By David Owen
February 12 – Women footballers are preparing to take centre-stage at the World Cup in Canada this Summer, but a new report shows they remain on the margins of the sport’s power game.
Women still have only the most peripheral of roles in football’s power game, comprising just 8% of executive committee/board members of national football associations, according to a new FIFA survey. What is more, representation is lowest in the two regions where the sport has its deepest roots: Europe and South America.
Within the CONMEBOL region covering South America, women account for only one in 50, or 2%, of appointees to member association executive committees; in the UEFA zone, covering Europe, the corresponding figure is just 6%. These two areas have, between them, won every single FIFA World Cup since Uruguay emerged as inaugural champions in 1930.
The text accompanying the data characterised this level of representation as “very low”. The figures were said to underline “the difficulties for women in reaching key senior positions in member association structures”. They also showed that this difficulty was “greater in the more established member associations than in developing football associations”.
Published with less than four months to go before women footballers take centre-stage at the Women’s World Cup in Canada, the 84-page survey was produced by the CIES Football Observatory using data collected in 2014 by FIFA via an online survey. A total of 177 member associations provided answers, amounting to an 85% response rate. The lowest response rate, at 74%, came from member associations in the region covered by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
The survey found that there were more than 30 million women players worldwide, over half in the United States and Canada. Annual investment in women’s football by member associations which took part in the survey was put at $156.6 million, ie around $5 per player. Just under $100 million of this investment was made in Europe.
Government investment was put at $18.5 million, with private sponsorship totalling $5.4 million. Not a single member association in South America had a women’s football sponsor. The best result in this category was reported by associations in Oceania, fully half of which have women’s football sponsors.
Oceania also had much the highest proportion of countries where football for girls is included in the school curriculum, at 90% against just 10% in South America. There were said to be more than 76,000 female referees, not far off 50,000 of whom are based in the USA and Canada.
The survey may be accessed here: http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/footballdevelopment/women/news/newsid=2522643/index.html
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