The fight for sporting equality took a significant step forward after a record-breaking Women‘s Premier League auction, writes LACHLAN MCKIRDY.
The Women’s Premier League auction promised to be a history-making night for cricket.
Instead, it became the moment women’s sport changed forever.
As Australian players watched on from their phones at their World Cup training camp in South Africa, not even they could comprehend the paradigm shift that was about to take place.
In terms of team sports, they are now among the highest paid female athletes on the planet. And this, of course, does not take into account their central contracts with Cricket Australia, nor their WBBL contracts, nor the deals some have signed with The Hundred in the UK.
Just over a month ago, the WPL was still an unknown quantity.
Teams hadn’t been confirmed.
No one was sure how the broadcast rights would fall.
But on Monday night, Australia’s world champion players went under the hammer and were signed up for the inaugural season of the competition to eye-watering sums.
Ashleigh Gardner was the big winner, picked up by the Rachael Haynes coached Gujarat Giants for 3.2 crore ($AUD558,000).
Let’s reflect on that for a moment.
In 2008, Australia’s top 20 women’s players shared a pool of $500,000 with a select few earning an additional $15,000 in marketing contracts.
Gardner will earn more than all of them combined.
In the WBBL’s inaugural season in 2015, the top player retainer was $10,000.
Gardner will pocket that in a couple of overs.
She was far from the only Australian to earn big money on Monday night.
Ellyse Perry was the next to go, earning $296,000 to form a superstar trio along with Smriti Mandhana and Sophie Devine at the Royal Challengers Bangalore.
Beth Mooney sparked a fierce bidding war, eventually selling for $349,000 to join Gardner at Gujarat. Tahlia McGrath picked up $244,000 to join the UP Warriorz. Meg Lanning earned $192,000 while Alyssa Healy and young all-rounder Annabel Sutherland both earned $122,000.
The salaries place Australia’s cricketers among the highest earning female athletes in the world among all team sports.
A recent report in The Sun listed the top contracts in the Women’s Super League, which features the likes of Sam Kerr, at approximately $AUD435,000 a season.
The top earner in the WNBA, Jackie Young of the Las Vegas Aces, earns an average annual salary of close to $AUD365,000, according to NBC. That’s a similar figure to Trinity Rodman, the highest paid player in the NWSL per ESPN, who takes home approximately $AUD397,000 per season.
The Aussies in the WPL will earn their salaries for less than a month of work.
The signs were there that the WPL auction was going to be a watershed moment. More than $AUD835 million was shelled out for the ownership of the five franchises, while Viacom18 put together a record-breaking deal of more than $AUD1 million a game for the broadcast rights.
And in December, more than 45,000 fans crammed into the DY Patil Sports Academy in Mumbai to watch Australia take on India in a T20 match. Australian players returned home thinking about the significance of the moment, knowing they hadn’t experienced anything like it before outside of the momentous T20 World Cup final at the MCG in 2020.
But none anticipated the enormity of the occasion on Monday night.
History may well remember the auction as the evening the glass ceiling was shattered and the sky, at long last, became the limit.
