Manchester United call for European-wide hard salary cap in women’s game

The head of group planning at Manchester United, Francesca Whitfield, has called for a European-wide hard salary cap in women’s football to improve competitiveness.

There are no financial regulations in the Women’s Super League apart from a soft salary cap.

Speaking at the first Women’s Football Summit held by the European Club Association, Whitfield said: “We should be looking to adopt financial regulation much earlier in the women’s game than we did in the men’s game to stop that gap widening.

“Currently in the WSL we have a salary cap system which is 40% of revenue but that includes parent club income, meaning the larger clubs naturally benefit from shirt deals on the men’s side and that’s creating a gap that is affecting the product. This can’t be something that we just address domestically, this has to be something we address on a European level.”

Uefa’s financial fair play rules were introduced in 2009 when the governing body discovered more than half of European clubs had financial losses and 20% were believed to be in financial danger. The rules allow men’s clubs to incur losses of €60m over a three-year period and commit to a spending cap on wages, transfers, and agents’ fees to 70% of total revenue by 2025-26. It was later conceded that it would be hard for clubs to hit those targets and so a gradual implementation was agreed, with the percentage set at 90% of revenue in 2023-24, 80% in 2024-25 and 70% in 2025-26.

Meanwhile, the Premier League’s separate rules allow for total losses of £105m over a three-year period.

“We can’t simply emulate or replicate what we did on the men’s side,” Whitfield said. “The game is in a different space and we need to ensure that we can invest but we equally need to attract