Ahead of yesterday’s kickoff of the Fifa Women’s World Cup, a pair of viral videos has been vying for the attention of the sport’s fans, players and especially administrators. One is a clever piece of artifice and the other is as artless as it is heartfelt. Judging by the number of likes and retweets, the former is making the greater impression. But it is the latter that makes the more salient point about the state of women’s football as players from 32 countries take its biggest stage.

The first video, paid for by the telecommunications company Orange, opens with clips of football skill by members of the France men’s team, known as Les Bleus. About halfway through the two-minute video comes the big reveal: you’ve been deceived by FX. The skills were actually executed by members of the France women’s team, known as Les Bleues, but clever editing replaced their heads and upper bodies with those of the men. (On second viewing, you notice that the legs are less hirsute than usual.)

The point of this trickery, according to the video’s creators, is to challenge the perception that men are more skilful at football than women. But this feels like a straw-man argument by a sponsor seeking to signal virtue. The expected audience numbers for the tournament — two billion worldwide television viewers and 1.5 million spectators in stadiums across Australia and New Zealand — suggests the perception of female inferiority is a thing of the past.

As cool as the Orange video is, it pales in comparison with the thousands upon thousands of YouTube clips of women players demonstrating brilliant footwork. Those who still believe that men do it better are, I suspect, unlikely to alter their view because of a deepfake.

The second video, deeper and entirely real, has a better shot at changing hearts and minds. In it, a succession of players from the Australia women’s team, known as the Matildas, talk of their long struggle for parity in pay and benefits, which includes a guarantee of the same minimum percentage of prize money from tournaments such as the World Cup. The Matildas challenge Fifa to match the prize money it paid out for the men’s World Cup in Qatar last year — $440 million — instead of the $110 million allocated for the women.

In addition to the iconic gold trophy, the Lionel Messi-led Argentina team that beat France in the final in Doha took home $42 million. The winners of the women’s competition, which will be decided in Sydney on August 20, will get $10.5 million.

Most of the teams at the Women’s World Cup would be grateful for the pay parity achieved by the Australian, English and American teams. Fifa’s position, articulated by president Gianni Infantino, is that national federations are responsible for players’ pay. “We have issued recommendations but we are an association of associations,” Infantino said on the eve of the opening match in Auckland. “So whatever payments we do will be through the associations, and then the associations will make the relevant payments to their own players.”

This is disingenuous: it is very much in Infantino’s power to force the national bodies to do the right thing. And Fifa can and should set the example by dipping into its substantial reserves — $4 billion at last count — to equalise the prize money for the men’s and women’s World Cups.

Asked about this on Wednesday, Infantino chose to deflect: “It’s a moment to focus on the positive, focus on the happiness, focus on the joy,” he told reporters. “If somebody’s still not happy about something, well, I’m so sorry.”

Now that’s a video that ought to go viral.

• Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. Previously, he was editor-in-chief at Hindustan Times, managing editor at Quartz and international editor at Time