Why Rich Countries Excel in Women's Football

In about a week’s time, the Socceroos will step up against Turkey, their first opponents in this year’s World Cup.

Winning their first match will be a big ask; progressing beyond the first round will be a bigger one.

No disrespect to the men, but if it were the Matildas, hopes would be higher.

After reaching the semi-finals in 2023 on home turf and almost going all the way at the Asian Cup, we have lofty expectations for the Tillies that go beyond their No 15 world ranking.

Fans of World Cup co-hosts US and Canada will know the feeling. Both have women’s football teams that conspicuously outshine their male counterparts.

Tiya Banerjee, an economist at the e61 Institute, says these examples are not mere coincidences.

Banerjee in a new report has crunched the numbers and says it is in fact part of a broader pattern that would be familiar to enthusiasts of the beautiful game: that rich countries do better in women’s football.

Which raises the obvious question: why?

Maybe richer countries are just better at sport in general. This first theory falls over immediately.

If being rich by itself was enough to explain a nation’s sporting prowess, the women’s and men’s teams of wealthy countries would be equally successful.

“This means that at least part of their [wealthy countries’] advantage is specific to women’s football, not football in general,” Banerjee says.

Perhaps it’s because richer countries tend to be more progressive and so more supportive of women and girls playing sport, providing a bigger talent pool.

With a lack of data on female participation in sport, Banerjee used female labour force participation as a proxy to test the idea.

She found there was indeed a correlation between the share of women in the workforce and that country’s Fifa world ranking.

But further analysis showed that while gender norms played their part, they only had a “minor effect” on the relationship between a nation’s income and the ranking of its women’s national team.

“Gender norms explain some of it, but not all of it,” Banerjee says.

What explains the phenomenon better is – no surprise – money. Or more specifically, how much a country invests in women’s football.

“That means some of the difference might be how men and women footballers are trained. And here the resources and the training infrastructure of your country matters a lot more for women than for men.”

Public money in the women’s game gives much more bang for buck because it lacks the huge sums of private money associated with the men’s game.

“The privatised, global transfer market is the dominant force in talent development for men’s football,” Banerjee says.

Transfer fees in men’s football reached a record $US13.08bn in 2025. Fees paid in the women’s game also climbed to a record last year.

But at just $US28.6m, “they remain a rounding error in the global market”, Banerjee says.

“That gap matters,” she says.

While clubs scour the world to recruit and then train talented young male players, “nothing like this exists in the women’s game”.

Despite the development in the women’s game over the past two decades, most young players are trained in their own country and play in the local leagues.

Banerjee says she isn’t advocating for public funding for the women’s game at the expense of the men’s.

But “there is every chance that if we fund them both equally, we might get higher returns in women’s football, and some success”.