Karren Brady has ripped into the Football Association following West Ham arriving in the Womens’ Cup Final at Wembley’s Womens’ Team arriving in the Womens’ Cup Final.
For the prize money to the winning team is a miserly £25k despite the popularity of the event growing year on year since its inception.
And to be truthful the Hammers vice chairman has nailed it and is spot on.
Even though the Final has attracted 15,000 in its first year to an expected near 50k for the Hammers v Man City Final,neither team takes a penny of the gate.
The clubs make next to nothing and that is scandalous – almost as bad as punishing players with £30k fines for alleged offensive language against doping officials as is the case of course with Robert Snodgrass.
It’s all well and good the FA talking about promoting the womens’ game and singing about its growing following – it’s quite another to support it with hard cash.
Come to that, where does, all that money actually go! A mystery.
Brady also complains that the club was given a paltry 1,200 tickets until she approached the FA for more.
Sadly that’s spinning things a bit as Claret and Hugh was given a clear FA statement saying the 1200 was an initial amount but more would be made available until demand was exhausted!
Writing in her Sun column Brady snaps: “Along with the trophy and medals, the FA are giving just about enough to buy a new Mini, a dress and a hair-do.
“Not each, no fear. They’d all have to cram aboard because the £25,000 cash is the amount the winning team get.
The women’s prize money is insulting and, making matters worse, neither club gets a penny of the gate receipts, which last season set records with a 45,423 crowd for the Arsenal- Chelsea final.
What do the runners-up receive? Enough for a skateboard each.
Look, I don’t want to make this all about equality for women, at least in the context of football rewards.
It’s also unrealistic to compare women’s tennis with football. At Wimbledon, the prize money is the same for both sexes, even though the men play best of five sets and the women best of three, causing regular moans from male chauvinists.
Scheduling the women’s final on the same day as a Premier League match was asking for trouble which duly arrived with City and West Ham playing home games on the same day.
Our kick-off is at 3pm while City’s is at 12.30.
Southampton when asked, refused to kick off at 12.30 instead of 3pm so at least our supporters had a chance of watching both matches.
As for tickets, it is travesty that we were allocated a paltry 1,200 until I spoke to Martin Glenn, who kindly gave us the allocation we wanted.
It appears only 800 west ham fans turned up for the semi final I don’t know what all the fuss is about an extra 400 seems fair 50% extra is a brilliant amount
Have to say on this I agree with her, the women now seem to be putting a huge effort into their professional football careers and having to struggle just to get by. Having watched a few of the international matches the quality seems to be steadilly increasing, with the money awash in the mens game I don’t see any reason why some of that shouldn’t be made available to run the womens clubs. Its easy to say that mens football is what attracts the viewers and the associated advertising revenue but thats short term thinking, as we have seen with tennis if you improve the quality of the product the viewing figures increase it just needs a few star players to sprinkle some stardust to create a broader demographic as happened with the Williams sisters. Hopefully things will change and the women will be able to create a career out of football, good luck to them.