Silesia 2028 and £3m: European athletics switches to paying by finishing position

On finals night in Birmingham, nine gold medals for the host nation, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, were presented one after another. Not one of them reached the threshold for the €50,000 Gold Crown bonus. The stands still applauded long enough, the organisers still entered the names into the record, but that €50,000 sat in a different column: the column reserved for the highest marks on the World Athletics scoring tables, not for the winner.

I stayed behind in the media area for almost an hour after the stadium lights went down. A Polish coach, due to take his athletes home to prepare for qualifying, said to me, very quietly: “Winning without prize money is still winning, but my athletes still have to pay rent.” He said no more. I did not ask. Four years later, in Silesia, that sentence will get a written answer — but only for eight people per event.

A PAYOUT TABLE, NOT A PERFORMANCE TABLE

European Athletics has confirmed that the 2028 European Athletics Championships in Silesia, Poland, will carry a record prize fund of about £3m. The split is specified down to each rung: €30,000 for first, €15,000 for second, €10,000 for third, €5,000 for fourth, €4,000 for fifth, €3,000 for sixth, €2,000 for seventh, €1,000 for eighth. Added up, each event pays out €70,000. Multiplied across the 50 events in the programme — track, field, combined events and road — the total is €3.5m, which matches the “about £3m” figure in the announcement.

Let it be clear from the outset: this is a money story, not a performance story. There is no mark, no wind reading, no altitude, no personal best anywhere in the source text. The only thing analysable here is the distribution structure — and that structure has just changed at the root.

The old model worked very differently. Each edition set aside ten bonuses of €50,000, split evenly five for men and five for women, awarded to the athletes with the highest scores on the World Athletics scoring tables. The old fund totalled just €500,000 — one-seventh of the figure just announced. The old method rewarded the quality of the performance, not the finishing position. A runner-up with a personal best could earn more than a winner in a weak event.

That is the fault line. From 2028, money at the European Championships is paid by finishing position, not by the quality of the mark. Organisers have converted a variable bonus — dependent on how many athletes cleared a scoring threshold — into a fixed, knowable outlay applied evenly across all 50 events. In governance terms, this is a shift from something close to a lottery into a payroll that can be budgeted in advance.

Put another way, what is being bought here is stability. A variable fund is awkward for the payer and the recipient alike. €70,000 per event can go straight into a federation’s financial plan.

WHO GAINS WHEN MONEY FOLLOWS FINISHING POSITION

Great Britain and Northern Ireland left Birmingham with 19 medals, nine of them gold. None of those golds reached the €50,000 Gold Crown bonus. That detail says a great deal about the old model: the bonus sat almost entirely apart from winning and losing, rewarding only rare peaks — a surprise national record, or a mark far beyond the general standard.

Under the new model the logic reverses completely. A nation with thirty athletes finishing in the top eight across different events will collect considerably more than a nation with a single star. For deep squads such as Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands, the aggregate take from Silesia 2028 will most likely rise well above the old level. For a small federation with one athlete peaking at the right moment, that income could fall, or vanish entirely.

There is a variable that rarely gets mentioned: Poland is the host. A large host squad competing at home is the ideal configuration for maximising top-eight finishes. Read that way, the placing-based model operates as an indirect subsidy for host-nation depth. Nobody says so in the announcement, and nobody needs to.

There is a subtler point still. The old model was an explicitly designed gender-parity mechanism: exactly five slots for men, five for women, regardless of which events happened to be deeper. The new model drops that mechanism. From 2028, gender parity depends on the programme itself — what share of the 50 events belongs to women, and whether the depth in women’s events is enough to fill all eight paid places. For European athletics, where women’s events are consistently fiercely competitive, this may be good news. But it is good news by accident of structure, not because a clause was written to protect it.

Based on my experience following athletics championships across nearly two decades, changes to prize mechanisms are rarely read correctly at the moment they are announced. People look at the total; few look at the allocation formula. Yet the allocation formula is what decides who can still survive in the sport after the age of 30.

