FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke has said that women football players should not expect to be paid the same as men for many World Cups to come, claiming that any comparisons between the two tournaments was not worth debating.
Valcke, who would conduct the 2015 women's World Cup draw on Saturday, noted that women would see prize money jump from the 10 million dollars at the last World Cup in Germany to 15 million dollars next year in Canada but it would be a long, long time before there would be the same type of pay parity that women enjoy at the tennis grand slams.
He said that the comparison between the prize money of the men's World Cup in Brazil to the women's World Cup in Canada, is not even a question he would answer because it is nonsense. He added that they played 30th men's World Cup in 2014 and they are playing the seventh women's tournament so things could grow step-by-step, Stuff.co.nz reported.
Valcke said that they are still another 23 World Cups before potentially women should receive the same amount as men, adding that the World Cup pays for all the 20 tournaments FIFA organises, the under-17, under-20 men and women, club football, beach soccer all is financed by the men's World Cup which brings directly 4.5 billion dollars to the football governing body.
The women's game continues to grow in popularity with next year's finals featuring 24 nations, up from 16 in 2011, for the June 5 to July 6 at six venues across Canada, with the Canadian Soccer Association expecting attendance to come in a close to 1.5 million.
Still women's soccer has been a tough sell.
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When Valcke took over as FIFA's television rights and marketing director in 2003, one of his first projects was to see what appetite there was women's soccer as a standalone product, but the results were not encouraging.
Valcke said that he went to various companies around the world trying to sell women's football on its own out of the men's events and he failed.