Formula One wants to go back to Africa, with the Moroccan city of Marrakesh and South Africa’s Kyalami circuit keen to host a race, according to Sean Bratches, F1 Managing Director of Commercial Operations.

Rwanda and Nigeria have also expressed interest in fan festivals on their territory.

Reuters reports:

“It’s a marketplace in which we would like to race,” Bratches said two days after Formula One announced the return of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in 2020 after a 35-year absence.

Morocco and South Africa have hosted world championship grands prix in the past, Casablanca in 1958 and South Africa in East London in the 1960s and Kyalami 20 times between 1967 and 1993.

“We race on five continents now and the last habitable continent that we don’t race in is Africa,” said Bratches.

“We’ve been having very productive conversations in South Africa and to a lesser extent in Morocco about bringing a Grand Prix… we’re on it. It’s really important to us.”

Bratches said there was a “high degree of interest” from Morocco in a circuit race in Marrakesh, with the authorities seeing Formula One, owned by U.S.-based Liberty Media, as an economic engine for growth and tourism.

The all-electric Formula E series already holds an annual street race there.

“The vast majority of our grands prix are underpinned by government and it’s because it works. We shine a bright light on these cities,” said Bratches.

Yath Gangakumaran, Formula One’s director of Strategy and Business Development, who spoke at iSportconnect’s Broadcast Masterclass last month, told reporters that Rwanda and Nigeria were also keen to be involved in fan events.

“I think Rwanda in particular have seen the benefits of the Arsenal sponsorship deal,” he said. The Premier League club has had a ‘Visit Rwanda’ logo on players’ left shirt sleeves since last year.

“There’s a lot of interest not just for races but for actuations throughout the continent.”

Next season will see two new grands prix added to the calendar, with Zandvoort and the debut of Vietnam, but Mexico, Spain, Germany and Britain are out of contract at the end of 2019.

Mexico, Germany and Spain face particularly uncertain futures.

“We are optimistic about the prospect of a 21 grand prix schedule next year,” said Bratches. “I don’t think we are going to have more than that.”

He said “productive conversations” were continuing with the Mexican promoter, whose race is set to lose essential government funding, and British GP hosts Silverstone, who say they cannot afford the current terms.

A second U.S. race in Miami remains on the cards, despite Formula One and local organizers giving up on plans for a race downtown and focusing now on land next to the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium.

“In an ideal circumstance we would be racing downtown Miami or downtown Las Vegas,” said Bratches. “Those are the two cities in the United States that best align with our brand and our aspirations.

“We are going to try and create the best experience in each market that (circumstances) will permit, not only from a racing standpoint but a fan engagement and economic standpoint… it’s still viable.”

The Miami race was originally scheduled for 2019 but pushed back due to until at least 2020 after local opposition to the proposed harbourside layout.

Qatar inaugurated the first of seven new World Cup 2022 stadiums on Thursday, just weeks before a crucial FIFA summit will decide whether to expand the tournament and potentially push it beyond the tiny Gulf state’s borders to accommodate a larger format.

Fans packed into the Al Janoub stadium, a 40,000 seat venue made to resemble the sail of a dhow, or traditional wooden sailboat, to cheer on Qatari teams playing in the final of the Emir Cup, a local tournament for the country’s club sides.

Reuters reports:

The inauguration comes as soccer’s world governing body FIFA floats a plan to expand the next World Cup to 48 teams from 32, which could require a last-minute co-host despite a protracted dispute between Qatar and some of its neighbors, bans on alcohol and a lack of facilities restricting likely candidates.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt have imposed a political and trade boycott on Qatar since mid-2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism, which Doha denies.

That rift has strained efforts by FIFA President Gianni Infantino to push for a suitable Word Cup co-host even as qualifying matches begin early next month.

FIFA will host its annual congress in Paris on June 5, where it is expected to make a final call on the expansion, though any decision must be signed off by Qatar, the first Arab country to win hosting rights for the tournament in 2010.

The finals will start in November 2022, having been moved from the usual June-July slot to avoid the searing summer heat.

Al Janoub, a fully air-conditioned stadium which kept the temperature 10 degrees lower than the 29 Celsius outside, was called Al Wakrah after the city just south of Doha.

However, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani tweeted before the match that it was being renamed.

