Image Rights of Female Athletes: The Money Flows Through Someone Else's Hands

On August 13, public figure Sofía Yunes announced she had opened an official channel on a paid-content platform she calls the "blue app." The announcement was short: many people are profiting from her image, and she wanted a legitimate space to connect with her followers. The channel offers exclusive photos and videos, behind-the-scenes moments, live streams, and content reserved for subscribers. Alongside it came a warning about impersonation accounts using her name and likeness. Placed on a sports desk, that announcement should belong to the entertainment section. It still lands on a sore point in women's sport: an athlete's face is an asset with real value, and the person who creates that asset usually receives the smallest share of the money it generates. I still remember an evening in July 2026, rewatching the footage of Vietnam's women's team at the World Cup finals. The stands were empty, and I could hear the footsteps of space itself. Every square metre of grass was genuinely vacant, and every pass had to travel through that emptiness. There was no one in the stands, but there was plenty online. Attention had left the pitch long ago, and the money followed it. Three layers of image rights, and two left empty In men's football, image rights are negotiated on three levels. The individual level is the player's contract with a brand. The collective level is a club's agreement with a commercial partner to exploit the team's likeness. The competition level is the package sold to broadcasters and sponsors. These three layers lock together through contracts, binding clauses, and the legal teams behind them. In women's football, the second and third layers are usually thin, and in some places non-existent. Most female players only have the individual layer, and that layer opens for a few weeks after a major result and then closes again. FIFA announced total prize money of USD 110 million for the 2026 Women's World Cup. Each team eliminated in the group stage received USD 1.56 million, and each of the 732 participating players was guaranteed a minimum of USD 30,000. That is a major leap from previous editions. But prize money is a one-off. So is attention. After the tournament, players' follower counts spiked and then flattened, while their commercial value depended on whether anyone would do the work of building and protecting it. Huỳnh Như once played for Lank FC in Portugal, one of the very few Vietnamese female players to move abroad. In her case the gap between sporting achievement and commercial structure is easy to see. She played in Europe, but the value attached to her image was still divided among a loose network of media outlets, local brands, and content aggregators, with no single party responsible for protecting it. Based on my experience following matches, that gap is not a Vietnamese peculiarity. It is a feature of nearly all of Southeast Asian women's football. The shift from scale to depth Yunes made a choice worth dissecting. She left the advertising model, where value is measured by follower count, for a paid model, where value is measured by the depth of a small group. Numbers do not lie, but they know how to stay silent. An account with 100,000 followers, a 2% conversion rate, and a USD 5 monthly fee generates nominal revenue of roughly USD 10,000 a month, or USD 120,000 a year. An account with one million followers that charges nothing depends entirely on distribution algorithms and ad rates, with a very wide range of outcomes. The 2% figure is an assumption; this arithmetic illustrates structure, not a forecast. It shows that a loyal base of 100,000 can out-earn half a million scattered followers. The more interesting point lies elsewhere. A paid model turns a public figure into a full-time content producer. They must post consistently, engage constantly, and maintain emotional rhythm. For an athlete, that is a second shift stacked on top of the first. The cost of self-ownership Women's sport lives with a layer of problems rarely discussed. A player returning from injury already carries two loads: a physical load from tissue and ligaments still repairing themselves, and a psychological load from outside expectation. Adding a content-production shift at exactly that stage adds pressure to a body that has not finished healing. Demanding that a player prove herself in her first match back is cruel. Demanding that she simultaneously prove her commercial pull is no kinder. There is another way to see this. I do not watch the player running; I watch the space she leaves behind. With image rights, that space is exactly the value the system will not collect on her behalf. The athlete does not lack appeal. She lacks a structure that collects the money and protects her likeness for her. That is why some women's football federations in Europe have moved to collective image-rights agreements: a shared pool, distributed by appearances and years of service, with anti-impersonation clauses handled by the federation. This lowers the peak earnings of a few stars, but raises the floor for the whole squad and reduces the off-pitch workload for everyone. A misclassification, and what it reveals Re-reading this source, I noticed a technical detail. It was tagged as belonging to football, while the content inside contains not a single sentence about football: no club, no player, no manager, no competition, no transfer. This is an automated tagging error. The error is not harmless. Digital content classification systems are built on templates drawn from men's football: keywords, name-density, engagement levels, fixture calendars. When women's sport content does not fit the template, it is either routed incorrectly or absorbed into the nearest category. The downstream effect is that female athletes receive less distribution, fewer advertising deals, and less protection against impersonation. Yunes ran straight into that: fake accounts appeared before the real channel opened. Here is another contrarian point. Opening an official channel is usually praised as an act of autonomy. Look closely, and it is a transfer of responsibility. Protecting a personal brand and pursuing impersonation accounts is legal work, and it should belong to the platform or a representative body. Placing it on the individual means the weakest party in the chain carries the heaviest task. What to watch Every passage of play begins with an intention, even an unintentional one. The intention in this story is to turn attention into an enforceable contract. Over the next twelve months, the metric worth watching is not any individual's subscriber count, but whether any Southeast Asian football federation signs a collective image-rights agreement with its women's national team. If one does, that is structural change. If none does, each player will keep building her own stage, paying her own costs, and carrying her own risk. Winning is a chain of errors controlled better than the opponent's, and in this game the party committing the fewest errors is the one that never steps onto the pitch.