When fans started realizing the unthinkable – that FIFA had split up group tickets at the Women's World Cup and scattered fans around the stadiums away from loved ones – the accusations of sexism came quickly.

"Just wondering, would the FIFA Women’s World Cup ticketing disaster be happening if this was the men’s World Cup?" one fan tweeted rhetorically.

"And you know this would NEVER happen at the men's games," another fan wrote. "Can you imagine the outrage? The safety issues? Why is it ok for my friends and I to be separated because it's a women's match?"

"Do you hate women?" another angry fan tweeted. "Cannot imagine this BS happening during the Men's World Cup."

It's still unclear how FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, managed such a massive blunder. A FIFA statement to Yahoo Sports said officials are still in communication with the local organizing committee to assess "the scope of this matter."

But whether or not it had to do with FIFA caring less about the women's game and treating the Women's World Cup as an afterthought, it's easy to see why fans think so.

Whether it's inappropriate comments from the president of FIFA about how the women should play in tighter shorts, or FIFA paying the women small fractions of what it pays men, or giving the women worse conditions for tournaments, FIFA's past is filled with instances of double standards and sexism that, so far, haven't been proven wrong.

"FIFA doesn't really show that they care about the women's game," said U.S. winger Megan Rapinoe in October during World Cup qualifying. "That's not to say they don't do anything. They do things for the women's game, but in the way they truly care about the men's game, they don't truly care about the women's game."

View photos The mission of FIFA is supposedly to promote the sport of soccer, but that doesn't usually seem to extend to the women's game. (Reuters) More

One obvious way to see that is through the prize money it offers for its flagship events, the senior World Cups on the men's and women's sides.

At last year's World Cup, the French men's team that lifted the trophy earned $38 million. Meanwhile, whichever women's team wins the trophy this summer will get only $4 million, which is roughly 11 percent of what the men earned.

The disparities are more galling when you look at the losers. When the U.S. women won in 2015 after a seven-game gauntlet, they got around $2 million. When the U.S. men's team got knocked out in the round of 16 after four games the year before, they got $8 million. That's right: The losing U.S. men's team got four times what the winning U.S. women's team made.

FIFA doubled its total prize money for the Women's World Cup from 2015 to this year's edition, now offering $30 million for all teams. But it also raised the prize money for the men to $400 million, so much that the gap between the prizes for men and women actually got bigger.

"They're probably looking for pats on the back for the increase, but they're not going to get it here," Rapinoe said after the prizes were announced. "I mean, until they're really going to take meaningful steps to truly show they care about the women's game in a deeper way, I don't know. $15 million is nothing to them."

Indeed, FIFA's rainy day reserves currently have around $3 billion – yes, that's billions with a "B." The reason FIFA hasn't increased its women's soccer funding has nothing to do with whether or not the non-profit organization can afford it – it's clearly a choice FIFA has made.

FIFA often cites the staggeringly high revenue that the men's World Cup brings in as the reason the prize money is so large for the men. But no one knows how much revenue the Women's World Cup earns because FIFA doesn't have separate revenue streams for each tournament.

Instead, FIFA signs sponsors for both World Cups as a bundle, and then FIFA apparently assumes those sponsors care about only the men's World Cup.