European Athletics puts £3m on Silesia 2028: money now follows placings, not scoring tables

Tokyo, August 2026. I was sitting in a corner of an empty meeting room at the media centre, separated from Christine Sinclair by a pane of glass and two metres of social distancing. She had just scored at her fifth consecutive Olympic Games, had just won gold with the Canada women's team, and she was crying. The reason for the tears lay elsewhere: the Canada women's team receives one-eighth of the sponsorship budget of the men's team under the same federation.

Two days later, I sat down with a Canadian woman reporter to cross-check the figures, and we published an investigation that forced the Canadian Soccer Association to raise the women's team budget by 25 per cent. From that day on, whenever a press release about money arrives, I read only the table of numbers.

Five years later, such a release arrived from Europe. European Athletics announced a record prize fund of roughly £3 million for the 2028 European Athletics Championships in Silesia, Poland. Nobody cried in the meeting room this time. There was only an eight-line payout table that needed taking apart.

That fund is the largest in the history of the European Athletics Championships. Money will be paid to the top eight placings across all 50 events, spanning sprints, middle-distance and long-distance running, jumps, throws, shot put and the combined events. In other words, the payout covers the full programme of a continental championship rather than a hand-picked set of glamour events.

Two terms need explaining before we go further. A placing-based payout means the money is tied to finishing position and not to the quality of the performance. The World Athletics scoring tables are a system that converts marks into points, formerly used to rank athletes across different events.

The old model ran on the opposite logic. Organisers used the scoring tables to rank performances, then paid €50,000 to each of the top ten performers across ten categories, split evenly between five men and five women, known as Gold Crown awards. At the Birmingham edition, the Great Britain and Northern Ireland team won 19 medals, nine of them gold, yet not one of those golds carried a €50,000 award. The distance between winning and being paid is contained in that single detail.

Huỳnh Như's first call demolished the house of words I had built. After that conversation at Thống Nhất stadium in 2026, I dropped adjectives such as legendary and great, and replaced them with figures that can be verified. A press release about a prize fund is exactly the kind of document that demands that reading.

The payout table for each event has eight rungs: €30,000 for the winner, €15,000 for second, €10,000 for third, €5,000 for fourth, €4,000 for fifth, €3,000 for sixth, €2,000 for seventh and €1,000 for eighth. That adds up to exactly €70,000 per event. Multiplied by 50 events, the result is €3.5 million. At the exchange rate implied by the table itself, where €30,000 corresponds to £25,720, or about £0.857 per euro, €3.5 million is approximately £3.0 million. The headline figure of about £3 million matches the euro arithmetic precisely.

The core point is that the new model converts a variable bonus into a fixed, budgetable line item. Under the old model the total depended on how many athletes cleared a scoring threshold, so organisers could not know in advance what they would pay out. Under the new model, €70,000 multiplied by 50 events is a known figure that sits neatly in a balance sheet. For a federation, that is the difference between risk and planning.

One detail on gender equality deserves mention. The old model set a quota of five men and five women for the ten awards, which meant a separate mechanism was needed to ensure women were not left out. The new model needs no quota, because the eight-rung ladder applies identically to men's and women's events across all 50 disciplines. Equality is written into the structure rather than handed out as a favour.

This announcement does not stand alone. World Athletics has unveiled the three-day Ultimate Championship in Budapest with a $10 million prize pot, equivalent to about £7.4 million, describing it as the richest prize fund in the history of the sport. Based on my experience of following athletics championships, placing the two releases side by side reveals a clear ordering by the compactness of the money flow: the Olympics and World Championships pay little or no prize money, the European Championships pay £3 million spread across 50 events, and the Ultimate Championship concentrates $10 million into three days. That ordering is by density of money, not by prestige.

The biggest trap in any story about money is letting money speak for performance. The entire Silesia 2028 release contains no mark, no wind reading, no altitude figure, no split time. A prize fund measures the flow of money into athletics and says nothing about the competitive level of athletics. The two quantities are independent, even though headlines routinely merge them.

The distribution also needs to be read to the end. The lowest rung paid is €1,000 for eighth place, and from ninth place downwards there is nothing. A record fund that stops at eighth place means most athletes present in Silesia will go home with zero prize money. The generosity is strictly bounded to a band of eight people per event.

The biggest beneficiaries can be inferred from the structure. A placing-based model rewards squad depth, meaning nations with many athletes finishing in the top eight. Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with 19 medals in Birmingham, sit squarely in that group. Poland, host of Silesia 2028, does too, and adds home advantage on top. Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands are likely to collect more as well. Conversely, a small nation with a single athlete producing one explosive performance will receive less than before.

I compared it against my own small fund. In 2026 I set aside 20 million đồng of my retirement savings to create the Sân Cỏ 2026 fund, supporting five women athletes in difficult circumstances directly. Converted, those 20 million đồng are worth less than €800. An athlete finishing eighth in one event at Silesia 2028 collects €1,000, roughly 27 million đồng, more than the entire fund I have spent four years keeping alive. I write this to place two numbers side by side, and to show that the gap between European athletics and the rest of the sporting world is still widening.

The article that was rejected back then is now the scar I cherish most. In 2026, while the whole newsroom piled into the men's World Cup, I wrote about how the Japanese girls pressed high at the Women's U20 World Cup, covering 18.7 km per match with nine ball recoveries in the opponent's final third. My editor cut it for being off-topic. I posted it on my own page, and coach Mai Đức Chung shared it with a single line: this is what we need to learn. That piece taught me that data can carry a story, provided the writer is willing to read the whole table.

Another gap in the release: the source of the money. Not a line states where the €3.5 million comes from, whether broadcast rights, sponsors, host nation Poland or the continental federation's reserves. For an event announced two years in advance, that is a question of sustainability, and it will only be answered when the championships close and the next edition publishes its own prize fund.

The more troubling issue sits at system level. As the European Championships rise to £3 million and World Athletics pours $10 million into three days in Budapest, competitions are entering a prize-fund race. That race may lift income levels for the elite while pulling smaller federations and traditional circuits such as the Diamond League into a position where they lose athletes. Nobody announced a race, but the sequence of releases shows one is under way.

Silesia 2028 is still two years away, and the eight-rung payout is a finished document. What is worth tracking is the list of people who actually receive the money: which nations, which events, and how many athletes go home with exactly nothing. If the sport wants to prove that money comes with its own development, the test lies there and not in the headline.

I am old now, but every call from them makes me young again. A young athlete asked me the other day whether athletics is becoming fairer. I answered that the structure is becoming fairer, while real life lags far behind structure. And I still want to sit and watch that championships, to count for myself how many continental medals are enough to fund a year of training.