The Problem With Wimmins' Football Is Wimmins

Exactly like the WNBA

Should women be playing football? Sure. Even, of course. They, just like us brute males, should be allowed to do anything that comes into their pretty little heads. This always has been, after all, the English Settlement. We have a few - a few, and only important ones - telling us all what we may not do and after that we all get to go do whatever.

Yes, I know, the clipboard wielders try to advance into such space all the time but that still is the basic assumption of the society, however much it’s breached.

So, women play football now. There are even professional teams of women footballers and damn good luck to ‘em too says I.

And that’s it really. There is no more.

Except here come the clipboard wielders:

The average annual salary for a female professional football player globally is $10,900 (£8,400, A$17,000, €9952), says Fifa’s annual report on the women’s game, a figure skewed by a small number of top clubs.

Among the teams Fifa designated as Tier 1, which includes 41 clubs from 16 countries, the average salary was around $24,030, although 16 of those top clubs paid an average gross salary of over $50,000, according to the Setting the Pace, Fifa Benchmarking Report on Women’s Football released on Monday.

The highest of those salaries was approximately $120,000. The average gross salary, however, at Tier 2 and 3 clubs was $4,361 and $2,805, respectively.

Well, OK. Football’s a tournament sport, aha, aha - which in economics means something specific. Wages will end up following a power law. The tippy top make out like bandits and the bottom level tends to have to pay to get a game. Just like men’s football in fact. There are those few hundreds making millions a year and hundreds of thousands in England alone having to pay a fee for the hire of the pitch to get a game. Ho well.

Music, acting, there are many areas of life that work this way too. Ho well.

But clipboards:

“There is a need for players of a certain standard to earn a reliable and sufficient income solely from playing, reducing their dependence on secondary sources of income and allowing them to dedicate the time required to play at a higher level,” the report said.

What need? What requirement? I’m wholly unaware of any ethical or moral insistence that the world owes you a living for you getting to do what you enjoy.

But clipboards. Male soccer players - at that top - get pots and pots so where’s the women’s money then? But the world doesn’t work that way at all. It also shouldn’t.

The specific reason the women aren’t making those pots and pots is:

The Fifa report also highlighted attendances as an area of concern.

While Arsenal hosted Manchester United in front of a Women’s Super League record 60,160 fans at Emirates Stadium last year, Tier 1 teams averaged 1,713 fans, while Tiers 2 and 3 were 480 and 380, respectively.

Arsenal were among the 23% of clubs that played some matches at a stadium other than their regular ground, playing five home league games at the Emirates and the rest at Meadow Park, which has a seating capacity of 1,700 and total capacity of 4,500.

No bugger goes to watch the women’s game. Therefore there’s no money in the women’s game. And that’s it.

As that American comedian said about women’s basketball. Hey, he might even make the effort to go see a few games himself but only if the female fans did their bit by turning up occasionally too.

The problem with wimmins - as opposed to women’s - football is simply wimmins. There’s no money in it because wimmins will shout about it but resolutely refuse to turn up - or more accurately, pay - for it. If there’s no money coming in then there’s none to pay out.

As it happens I used to be a keen musician. Good enough to occasionally get paid to play. Back in the days when every dance had a dance band I could have - and possibly would have - held down a living on a second trumpet stand. As it turned out I wasn’t good enough to make a living at it when I was of the right sort of age. Not enough people came to hear middling dance bands play that is.

Ho well. The loss to economics of my subsequent career is matched by that gain to music…..