‘We’re used to scraps’: How $30,000 guarantees will change World Cup players’ lives

A month before this year’s Women’s World Cup, Jamaica’s players posted statements to their social media accounts saying they had not been paid. They also said they had been subjected to “subpar planning”. So dire was the situation that online fundraisers were started to help the team – one by the mother of Jamaica midfielder Havana Solaun.

Despite that uncertainty, the Caribbean nation with a population of less than 3 million didn’t concede a goal in their first three games at this World Cup, including a pair of scoreless draws against world powers France and Brazil, to advance to the knockout stage for the first time.

“I feel so emotional,” Jamaica goalkeeper Becky Spencer said on Wednesday, after the draw that sent Brazil out of the tournament. “We’re a team that goes through so much off the pitch. No one else believes in us. The ones up above us don’t believe in us, but we always believe in ourselves.”

Now, their resilience is literally paying dividends. Jamaica’s progress to the last 16 means each player on the Reggae Girlz is guaranteed to make at least $60,000 in bonus money from Fifa.

Related: Football Daily | South Africa, Italy, agony and ecstasy

Fifa announced before the tournament an increase in performance-based prize money to $110m for the 2023 World Cup, more than tripling the pot from the previous edition. The biggest news was that money would be earmarked for direct payment to players, a solution to a longstanding problem by which some unsavory federations collect payments but do not always distribute them to players.

Each player at the 2023 World Cup is guaranteed $30,000 from Fifa. For many, that is life-changing money. A Fifa report in 2022 found that the average salary of paid women’s players globally is $14,000. A more recent report from world player governing body Fifpro said that 35% of players surveyed during World Cup qualifying considered themselves amateurs. For those players, the Fifa bonuses represent “money that a lot of us … have ever seen playing,” Philippines midfielder Tahnai Annis told the Guardian before the tournament.

“Women’s soccer, for the most part, we don’t play for the money,” Philippines forward Sarina Bolden said in the moments after her team’s elimination. “That’s nice that it’s there, but whether the money was there or not, we are just so used to playing for scraps.”

Jamaican players were hardly the only ones to make their fight with their federation public. Players from Nigeria and South Africa were at odds with their federations over what they said were missing payments and insufficient preparations. South Africa’s World Cup players boycotted a warm-up game as part of the standoff.

Top teams are not immune to the issue, either. Players from England expressed frustration with the bonus structure set up by the FA, outside of the Fifa prize money. Reigning Olympic gold-medalists Canada spent the entire spring threatening a labor strike for back-owed payments. It was only last year that USA players resolved an equal-pay dispute that had lasted six years.

Fifa’s promise to pay players directly is a significant step toward mitigating these problems. There has been skepticism around how and whether players will receive their funds, given the unscrupulous history of some federations, but Fifpro general secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann and Fifa president Gianni Infantino have expressed confidence in the process. They confirmed that there are bank accounts with third-party auditing designated for player funds.

Last October, 150 women’s players around the world signed a letter sent by Fifpro to Fifa asking for equal playing conditions with the men’s World Cup. Baer-Hoffmann called the effort a “culmination of what is maybe the biggest collection of players on an international level certainly in football, maybe in sports.” His colleague, Sarah Gregorius, is Fifpro’s director of global policy & strategic relations for women’s soccer and a former New Zealand international. She knows first hand how important these changes are.

“Many players go into the tournament as either semi-professional or amateur,” Gregorius said. “And so if you’re having a discussion about prize money or conditions, it’s worth pointing out that some of those conditions and the conditions around prize money could be very much life-changing for some of the individuals that could benefit from receiving it. So, we wanted to make sure that before the players entered into any conversation about prize money, that we were also having, in that same conversation, a discussion around making sure that prize money reached players that really needed it.”

Among the teams joining Jamaica in the round of 16 are Nigeria and South Africa. In some cases, players have resigned themselves to the fact that they will never see the backpay they are owed. The promise of direct payments from Fifa however, could be life-changing.

“I think it was only fair to make this available to the players at the World Cup and I think it would mean a lot, speaking from a personal perspective, because for many years we’ve been talking about the issue of having money and being compensated, rightfully so, to our male counterparts,” said South Africa forward Thembi Kgatlana, who scored a stoppage-time goal against Italy to send her team through to the next round.

“I think this announcement couldn’t have come at a better time than going to the World Cup because I think a lot of players, especially those that are not professional, would appreciate having this prize money. It will help them toward changing – some of them are still in school, studying, so to be able to pay off their studies, to help them in school and to help their families. And I think in the long run it will go a long way towards helping them become better professional athletes.”

Baer-Hoffmann said that the next step in improving player welfare is establishing an arbitration system for players and their national teams that mirrors the processes in place for professional clubs. In theory, that would prevent the disputes that were so prominently on display in the buildup to this World Cup.

Programs like Jamaica have been fighting for improvement for over a decade. Cedella Marley, the daughter of Bob Marley, had to personally fund the Jamaican team’s 2015 World Cup qualifying campaign in lieu of federation support. The Reggae Girlz qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 2019. The question has hardly changed for Jamaica or umpteen other programs globally: If they can do this much with the little they have, how good could they be with real investment?

“Everyone is looking at these smaller countries,” Jamaica coach Lorne Donaldson said during the group stage. “Governments and everybody, cut the bullcrap; it’s time to step up and support women’s football.”