Nayara Batschke |
Bangkok (EFE).- The Women’s Soccer World Cup will start on July 20 in New Zealand with the challenge of becoming the most egalitarian edition ever seen. But 40 days after its start, some setbacks, such as the television broadcast fiasco, still threaten more forceful steps towards complete equity.
For the first time since the first official edition of the championship, in 1991, 32 national teams will compete in the Women’s World Cup, the same number that hosted the Men’s World Cup in Qatar last year.
FIFA has confirmed its decision to equalize the conditions and prizes in the women’s World Cup with respect to the men’s and has announced that each player who wins will receive 250,000 euros, while the team that wins gold will get four million.
All players participating in the tournament will also have guaranteed salaries, an initiative with which FIFA “hopes to set a precedent in the sector, ranging from the media to governments,” according to a statement.
Everything indicates that this historic edition is going to break records also on the grass.
Over a million entries
With just over a month to go before the initial whistle, the FIFA president, the Swiss Gianni Infantino, announced that more than one million tickets to attend the matches have already been sold, which exceeds the total sales registered in the World Cup in France 2019 and is another “historical milestone”.
“As I write this, 1,032,884 tickets have been sold. This means that with over a month to go, we have surpassed the sell-out numbers for France 2019, which means that Australia and New Zealand 2023 is on track to become the most attended FIFA Women’s World Cup ever.” Infantino said in a statement.
“The future is women,” he said.
No deal for broadcast
But not everything in the field is flowers. With only a few weeks to go before the biggest event in global women’s football, some European countries, including Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, have not yet reached an agreement to broadcast the matches, which could threaten the reach of the broadcasts.
A few days ago, FIFA’s director of media relations, Bryan Swanson, denounced on his Twitter account that some European television channels have offered values of only between 1% and 3% for the broadcast rights regarding the World Cup. of Qatar 2022.
For this reason, he made a public appeal for “justice and respect” and recalled that “more income” translates into “more investment in women’s football.”
This Friday, internal FIFA sources have confirmed to EFE that the negotiations are still underway and expressed that the arguments presented by the television channels for the low offers “are not very consistent.”
They added that FIFA “is taking great steps to promote the sport”, but the “support and commitment of all sectors” is needed.
Infantino himself has repeatedly criticized the stations of five of the most footballing countries in the world – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy – for offering “between 10 and 100 times less” to broadcast the women’s World Cup compared to the men’s tournament .
The Swiss leader even went so far as to threaten a television blackout in those countries in the event that the European stations do not offer “a fair agreement”.
Worry
The urgency of the matter has led the governments of these five countries to issue a joint statement in which they express their “concern” about the impasse and urge FIFA and broadcasters to “quickly reach an agreement” that guarantees the transmission.
“We are convinced that the media coverage of the Women’s World Cup will be decisive in improving the global visibility of women’s sport in our European countries,” the note underlines.
“We consider that it is our responsibility to fully mobilize all interested parties so that they quickly reach an agreement,” he stresses.
And it is that the impact of the absence of a clear resolution on the possible broadcast of the matches is already being felt among the fans: there are few or no announcements, references to the coverage or special calls for viewers.
Instead, the potential audience and existing fans in those countries have been left in a limbo where doubts reign. In the end, for millions of fans, television will be the only opportunity to follow one of the biggest global sporting events that will take place on the other side of the world.