Megan Rapinoe sits down for an exclusive interview with ESPN and discusses the impact Donald Trump's tweets had on the USWNT at the World Cup. (1:21)

There's no debate: as a standalone tournament, the Women's World Cup is a rip-roaring, commercially viable success. The 2019 edition broke women's football viewing records around the world. This happened not only in Europe, where the time zones were friendly and new marks were set in France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and Brazil. In fact, according to FIFA, Brazil set a new global viewing record when 35 million watched the Selecao take on France in the round of 16.

And it's not as if this audience was simply football junkies getting their fix at the end of the European season because there was nothing else on. They had plenty of other options, from the European under-21 championships to the Africa Cup of Nations, from the Copa America to the Gold Cup and Major League Soccer.

The tournament was rightly celebrated across mainstream media, but you can't help but wonder what happens next and whether the right questions are even being asked, not just of FIFA, but of stakeholders in the women's game -- players, fans, associations -- around the world. Because the risk for women's football is that it becomes like most Olympic events: massive audiences and media attention every four years, and then zero on the Richter scale until the next Olympiad. And like many Olympic events, it becomes not a true mass participation sport but a niche pursuit for the privileged elite.

There is a significant window of opportunity for women's football. It requires creative thinking. It requires belief. It requires a willingness to hold institutions, from FIFA to federations, to account. Above all, it requires a clear-eyed realization that the priority must be making the game accessible and sustainable to every woman and girl who wants to play it. With that said, here's my take on the some of the most important issues facing women's football as it looks to build on the successful Women's World Cup.

Q: OK, let's start at the top, with FIFA. Shouldn't we be holding it to account over equal pay and equal prize money?

A: I can see why you would conflate the two issues, since much of the media has. But they're entirely separate.

Equal pay refers to what women's national teams earn relative to their male counterparts. In some federations the women's team is not just more successful, but also generates comparable, if not greater, amounts of money than the men's team. It's not quite "pay" in the sense that these aren't salaried employees, but more like contractors. It's also complicated by the fact that for most of the bigger men's teams, the bulk of the players' earnings comes from their club sides and the national team stipends are basically pocket money, whereas for the women they're often the main (and sometimes only) source of income. So it seems justified and reasonable to treat the men's and women's teams equally.

Norway were among the first federations to do it, and in the U.S., the women's team took legal action last March.

play 0:38 Victorious USWNT parade through New York City Members of the United States women's soccer team celebrated winning the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup with a parade through the streets of New York City

Q: What about prize money? The men's prize money pool in 2018 was $400 million. The women's prize money in 2019 just $30 million.

A: Like I said, that's a totally different issue. The men's World Cup also had 32 teams instead of 24, so on a per-team basis, on average, the men's prize money was 10 times as high. There's a reason for that. (I'll get to it in a minute.) But what many seem to fail to understand is that prize money doesn't go to the players. It goes to the federations that then decide how to allocate it.

Some of it goes to World Cup preparation and expenses -- in the case of less wealthy federations, FIFA covers the cost with an additional pot of $20m -- some of it goes to players and staff. In the case of men's teams there's another massive expense relative to the women: insurance. FIFA pays the cost of insuring players at the World Cup itself, but not for qualifiers and friendlies. But obviously you need to play qualifiers and friendlies to get there.

In any case, there's nothing stopping successful women's teams like the United States from going to their federation and demanding equal pay, as they have done. It shouldn't be tied to prize money.

There's also another, more pertinent, reason why discussion about investing in the women's game shouldn't focus on prize money.

Q: What's that?

A: Increasing prize money would simply steer more cash to those who need it least. The countries who perform best at the Women's World Cups are all wealthy nations with the best-established women's football programs. All eight of the countries with the most registered women footballers reached the round of 16 in France and seven of the eight made the quarterfinals. That shouldn't be surprising: when you have far more players to choose from and more money to train them you usually end up winning.

FIFA's mission is to promote and develop the game worldwide, not to run a commercial enterprise that rewards countries which already enjoy all sorts of advantages. Every dollar spent on prize money is a dollar not going into development, and FIFA's job is primarily development. Roughly a quarter of FIFA member nations (156 of 209) don't even field senior women's teams and it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) for a woman to play organized football at any level.

This gap is why there's such a disconnect in the conversation. The U.S. and Australia, two of the countries that have pushed hardest for increased prize money, are actually two of the ones who, frankly, need it least. The U.S. has more than 1.6 million registered women's footballers, which is roughly 40 percent of all registered women's players in the world. It has Title IX, which ensures opportunities for women to play at university level. These are luxuries most of the world's countries can only dream of.

Demanding more prize money from FIFA smacks of a "first world" attitude if it comes at the expense of development money, especially when these players can (and should) get more pay from their own federations.