The economic gap between male and female Champions League finalists

This Sunday, May 16, the final of the Women's Champions League will be played between Chelsea and Barcelona at the Gamla Ullevi stadium in Göteborg, Sweden. Two weeks later, the men's final will be played at Atatürk in Istanbul, Turkey. The difference in prizes and cost of squads between the men's and women's squads are wide. Here is an analysis of each ending.

Men's Champions League

In numbers, the monetary gains achieved by teams in the men's Champions League are abysmal compared to the same women's competition.

The current season's champion would take 82.4 million euros, in addition to the 3.5 million euros corresponding to qualification for the European Super Cup and another million euros for qualifying for the Club World Cup.

Depending on how he fares in the Super Cup and Club World Cup, the total prize pool could amount to a little more than 92 million euros for the champion. The team that is runner-up would win about 77 million euros.

In terms of squads, both teams are the most expensive in the Premier League. Data from the Transfermarkt platform estimates the cost of Manchester City's workforce at 1,030 million euros, with Kevin De Bruyne earning the most with 23 million euros a year.

On the part of Chelsea, the establishment has a cost of 780 million euros. The player who earns the most is striker Timo Werner with 15 million euros a year.

You can also read: European Super League: The football business model in crisis

Women's Champions League

Currently, the champion team of the competition will access 460,000 euros, the runner-up will get 50,000 euros less. They are 178 times less than what the men's team wins in the same competition.

However, this situation will change from the 2021-22 season.

Through UEFA's new financial distribution model, just for participating in the Women's Champions League, each team will receive 400,000 euros from 2021 to 2025. The champion team will reach 1.4 million euros. In total, there are 4 times more funds allocated with 24 million euros in total prizes. This represents a 4x increase in money over the current edition of the competition. However, with this new model, the champion would earn 58 times less than the men's.

The cost of the entire Barcelona squad amounts to 4.1 million euros in total. However, the team would have reached an agreement with the soccer players to reduce their salary by 70% due to losses due to the pandemic. In contrast, the player who earns the least for Barcelona, Riqui Puig, earns almost the entire cost of the women's team per year.

For Chelsea, the player who wins the most is Sam Kerr. The soccer player receives about 419,000 euros annually. The figure is still lower than that of the lowest-paid footballer on the Chelsea men's squad, Billy Gilmour with 450,000 euros a year.

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The data of the finalist teams in the men's and women's Champions League are in accordance with the conditions of the clubs. All three organizations are in the top 10 of the richest teams in the world according to Forbes magazine.

Barcelona, which has a finalist women's team, is the first most valuable team in the world; Manchester City, which has a male finalist, is sixth; and Chelsea who has a male and female finalist in the seventh.

There is a caveat, and that is that the richest football businessman is Sheik Mansour, owner of Manchester City. Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea, ranks sixth in that ranking.

The organization that won on both fronts is Chelsea, which managed to have a finalist in male and female. Therefore, in sports, there is already a success regardless of what may happen in both finals.

Although for the coming year, the gap in the men's and women's Champions League is going to be reduced, there is still a long way to go to reach the long-awaited equitable payment (or at least similar) for which women's football has fought so hard.