As the U.S. women’s soccer team was celebrating its fourth World Cup title this summer, lobbyists hired by the U.S. Soccer Federation were in Washington, D.C. arguing that the women’s team, which has filed a gender-discrimination suit against the federation, is fairly compensated.

Using a digital presentation prepared with U.S. Soccer, the lobbyists explained that women get far less in World Cup prize money from FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, in part because the 2019 women’s tournament was projected to generate a tiny fraction of the men’s World Cup’s billions in revenue—just $131 million. The lobbying was part of what a U.S. Soccer spokesman at the time called an effort to make sure lawmakers have “accurate information and factual numbers” about the federation’s support for women’s soccer.

There’s just one problem with that revenue figure: It’s wrong.

The “revenue” number actually was an expense. It came from a confusing FIFA financial report that was misreported by Forbes.com last spring. The figure spread through other reports and on social media this summer, as a debate raged about how much women’s players in the U.S. should be paid, and was picked up by U.S. Soccer.

The wrong number reflects a much bigger problem in the discussion about how much the U.S. women’s team and other women’s players around the world should be paid. Because of FIFA’s inscrutable accounting practices, it’s impossible to calculate how much the Women’s World Cup is worth. FIFA itself acknowledges that it doesn’t know the answer.

U.S. fans celebrate during the World Cup final. Photo: jean-paul pelissier/Reuters

Because rights for FIFA competitions, men’s and women’s, are sold as a package, “specific commercial revenues for the FIFA Women’s World Cup cannot be distinguished from the overall commercial revenue from FIFA competitions,” a FIFA spokesman said in an email to The Wall Street Journal.


The result is a vacuum of financial information about a fast-growing sporting event whose prize money and investment are being watched closely by women’s players and supporters around the world.

The 2019 Women’s World Cup global audience exceeded 1 billion, FIFA estimates. That’s about 28% of the viewership for the 2018 men’s tournament, which FIFA’s financial reports say generated more than $5 billion.

In the U.S., the 2019 Women’s World Cup generated nearly $100 million in TV ad sales for Fox and Telemundo, according to Kantar. About 200 countries had licenses to broadcast the Women’s World Cup.

The $131 million figure seems to have first appeared as a “revenue” figure in a Forbes.com column on March 7—coincidentally, the day before the U.S. women’s team sued U.S. Soccer. The Forbes column asserted that the gulf between the winning teams’ prizes—$38 million to the 2018 men’s World Cup winner versus $4 million for the women’s 2019 winner—was justified because of the 2019 Women’s World Cup’s projected $131 million in revenue. It linked to a FIFA financial report.


But the $131 million in the report referred to the projected expenses for the 2019 Women’s World Cup, not revenue. FIFA confirmed that fact in an email to the Journal.

A Forbes spokesman said the original post was taken down Tuesday. In an online post titled “Why FIFA’s Hidden Numbers Tripped Me Up,” Forbes assistant managing editor Mike Ozanian acknowledged the error and its discovery by The Wall Street Journal.

“I made a mistake, a transparent one that was spread widely—with no correction or outreach from FIFA,” Ozanian wrote. “One can only hope that the lawsuit filed by U.S. women’s soccer players will yield some sunshine into a very opaque and powerful sports bureaucracy.”

Many other pundits and outlets repeated the mistake. So did U.S. Soccer.

A U.S. Soccer spokesman said the federation removed the $131 million figure from the lobbyist presentation after being contacted by the Journal. He said U.S. Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro organized a meeting with FIFA president Gianni Infantino and a handful of U.S. women’s players after their Aug. 3 game at the Rose Bowl to provide an opportunity for the two groups to discuss ways to invest more in the women’s game.


FIFA has acknowledged that it doesn’t know how much revenue the Women’s World Cup generated in 2019, but did not provide answers to other questions. Instead, an official wrote in a statement that the “commercial landscape around women’s football has evolved greatly in recent years.”

It continued: “The success of France 2019, particularly in terms of TV ratings, has shown that the Women’s World Cup has now a real commercial potential and FIFA wants to develop a specific commercial strategy for women’s football in order to attract additional funds that can be attributed directly to the women’s game. This new reality will only be reflected in our future financial results.”

The 2019 tournament’s success didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2015 it attracted 764 million in-home TV viewers globally. But the 2019 Women’s World Cup saw a surge of viewers in the soccer hotbeds of Europe and Brazil, and Infantino raved about the tournament in a news conference two days before the final.

Red, white and blue socks are prominently displayed in a store ahead of a ticker-tape parade for the U.S. Women's team. Photo: Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Weeks later, the FIFA Council voted to expand the 2023 Women’s World Cup to 32 teams, matching the 2022 men’s World Cup in size. Earlier this month Infantino visited Donald Trump at the White House. Trump said the two spoke about making women’s soccer more equitable, and Infantino promised that FIFA soon would roll out initiatives for the women’s game.


The 2018 men’s World Cup generated nearly $5.4 billion in total revenue, FIFA’s 2018 financial report says. But about $3 billion of that came from the sale of broadcast rights, and the right to broadcast the Women’s World Cup is included in many of the men’s World Cup deals.

It’s not clear how, if broadcast rights are bundled, FIFA is able to produce a revenue figure for the men’s World Cup but not the women’s tournament.

FIFA’s statement said that in previous deals, media rights were sold in packages that used the “unique attraction” of the men’s World Cup to guarantee exposure for other events, “such as women’s, youth, futsal and beach soccer tournament that wouldn’t have been broadcasted in most parts of the world without such approach.”

Alex Morgan, right, of the U.S. fights for the ball with the Netherlands' Stefanie Van Der Gragt during the Women's World Cup final. Photo: David Vincent/Associated Press

The 2018 men’s World Cup’s global audience was massive: 3.572 billion including out-of-home and streaming viewers. But it has been stagnant in recent years. The Women’s World Cup’s audience has more than doubled since 2011.

Brand Finance, a brand-valuation consultancy based in the U.K., documented the growth in that market by comparing the TV audience for two teams that made parallel trips through the 2018 and 2019 tournaments: England’s men and England’s women.

The women’s semifinal match drew 11.7 million viewers in the U.K. That was about 44% of the 26.5 million viewers that watched the English men play in the semifinals of the tournament a year earlier, according to Bryn Anderson, Brand Finance director of sports services.

Share Your Thoughts Should U.S. men’s and women’s player pay be tied to revenue, based on team results or determined some other way? Join the discussion.

Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com