little over £1,970, but the median is £1,250 — and the spread beneath it is stark. A player in North America averages roughly £4,900 a month; one in central or western Europe about £3,000. In Eastern Europe that falls to £664, and across Africa to £363. In ten Eastern European countries, average pay sits below the national minimum wage.

Seven-month deals and no safety net

Contract lengths have stretched from about a year in 2017 to 19 months, but the calendar still punishes. Only two-thirds of players are paid across the full 12 months, with seven- and nine-month agreements obliging them to find other work to fill the year.

A quarter had been paid late at some point over the past two seasons, and 42% had no pension at all.

Where regulation has worked

Parenthood is the clear exception. Nearly half of those surveyed in 2017 said the wish to start a family could push them out of football; that has dropped to 19%, an improvement the union attributes largely to the maternity rules Fifa introduced five years ago. Targeted regulation, Fifpro concludes, works — the game has simply been slow to apply the lesson elsewhere.

A seat at the table

Alex Culvin, who leads on women’s football at Fifpro, warned that the attention lavished on the elite game risks concealing what happens beneath it, and said the sport had reached the point of “enough is enough”.

Her case is not for slower growth. Commercial success and player welfare, she argues, should not be treated as competing demands, and the players themselves need to be in the room whenever decisions about their futures are taken.

Fifpro has made the economic argument for women’s football repeatedly. What it now wants is for the governance to catch up.