4000 euros. A petitesse in football. Or not.
Lionel Messi from Barcelona earns so much in less than half an hour. The players from Spain's first league, however, is about 4000 euros a year. So much lies between their requirement for the minimum income for a part-time contract and the corresponding offer of the clubs. Now they have announced their last means of pressure: strike. From mid-November the ball should rest.
It was preceded by one-year negotiations with 18 collective bargaining rounds. A minimum wage of 16,000 euros per year for full-time contracts could have been agreed, they say. The legal minimum wage in Spain is 12,600 euros.
The crux lies in the part-time contracts, which operate primarily with the poorer of the 16 top division clubs. 12,000 euros annual rate demand the unions, 8,000 offer the clubs.
4000 euros, plus 35 percent social security, sometimes 22 players in the squad: a total of about 120,000 euros more or less. For women, such sums make a difference, at least at the club level. Unlike the national teams, where in particular the American players compete with Megan Rapinoe for a fair distribution of purses of Fifa and associations, there is little to distribute in a semi-professional league.
Although the women in Spain have recently caused quite a few exclamation points: Last season, there was the international attendance record in the match between Atlético Madrid and FC Barcelona (60,739 fans, the entrance fee was free for members and cost otherwise five euros), this year you will cash for the first time the television rights (a good 200,000 euros per club) and the league has a paying main sponsor. All this has already been provided for salary increases of 44 and 30 percent in the past two seasons, it is said by the club association. Most of the players earned anyway over the sums now discussed. The others, however, are usually students or jobben nebenbei. Overall, the operation is still in deficit, they say.
Salvador Belda, President of the women's section of Valencia CF, estimated his annual losses at 30 to 40 percent of the budget: without the parent club, that would be unthinkable. Twelve clubs are part of a first division or second division of men and are thus protected. The other four are not. "If we meet the demands now, some clubs will not be able to pay their salaries in January," said Lola Romero, Atlético's president of the women's section.
Winning costs money
The conflict of interest is representative of the question of the future in many countries. Should women's football be unabashedly subsidized by the men's clubs or defend its independence? Even with relatively little effort, the big football brands have transferred the capitalist logic of men's football to the sport of women: It wins who invested the most money.
Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Atlético, Olympique Lyon, VfL Wolfsburg and Arsenal are the names of seven of the eight current Champions League quarter-finalists. Traditional teams such as Turbine Potsdam in Germany or the 1st FFC Frankfurt will be relegated, despite all the merits of the development of the so ridiculed sport.
In Spain, the announced strike of these days is a big topic, and that alone can be seen as an achievement: after all, the situation of the players are talking, who try to live like professionals, but not paid as such. Like many colleagues from other, less glamorous sports, where gender equality prevails, because nobody has anything. Football is different, but there are no simple truths: Who helps a professional league if it can not finance itself?
"Grow gradually"
Even in the US, with significantly higher attendance rates than in Europe, two attempts by a professional league had to be stopped because of money problems. Since 2013, the third runs, he currently consists of nine teams, the minimum wage is the equivalent of 14,800 euros a year, the salaries of local national team takes over the association. In Germany, professionals and amateurs co-exist, in England the clubs have to offer their players at least 16-hour contracts.
"Not too fast approach, but gradually grow," wants in Spain, the Club Association President Rubén Alcaine. "I support the demands of the players, but I also understand the clubs," said national coach Jorge Vilda. "It seems to me that both are right," confirms Vero Boquete, former captain of the Spanish national team, in her newspaper column for "El País". Both sides should not forget what a long way they had gone together, when women's football did not interest anyone else: "Our connection must be stronger than the connection that was then made with any third party."
These third parties are, for example, the Spanish Federation, which was last the competence over the women's game operation of the league back. He invited the parties to the summit meeting on 6 November.