For Vietnamese athletics, the distance to a €3.5m fund is enormous, and the lesson is not in the number. It is in the principle: pay for depth, not only for peaks. A sport with a handful of stars will always depend on a handful of individuals. A sport with thirty athletes capable of reaching the top eight at continental level is a different sport in kind.

A RECORD FOR THE EVENT, NOT FOR THE SPORT

At the same time, World Athletics announced the Ultimate Championship — a three-day event in Budapest with a $10m prize pot, about £7.4m, described by the governing body itself as the richest prize pot in the history of the sport. Placed side by side, the £3m in Silesia immediately shifts position: a record for the European Championships, but second tier within the prize economy now taking shape.

That European Athletics raised its fund sevenfold over the old model, precisely as a three-day event from the parent governing body prepares to launch with $10m, is unlikely to be a coincidence. Continental federations are under pressure to retain elite athletes against a calendar that is richer in money and shorter in time. The Silesia money is therefore both an investment and a defensive move.

What stands out is that the new hierarchy ranks by concentration of cash rather than by prestige. The World Championships and the Olympics remain the summit, yet largely pay no prize money at all, awarding medals only. The European Championships pay about £3m spread across 50 events. The Ultimate Championship compresses $10m into three days. The fewer the days, the more money per hour of competition.

WHAT THE MONEY TABLE DOES NOT SAY

Looking at a scoreboard, I learned to read what is not recorded. The same applies here.

First, a larger prize fund does not mean a higher competitive standard. The two quantities are independent. An event can pay more while the general level of marks stays flat or even slides. Nothing in the announcement permits the conclusion that European athletics is getting stronger. This is the easiest trap to fall into when reading the news: see money rise, assume quality rises with it.

Second, the payout ladder is steep and blunt at the bottom. Eighth place receives €1,000. Ninth place receives nothing. A European Championships features hundreds of athletes; most of them leave Silesia empty-handed. The phrase “record prize fund” is accurate about the total, but misleading about how widely it is shared.

Third, the funding source is not disclosed. It is unclear where the €3.5m comes from — the continental federation, the host nation, or a sponsor. Until it is, there is no basis for assuming the model will survive into the next edition. A fixed outlay only holds up when a fixed income stands behind it.

Fourth, and this is the point I care about most as a writer on women’s sport: when the mechanism shifts from rewarding performance to paying for placement, competitive value and commercial value separate more sharply. An athlete who runs an ordinary mark and finishes third still gets paid. An athlete who breaks a national record and finishes ninth gets nothing. That distribution has a clear governance logic — it is easier to budget — but it also implies that the position on the track matters more than the quality of the track itself.

45 MINUTES ON THE EDGE OF THE TRACK

I still keep the habit of staying behind after the stands have emptied, once the athletes have gone to the interview zone and only the technical staff remain to pack up. That is when the people who never appear on the scoreboard tend to speak most honestly. I have heard about rent, about self-funded flights, about a meal in the athletes’ village being charged to a personal budget. When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices become leaders.

A contract has an expiry date, but a human story does not. The €1,000 for eighth place in Silesia will not resolve that story. But a stable, predictable income stream, paid evenly across all 50 events, can change how a small federation plans. A coach in a country with no athletics tradition can, for the first time, tell an athlete’s parents: if she reaches the top eight at a European Championships, the family will not have to cover the shortfall.

Forty-five minutes on the edge of the track, a lifetime that never grows old.

THE REST WILL BE SETTLED IN SILESIA

What I am waiting for at Silesia 2028 is not how much money will be handed out, but who receives it. If most of the €3.5m flows to a small group of large federations, the new model will have proven that it rewards existing structure rather than development. If the money spreads widely enough for a few mid-tier federations to place athletes in the top eight in women’s events — where European depth is genuine and routinely undervalued — then this payout table will finally do something the scoring tables could not: measure presence.

In the stands, I still count empty seats. With one difference: this time, I will count the occupied ones too.