The Football Association (FA), English soccer’s governing body, has announced that the prize fund for the Women’s FA Cup competition has been doubled for the 2023-24 edition.
The previous £3 million ($3.681 million) total prize pot has been increased to £6 million, courtesy of a £3 million investment approved by the FA’s board of directors.
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While the first two rounds of the competition, comprised of sides that are not fully professional, have been excluded from the boost in prize money, each of the six subsequent rounds, including the final, will see its per-match prize pot more than doubled.
This means that if a club from the top-tier professional Women’s Super League (WSL) goes on to win the cup, it will gain as much as £814,000 as WSL sides enter the fourth round of the competition.
More than half of that would come from winning the final, which alone grants £430,000 to the victorious side and £108,000 to the losing team.
Baroness Sue Campbell, director of women’s football at The FA, stated: “Doubling the prize money showcases the FA’s clear commitment to the future of the Women’s FA Cup and will help us maintain its stature as the most prestigious domestic women’s cup competition in the world.
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By GlobalData“Ultimately, we want the women’s competition to receive the same prize money as the men’s, and this new increase is a positive step in the direction of achieving that long-term ambition.”
This is the second straight year that the FA has increased the prize money allocated to the Women’s FA Cup, with the governing body increasing the total prize pool from around £400,00 up to £3 million ahead of the 2022-23 edition focusing on the earlier rounds of the competition where now it is focused later.
The 2022-23 Women’s FA Cup final set a world record attendance for a women’s domestic club soccer match, with 77,390 in attendance at Wembley Stadium in London to see Chelsea beat Manchester United.
It smashed the previous record of 60,739, which had stood since March 17, 2009, when Atletico Madrid lost to FC Barcelona at the Estadio Wanda Metropolitano.
The record for a women’s soccer match still remains at 91,648, the tally that watched Barcelona vs Wolfsburg in the UEFA Women's Champions League semi-final first-leg in April 2022.
