Lionesses wages: what England match fees are worth compared to WSL salaries

In September 2020 the Football Association made an announcement that sounded, on the surface, like a clean victory: England’s senior women’s and men’s teams were being paid the same match fees for representing their country. The policy had actually been in place since January of that year — the FA had just chosen not to publicise it until after the men’s summer tournament cycle had concluded.

Six years later, the claim has entered the public record as settled. Google it and you will find it repeated in articles, social posts and broadcast commentary: the Lionesses are paid equally. The claim is broadly true. But what it actually means depends heavily on what you compare.

The £2,000 match fee

The standard England appearance payment — for men and women — was reported at around £2,000 per game, according to BBC analysis published after the Lionesses won Euro 2022. Multiply that by a full international season of perhaps ten to twelve caps and an England regular might earn £20,000 to £24,000 from international appearances in a busy year.

That figure, the BBC noted, is a “consolation” — equal pay in one narrow band within a sport where the wider financial picture is anything but.

The FA did not disclose whether the equality extended beyond the per-game fee to include training-camp stipends, image-rights arrangements, or commercial appearance payments. Public reporting has focused on the headline match fee.

Where equality stops: tournament bonuses

The cleanest illustration of the gap came during Euro 2022. The Lionesses were reported to have earned a bonus of £55,000 per player for winning the tournament, producing a total pot of about £1.3m across a 23-player squad. Had the England men’s team won the men’s European Championship the previous summer, the squad would reportedly have shared about £5m.

The Guardian noted in its 2020 report that “bonuses at major tournaments remain far apart,” and that remained the case two years later. Equal match fees do not mean equal tournament bonuses. The FA has not publicly equalised the two, and neither the FA nor the players’ union has disclosed whether negotiations on bonus parity have taken place since.

What a WSL player actually earns

The average Women’s Super League salary was approximately £47,000 a year, according to BBC analysis of published accounts from seven of the 12 WSL clubs for the 2021–22 season. That figure is not a pure player average — it includes wages for associated staff — but it is the most authoritative publicly available benchmark.

The range was wide. At the top end, the BBC reported that England captain Leah Williamson had earned about £200,000 in club wages in the same period. At Manchester City, a women’s wage bill of £3.3m spread across 44 players and staff produced an average approaching £75,000 per person.

At the lower end, Reading — the only WSL club not backed by a Premier League men’s side at that time — had a manager who publicly stated the team could not compete on wages. The Telegraph reported in May 2023 that six Premier League-affiliated WSL clubs had spent £33m on their women’s operations in the preceding year, while spending £186m on agents’ fees for men’s player transactions in the same period. The structural financial gap between the men’s and women’s domestic games remains orders of magnitude larger than the equal-match-fee policy addresses.

By the 2024–25 season, the picture had shifted somewhat. The WSL agreed a record £65m five-year domestic television deal with Sky Sports and the BBC in October 2024, replacing an earlier arrangement worth roughly £8m a year. Barclays had already doubled its sponsorship rights fee in a 2021 renewal, and the league’s operating company — NewCo, formally WSL Football — had signed additional partnerships with Nike, British Gas, Apple and Mercedes-Benz. All of this implies rising club revenues and, over time, rising player wages, though individual salary data remains private.

How the equal-pay deal came about

Unlike the United States women’s national team, which pursued a high-profile equal-pay lawsuit against US Soccer from 2019 to 2022, the Lionesses did not litigate. The FA’s 2020 equal-pay announcement was presented as a governing-body initiative rather than a concession extracted by a player dispute. The policy was backdated to January 2020 and made public in September of that year.

There is no public evidence of formal collective bargaining or a player strike driving the outcome. Public statements at the time characterised it as a milestone the FA had chosen to reach. That does not mean players did not advocate for it privately, but the documentary record is thin.

The absence of a public campaign may explain why the equal-pay policy stopped at match fees. Tournament bonuses remain negotiated separately, and the FA’s disclosure around the policy has been limited to the announcement itself. Six years on, the governing body has not published further detail.

What this means for a Lioness

For an England regular, the financial picture has three layers: a WSL club salary, England match fees, and commercial income from endorsements and sponsorships. The £2,000 match fee is equal to the men’s — and, for a player on the lower end of the WSL pay scale, not trivial. Ten caps in a year adds about £20,000, which is roughly 43 per cent of the average WSL salary.

For the highest-paid Lionesses, the match fee is a smaller share of total income. Endorsement income — which has grown substantially since the Euro 2022 win — is harder to quantify from public accounts and varies widely by player. Club wages remain the dominant income source for most squad members.

The equal-pay headline is accurate as far as it goes. It covers match fees and, according to the FA’s statement, match bonuses for representing England. It does not cover the tournament bonus gap. It does not narrow the gulf between Premier League and WSL club wages. And it does not, on its own, make a Lioness’s total football income comparable to that of her male counterpart.

Six years after the policy was introduced, England women’s and men’s players receive the same money for pulling on the shirt. The reasons the rest of the pay gap persists have less to do with the FA and more to do with the economics of club football — broadcast income, commercial revenue, and attendance — where the gap, despite recent growth, remains very large indeed.