It is one of seven venues built from scratch for the 2022 World Cup, with an eighth stadium renovated and opened in 2017.

Qatar has pushed ahead with an ambitious scale-up of its infrastructure ahead of 2022 that includes $6-8 billion on stadiums and sporting facilities, part of efforts to use the tournament to diversify its energy economy and project itself on to the world stage through sport.

British distance runner Jo Pavey has become the latest female athlete to complain that Nike halted her sponsorship payments when she was pregnant.

The five-time Olympian said the athletic apparel company froze her payments when she revealed that she was expecting her first child Jacob, who was born in 2009.

Reuters reports:

“When I announced I was pregnant my contract was immediately paused,” Pavey, who won 10,000 meters bronze at the 2007 world championships, told Sky News yesterday.

“One of the main problems is the target to get the contract back and the timescale,” she said.

“It was the joy of running that kept me going because you think, ‘What will be will be’ and I was focused on being a mum. But you don’t want to feel punished for being pregnant.”

Pavey’s comments come after American middle distance runner Alysia Montano made similar claims in a video on the New York Times website earlier this week.

“I was sponsored by Nike and when I told them I wanted to have a baby during my career, they said, ‘Simple, we’ll just pause your contract and stop paying you,’” said Montano, who famously competed while eight months’ pregnant in 2014.

“How about when you tell my daughter she can achieve anything, you back it up?”

Nike frequently promotes gender and racial equality in its advertising campaigns.

In a statement to Reuters, Nike said it had changed its policy last year on sponsorship so that no female athletes would be “penalized financially for pregnancy.”

“Nike is proud to sponsor thousands of female athletes,” a Nike spokesman said in an emailed statement.

“As is common practice in our industry, our agreements do include performance-based payment reductions. Historically, a few female athletes had performance based reductions applied.”

The Big Ten Conference, the oldest in American college sports, recorded nearly $759 million in revenue during its 2018 fiscal year.

The figure, which far exceeds any comparable annual figure for a college sports conference, was revealed in a new federal tax return that the conference provided Wednesday in response to a request from USA Today. It is a year-over-year revenue increase of 48 percent, with the conference reaching $512.9 million in fiscal 2017.

USA Today’s Steve Berkowitz reports:

The return also showed that Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany was credited was just over $5.5 million in total compensation for the 2017 calendar year. That, too, is a single-year record for a conference.

The revenue total was driven by new TV agreements that took effect at the start of the 2017-18 school year and resulted in payments of roughly $54 million to each of the 14-team conference’s 12 longest-standing members. Maryland and Rutgers received smaller revenue-share amounts, but both schools also received loans from the conference against future revenue shares.

Despite the conference’s name, the Big Ten has grown to 14 member universities. The original 10 are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin. Four more joined in 2014: Maryland, Nebraska-Lincoln, Penn State and Rutgers (state university of New Jersey).

In February, the Southeastern Conference reported just under $660 million in revenue for fiscal 2018, resulting in an average of $43.7 million being distributed to the 13 member schools that received full shares. Mississippi did not get a full share because its football team was banned from postseason play.

The 10-team Big 12 recently reported $374 million in revenue for 2018.

The Big Ten’s new basic per-school share means that those programs received more money from one revenue source than the vast majority of Division I athletics departments had in total. More than 170 of the 213 public-school athletics programs outside the Big Ten reported less than $54 million in operating revenue for fiscal 2017, the most recent year for which figures have been compiled by USA TODAY, in partnership with Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

As for Delany, his compensation total surpasses the nearly $4.8 million that the Pac-12 Conference reported paying Commissioner Larry Scott in 2016. (Under IRS rules, a non-profit organization must report its revenue and expense data based on its fiscal year, but it must report compensation data based on the calendar year completed during the fiscal year. The Big Ten’s fiscal year ends June 30.) Scott also has continued to have the benefit of a nearly $1.9 million loan, dating from fiscal 2010.

In July 2015, Delany became fully eligible for more than $20 million in future bonus payments – and those amounts started becoming part of the Big Ten’s compensation reporting on the new return.

Delany’s base pay in 2017 was $2.25 million, about $125,000 more than it was a year earlier. He also received nearly $1.5 million in bonus pay – all of which came from the future bonus total, according to Big Ten Associate Commissioner and Chief Financial Officer Julie Suderman.

