The Women's World Cup offers us timely remainders of the battles still ahead

Throughout the tournament, there have a series of reminders of women's football's olace in the food chain, but this disregards the pace of change that's been happening.

Even allowing for the fact that once they pass a certain level of seniority those who work in football stop talking like normal people, it was a strange screed. “There remains a huge discrepancy in prize money between the men's and women's tournaments,” said Infantino, as though he was a innocent bystander in all of this rather than the guy who, yanno, signs off on it all, “with the record $110m for this World Cup some way short of the $440m on offer to teams at last year's men's finals in Qatar, where 3.4m fans were in attendance.”

“Equal pay in the World Cup? We are going in that direction already”, he continued. “But that would not solve anything.” Your eyes start darting around. Was that the sound of a record scratching? “It might be a symbol but it would not solve anything, because it's one month every four years and it's a few players out of the thousands and thousands of players.” Whoa there, Nelly! What was that? Do you not think that maybe, if it really does matter as much as you said less than a quarter of a second earlier, might the symbolism from the top of the world’s governing body… help? Isn’t a few players out of the hundreds and thousands of players better than… none of them?

"We need to keep the momentum." The momentum of what? The momentum of women getting paid a tiny fraction of the amount that men do in the professional game? The momentum of women of having to complain to you about your organisation paying less, and then you continuing to do so? Because if women are getting paid more than they used to be—and let’s be reasonable, it’s not so long ago that they couldn’t get any paid less—that’s down to them pushing back against you and people like you.

He added: “And I say to all the women - and you know I have four daughters, so I have a few at home - that you have the power to change. Pick the right battles. Pick the right fights. You have the power to convince us men what we have to do and what we don't have to do. You do it. Just do it.”

I, umm, well, okay.

Right then, Mister Four Daughters at Home, what are the “right battles” that women should be picking? Is equal pay in FIFA tournaments not one of them? Because the world is picking up some extremely mixed messaging from you at the moment, though perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by that, considering that you yourself left the tournament to go to Tahiti following a week during which you skipped four matchdays, and all this after having called for the women's tournament to be shown the same ‘respect’ as the men's competition. Is this the “respect” are we talking about here? Or is it being featured in a video wearing a fake crown and gold chains while thr women’s tournament that you left was playing out. Because from down here at ground level, that “pick the right battles” sure does sound like “Women: Know Your Limits”.

And no, it’s not just Infantino and FIFA. The reminders are everywhere, in the social media messaging of men who find the idea of women kicking a ball strangely threatening and therefore have to send reams of sickening abuse to players, in the all concerned for scheduling it to run at the same time as domestic men’s leagues, thereby necessarily reducing the amount of coverage it’s getting, in Manchester United making the day of an England team reaching the final of a Women’s World Cup final all about them because they want to reintroduce someone into their team likely horrifies the majority of their women’s team, and were prepared to throw their own women’s players under a bus to do so.

Women in football don’t need to be told to pick the right battles, Mr Infantino. They’ve already been fighting them for years.

Largely against people exactly like you.