Despite the women’s game drawing greater levels of publicity and gaining more funding than in previous years, the position of women within football is significantly lower than that of men.

The pay gap between the two counterparts is ridiculous and they bear no comparison to one and other, despite the same level of play. The top earner within the women’s game, Olympique Lyonnais’ Alex Morgan, earns $650,000 per annum. However, the top earner within the men's game,Lionel Messi of Barcelona, earns a whopping $111 million dollars a year!

A report carried out by FIFpro in 201, revealed that 88% of players within the women's super league (WSL) shockingly earn less than £18,000 per year, which is 0.7% lower than the average man in the premier league, which is £2.6 million per annum.

So why the humongous gap for our worlds best football players?

The clear pay gap within the sport is down to a number of reasons. One of these being the lack of investment and sponsorship in women’s football.

The women’s FA cup only gained sponsorship in 2015 from the Scottish energy company, SSE, which became one of the biggest sponsorship deals in Women’s footballing history. However, despite a great step forward in terms of more investment for the female game, there were two steps back as the prize money in 2015 was revealed as a mere £8,600 for the FA cups winning team. In mediocre comparison to the successful men’s winning team gaining a stupendous £1.8 million.

In 2019, Barclays revealed that they would be investing a “multi-million” pound sponsorship deal into the top tier of women’s football in the UK, the WSL. Contracts like these are ones that will aid the closure of the colossal gender pay gap within football.

It can be argued that the lack of spectators at female games is the main contributing factor for the pay gap. However, it is a vicious cycle and this lack of spectators comes from a lack of advertising which stripped back, is due to the lack of investment.

The new Barclays investment for the WSL, has hopefully inspired other businesses to potentially get behind the women’s game and pump more funds into it. With more companies hopefully following the lead of Barclays, we will see a huge increase in the number of spectators at our women’s games and following the example of European giants, Juventus.

Juventus Women played  at the Allianz Stadium on Sunday 24th March for the first ever time, with a total of 39,027 people coming out to see the league leaders play and successfully conquer second-placed Fiorentina 1-0.Successes like this stemmed from women being given the opportunity to play in big arenas such a the Allianz stadium.

Following the success and amazing reception of the women in the Allianz arena, more businesses will realise the potential within the women’s game and invest more money in it.

Kadelia Wilkins, a Crystal Palace ladies youth player stated that she believed “If we got the same publicity and funding as the men's games I think that women's football could progress more and we would have much more live coverage of the games from the lowest league to the very top leagues.” A similarity between the two genders is all that it desired, and while that change will not happen overnight, there are still steps we can all take to get inches closer to equality in football.