In addition, Delany accrued – but was not actually paid – another $1.7 million. A majority of that amount also came from the future bonus total, Suderman said.

Delany’s base compensation for 2017 was slightly lower than that of Big 12 Conference Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who received $2.4 million. Bowlsby was credited with a total of nearly $4.1 million, although nearly $760,000 of that had been reported as deferred pay in prior years.

Maryland’s loan from the Big Ten in fiscal 2018 was just under $31 million. When added to its revenue share of $26.1 million, this means Maryland received more money from the Big Ten in 2018 than any school. But it also means Maryland has been loaned more than $66 million during its first four years in the conference, and its future revenue shares will be adjusted accordingly.

Rutgers’ loan from the conference — $14 million — is its first. Rutgers’ revenue share for 2018 was $11.7 million.

 

The players set to light up the Women’s World Cup in France next month may play for big-name clubs like Barcelona, Arsenal and Juventus but, although salaries are improving, they earn a fraction of the money paid to their male counterparts.

Reuter reports:

Nilla Fischer, who will move from Frauen-Bundesliga champions VfL Wolfsburg to FC Linkoping in her native Sweden when the tournament is over, gave Reuters a stark assessment of the gap between men’s and women’s wages in a recent interview.

“What they maybe make in an hour, I make in a year,” she said bluntly.

The vast pay inequality was one of the reasons that prompted Women’s World Cup holders the United States to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation in March.

All 28 members of the 2015 World Cup-winning squad were named as plaintiffs in federal court in Los Angeles in the lawsuit which outlined complaints about wages as well as other aspect of their working conditions when compared to the U.S. men’s side, who failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

The group that includes high-profile players such as Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd and Alex Morgan said they have been consistently paid less money than their male counterparts even though their performance has been superior to the men’s team.

“We believe that fighting for gender equality in sports is a part of that responsibility. As players, we deserved to be paid equally for our work, regardless of our gender,” Morgan said at the time when the lawsuit was filed.

The advent of fully-professional leagues like the Women’s Super League (WSL) in England is a step in the right direction, but there was still a long way to go, sports agent Lindi Ngwenya told Reuters.

“The definition of ‘fully professional’ is that the players are paid a salary that they can live on, so from this season all the players that you see in the WSL are on a basic (wage) of £20,000 to £25,000 pounds a year, plus accommodation, with the big clubs paying slightly more,” she said.

In contrast, the average pay for a male footballer in England’s Premier League was £3 million a year, according to the 2018 Sporting Intelligence Global Sports Salary Survey – or more than 100 times what their female counterparts are paid.

Despite that enormous gulf, improved salaries for women footballers in England represents a big step up from the most recent report published by player’s union FIFPro in 2017.

The Global Football Employment Report contained the results of a survey of 3,600 top-level female players around the world and revealed an average wage of $600 a month, with 50% of players saying they did not get paid for playing.

Short-term contracts and a reliance on verbal, rather than written, agreements added to the insecurity for female players, according to the report.

Former rugby player and British army officer Ngwenya, director of London-based agency SISU Sports Management, said the structure of contracts varies from country to country.

French clubs are the top payers on straightforward professional contracts, while mid-tier German sides often offer a part-time employment contract with a local company on top of payments for playing.

Though high-profile internationals such as Norway’s Ada Hegerberg and Brazil’s Marta can earn six-figure sums and complement their salaries with lucrative endorsements, not all players are so lucky.

Ngwenya said bigger crowds and more media attention means more sponsorship and ultimately more money in players’ pockets.

“We’re seeing more money coming into the game, which clearly at the end of the day is going to be the driver,” she said.

“The English FA subsidises the women’s game a lot at the moment, but the hope and the plan is that commercial sponsors will come in to take up that slack and take the game forward.”

For sponsors and the media it all comes down to return on investment, and the exposure provided by the Women’s World Cup in France will provide a chance to gauge the current popularity and market value of women’s football.

“The big tournaments are good, but we also want to get to a stage where the club game gets a commensurate amount of TV time and exposure,” Ngwenya added.

Despite the enormous gap between the earnings of women and men, she was hopeful for the future.

“I can definitely see the progress – yes I would like it to be faster, but we are definitely making progress in the right direction,” she said.