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.

The sports technology investment market has been steadily growing steadily since 2016, according to the 2019 North American SportTech report from SportTechX.

There has also been an increase in average deal value in the last three years moving from $670,000 in 2016 to $1.76 million in 2018.

Ontario is the top region in the country, driven by the healthy ecosystem in Toronto. While Vancouver and Montreal are very close in terms of start-ups founded, Vancouver is the clear leader between the two making it the second city in the country.

Halifax saw one big deal in 2015 in the Activity Data & Analytics sector but hasn’t seen much activity, since while Montreal sees regular investment every year. Toronto and Vancouver, while going through peaks and troughs, have seen relatively consistent investment trends.

ESPN is joining forces with Caesars Entertainment to bring the best in sports betting news and entertainment content to fans around the world.

The deal includes building a new ESPN-branded studio at The LINQ Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas (to launch next year), where sports betting-themed content will be created, along with segments for ESPN’s recently launched sports betting-related show, Daily Wager.

Caesars’ data and branding will also be integrated across ESPN programming within the coming weeks for use across ESPN’s content.

“The sports betting landscape has changed, and fans are coming to us for this kind of information more than ever before,” said Mike Morrison, VP of Business Development at ESPN. “We are poised to expand our coverage in a big way and working with a category leader like Caesars Entertainment will help us serve these highly engaged, diverse sports fans with the best and most relevant content possible.”

Chris Holdren, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Caesars Entertainment, said: “We’re really excited about the long-term value this collaboration with ESPN will create and thrilled that, starting immediately, ESPN’s platforms will begin featuring odds information generated by Caesars Entertainment. Millions of sports fans look to ESPN as a sports authority, and Caesars is honoured to have been selected for having the best odds to serve those fans. When you combine that level of exposure alongside the unique opportunity to build a studio along the famed Las Vegas Strip, this deal is truly unique.”

The studio will serve as a Vegas hub for odds-related content and will contribute to any number of ESPN linear, digital and social shows as well as ESPN.com and the ESPN app. It will also play a vital role during major sporting events, and especially during the growing number of marquee events hosted in Las Vegas. The new studio will launch in 2020.

Caesars will also serve as ESPN’s official odds data supplier across TV and digital, receiving associated attribution across ESPN. Additional advertising and sponsorship activations will roll out in the coming months and throughout the deal term.

“Between an increased interest in sports betting among fans, regularly hosting marquee sporting events – like the upcoming NFL Draft and NBA Summer League as well as premier UFC and Top Rank bouts – and the arrival of the Golden Knights and the Raiders, Las Vegas has become an epicenter of sports culture,” said Connor Schell, EVP of Content, ESPN.

“Having a great partner in Caesars Entertainment and soon a full studio presence in Las Vegas will help us create content that taps into that culture and grows our offerings to avid bettors and more casual fans.”