Prize money for AFC Women's Asian Cup: A giant leap forward but falls short

In a 1st, top 4 teams to get prize money but it's way short of men's football

In her youth, Sujata Kar rarely thought she’d get paid to play football. It was a privilege to be considered for the national team, the state team, or even for the club sides she represented in Kolkata. She was employed by the Income Tax department, which gave her paid leave to travel for the national and the state camps, and the freedom to build a team around her for the Kolkata league. It was the benefit of the public sector employment system — a sports quota job. 

“When we went for tournaments, even international ones, we never even thought there’d be prize money,” she says. “One went to gain exposure, to play against great players and for the trophy.” When Kar was playing for India in the early 2000s, this was also true for other countries across the world. 

Times have changed. In India, sports quota jobs for women footballers have dwindled to the point of none, but in many parts of the world, huge corporate investment has poured into women’s football. Take, for instance, the Australian women’s football team, which is, for sponsorship reasons, now referred to as the Commonwealth Bank Matildas. This has also boosted the growth of the sport itself. And the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), after decades of resistance, seems to have paid heed.

The Women’s Asian Cup 2022, kicking off in India on January 20, will offer prize money to its top four teams for the first time in the tournament’s 47-year history. "In line with the AFC's mission to raise the standard of its competitions, the champion of the AFC Women's Asian Cup will receive a prize purse of $1 million, while the runners-up and losing semi-finalists will earn $500,000 and $150,000, respectively,” the AFC said in an official statement.

Speaking to the media in a pre-tournament presser, West Ham United’s Australian goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold said it was a hugely progressive move by the confederation, albeit not one that the players had concerned themselves with. “To be honest, we haven’t had many conversations about this in camp, focused as we are on just winning the title, but it has been a talking point for a few years now, and it’s great to see the AFC take this huge step forward for women’s football in the continent.”

The immediate thought is to compare these figures to the men’s tournament; and they pale and wilt.

At the 2019 Men’s Asian Cup, Qatar, the winners, received $5 million, while runners-up Japan got $3 million. Each of the 24 participating teams, India included, received $200,000 just for competing. These comparisons, though inevitably, always spark debate. Those in favour of equal pay argue about the discrepancy and the sexism of which it reeks. Those in favour of the status quo question the eyeballs on the women’s game, the crowds, sponsorships, television audiences they bring in, and ask why they should be remunerated the same for contributing what is considered less. If the former is a simplistic view of the situation, the latter is classic neoliberal economics, confusing the need for equity with the requirement of profit.

A key point to consider here is what the money is used for — not player pay, but game development at the grassroots. What a lack of prize money (and this kind of top-down distribution), therefore, does in reality is increase the gap between teams in the continent itself. By awarding money to four of 12 participating nations, the AFC has essentially put itself on a shooting platform of sorts. Japan, Australia, China and South Korea are widely regarded as the heavyweights of the women’s game in Asia and an added incentive of funds from competition will undoubtedly filter through to their grassroots, thus increasing the gap when compared to under-supported nations in the continent. Many can’t even boast of massive private corporate sponsorships in their league and grassroot programmes — India among them. 

India’s women footballers, currently riding a wave of popularity and support, know the reality that exists for them once the cameras have, quite literally, gone away.

The Asian Cup will be televised in India for the first time — on Eurosport and JioTV. But as recently as November, when the team played World No 7, Brazil, the momentous game was shown live on the federation’s YouTube channel. So were the women’s senior Nationals later that month and games from the Indian Women’s League (IWL) in the years past. It is also necessary to point out that the IWL, the only professional club competition for women, inaugurated in 2017, hasn’t been held since February 2020. In the same time, the federation has managed to host the men's Indian Super League twice, the I-League 2nd Division twice and the I-League once (the 2021-22 season has been postponed by a month, after a round of fixtures played, due to surge in cases with the bio bubble).

Oinam Bembem Devi, one of only two women footballers to have won the Arjuna award and the first to win the Padma Shri last year, pointed to the need to do more. "Stakeholders, private companies, should take more interest in women's football so that girls are encouraged and motivated to take the sport as a career, just like the men,” she says. “If they sponsor more tournaments, clubs, even at the state level, it will at the very least give the girls more game time and create more earning avenues.”

At the base level though, even now, there is genuine concern about a lack of actual competition, mostly because of a lack of investment in the grassroots of the sport. All ISL and I-League clubs are required to have a women’s team, but in reality, few do. When, and if, state or national tournaments are announced, the teams are hastily put together. A club owner, who declined to be named said that it made no sense to put together a full women’s team, with a coaching and scouting unit and a youth academy through the year, if there was no prospect of there being any return on their investment — via game time and airwaves. Which is a backwards way of saying no money, no problems.  

Kar is employed by Kolkata police now, and scouts and coaches girls at the age group levels. She points out the problems an overall lack of investment creates in more stark terms. “Girls don’t see a future in the sport,” she rues. “There’s hardly any money in it. No one wants to employ women... well, not to play football, sadly. Hopefully the eyeballs from the Asian Cup can translate to more.”