Trinity Rodman makes £1.6m a year. The average WSL player? About £47,000

In January 2026, Trinity Rodman signed a contract that reset what anyone thought a women’s footballer could earn. More than $2 million a year, including bonuses. Four years, through 2028. The Washington Spirit forward became the highest-paid female player in the world.

That number — roughly £1.6 million — is genuinely hard to get your head around, not because it’s outrageous by sporting standards, but because of what it sits next to.

The gap, in actual numbers

The average WSL salary, last reported by the BBC, is £47,000. That was in 2022, and no more recent league-wide figure has been published. But it’s the starting point everyone uses, because it’s the only one we have.

Rodman earns 34 times that.

The WSL introduced minimum salaries for the first time this season. A senior player aged 23 or over is guaranteed £42,500. A 21-year-old gets £34,700. A teenager entering the league starts at £26,900.

Compared to those floors, Rodman’s pay looks like this: she earns 59 times what the youngest WSL minimum-wage player takes home. Forty-six times what a 21-year-old gets. Thirty-eight times the senior minimum.

And that’s before you get to the FIFA global average of $10,900 — about £8,500 — for professional women footballers worldwide. Rodman makes roughly 183 times that.

Why the gap exists

The NWSL and the WSL made opposite bets. The NWSL introduced a salary cap and a rising floor, and then carved out the High Impact Player rule — a mechanism that lets each club pay one star well above the cap without breaking it. Rodman’s contract exists because that rule exists.

The WSL went the other way: no cap, no ceiling. The league’s chief operating officer said explicitly there is “no intent” to limit what any player can earn, because the league is still at the investment stage and doesn’t want to deter money coming in.

In theory, a WSL club could pay someone £2 million tomorrow. In practice, nobody has. Not yet.

What the gap doesn’t tell you

Rodman’s contract is one data point, not a trend. The NWSL’s top earner earning 183 times the global average says more about how low that average is than about how high the ceiling has risen. Most women footballers, globally, earn less than the WSL’s lowest minimum.

The £47,000 average is also old. It predates the WSL’s first-ever minimum salaries, the new TV deals, and the wave of investment that followed England’s Euro 2022 win. The real average is almost certainly higher now. Nobody knows by how much, because nobody has published it.

That opacity is its own story. But the direction is clear: the money is going up. Rodman’s contract proves the ceiling can move. The question now is how fast the floor follows.

34 times the average: Rodman’s £1.6 million annual pay is 34 times the £47,000 WSL average, 59 times the youngest WSL minimum, and roughly 183 times the FIFA global average of 0,900. The NWSL High Impact Player rule made this possible; the WSL has no equivalent mechanism yet.

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