By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Just a few short years ago, most experts in the sports industry would say with confidence that men’s sports would always be more popular than women’s sports, and that the primary audience for sports is made up of men.
But since 2019 in particular, it’s the women who are putting the big points on the board for growth, in terms of overall popularity, TV ratings, investment, and endorsement deals. Women’s sports have experienced an incredible surge in both viewership and in game attendance, particularly in 2023, which set multiple new records.
And it’s not just one sport in particular. Growth in the women’s game is growing across the industry, including the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the Women’s National Basketball Association, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the US Open for tennis, collegiate volleyball, and the Women’s World Cup.
In 2023 and continuing in 2024 there are now billions of people around the world who are tuning in to women’s sports.
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Those numbers are feeding a virtuous circle that is accelerating growth even more. As ratings increase, brands notice, and they put more money into marketing, advertising, and in some cases into direct investment in various teams or leagues.
As the athletes and the teams generate more money, that results in better time slots on linear TV and more money spent on marketing and advertising, which in turn drives better ratings.
In short, the women’s leagues are now getting what the men’s leagues have always taken for granted; attention and investment.
The trend is also good news for the entire brand licensing industry, as it represents a powerful new path to reach female sports fans in ways that in the past was primarily only available for brands to connect with men, or with female fans of men’s sports.
As women more often make purchasing decisions for the home, this is a critical trend to understand and act on, not just for the obvious companies that are involved with sports, like Nike or adidas, but for brands of all types. As you’ll see in this special report on the growth of women’s sports, major brands like Coca-Cola, banking giant Ally Financial, Amazon, Meta, Michelob, and Adobe are also supporting the sector through investment and ad buys.
While women’s sports were typically starved of investment, leaving many athletes in the position of competing as a virtually unpaid hobby while holding down a full-time job, today’s athletes are earning millions for endorsements and Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) licensing deals.
Women’s Sports by the Numbers
One good place to start the discussion on growth is with viewership data. According to Nielsen, the guru of viewership analysis, “Interest in women’s sports is growing at a meteoric pace.”
As one example, consider that the 2023 NCAA women’s basketball final between Iowa and LSU drew nearly 10 million viewers, an increase of 103% from the previous year. Similarly, the audience for the WNBA draft grew by 42% between 2022 and 2023, and in particular viewership by female viewers was up by 89%. That’s a clear indication that there is a pent up demand for more women’s sports by female viewers.
In soccer/European football, the level of engagement is seeing similar growth. Ratings for the Women’s Super League increased by 81% from 2022 to 2023, and 41% of the global population said in a poll that they are excited about the Women’s World Cup, up from 34% for the 2019 event.
According to Nielsen, that didn’t just happen because people suddenly decided to tune in. It happened because brands and broadcasters decided to show more women’s sports, and to air the games at better times.
For example, during the Women’s World Cup prior to 2019, fans in the UK would have a hard time even finding a game to watch, as very few games made it to the linear channel. Most were tucked away, practically hidden, on the BBC website.
That changed with the 2019 Women’s World Cup, when the BBC aired triple the number of matches on its popular Channel 4 then it did for the 2017 Euro Cup. Three years later the broadcaster saw viewership spike again as it aired 26 matches from the Women’s Euro 2022 event.
The BBC also launched an integrated campaign to promote their coverage of the tournaments. The numbers showed not only the value of marketing, but the inherent draw of women’s sports.
In 2017 viewership came in at 11.7 million for that year’s Euro Cup, which then soared to 68.6 million in 2019. Also, in 2022, 57.9 million people watched the UEFA European Women’s Football Championship.
“These major tournaments are drawing bigger and bigger audiences, creating a halo effect of opportunity for the players, the fans and the sponsors,” Nielsen states in its report. “Nearly 80% of the general population are now aware of the 2023 Women’s World Cup and 40% find it appealing—the highest scores for any female competition.
In a similar vein, when ESPN expanded its coverage of the NCAA Women’s Basketball tournament in 2021, the ratings for the first round doubled compared to 2019.
Nielsen says that indicates very clearly that if you air it, the viewers will come. “The takeaway is clear: Prioritizing the access and promotion of women’s sports increases visibility and grows audiences and sponsorship opportunities,” the report concludes.
Three Lessons to Draw From the BBC’s Coverage
Nielsen says its analysis of women’s sports coverage highlighted three lessons that broadcasters and brands need to learn in order to create growth in viewership and consumer product sales.
The first is that fans actually want to watch women’s sports, but coverage is difficult to find, and must be increased.
Polling by Nielsen Fan Insights found that the media doesn’t provide enough coverage of women’s sports, and networks don’t air enough games. Nearly a quarter of the US population, at 22%, said there isn’t enough information in the media to keep up with women’s sports.
“Nielsen analysis found that ESPN SportsCenter provided 91 seconds of coverage for the average WNBA game and 266 seconds of coverage for the average NBA game, despite claimed interest in the two leagues being much closer,” the report says. “The second barrier cited is lack of access to live broadcasts. Almost a fifth of U.S. fans (18%) said live airings of women’s sports aren’t easily accessible to them.”
The second lesson is that fans want broadcasters and brands to take the responsibility of promoting women’s sports, just as the BBC has done.
Nearly 40% of global sports fans want to see more news coverage related to live women’s sporting events. “For both broadcasters and brands, this underscores a clear opportunity to create, promote and sponsor the women’s sports stories fans want,” Nielsen says. “And fans do love a company that supports their favorite franchise.
“According to Nielsen Fan Insights, 71% of Women’s World Cup fans believe that companies who sponsor the tournament show their commitment to the advancement of gender equality and women’s sports.”
The third lesson is that brands sponsoring teams are seen more positively than those who don’t, and that’s particularly true in women’s sports.
After seeing WNBA sponsorships during a game, 44% of WNBA fans said they visited a brand’s website, and 28% said they bought something from that brand. That compares to 36% and 24% of NBA fans who were surveyed on the same questions.
The same thing was true in soccer/football, where 69% of Women’s World Cup fans said they found brands more appealing when they participate in sports sponsorships. As well, 56% said they were likely to learn more about the brand, and 59%—well over half—“would pick a sponsor’s product over a rival’s if prices and quality were the same.”
2023-2024: The Breakthrough Year for Women’s Sports in North America
Interest in women’s sports has been growing steadily, but in 2023 a number of things happened that showed the sector has truly arrived. In fact, if you had predicted five years ago the attendance or ratings numbers for women’s events, you’d likely be laughed out of the locker room. However, the numbers posted for both attendance and ratings have increased exponentially.
For example, consider that the most viewed college sporting event of all time on ESPN+ was the recent NCAA championship game between the University of Iowa and Louisiana State University, which accumulated 9.9 million viewers on ESPN+, with viewership peaking at 12.6 million.
The game also propelled some athletes to even greater stardom. Before the game, LSU star Angel Reese’s name image and likeness value was $371,000. Since then, it has skyrocketed to $1.3 million.
Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, the highest scoring NCAA basketball player of all time, for women or men, signed deals with State Farm Insurance, Nike, Bose and Buick.
In August last year, the phenomenal Nebraska women’s volleyball team set the world record for the number of fans to ever attend a women’s sporting event. Fan demand was so high that the match had to be played in the University of Nebraska football stadium, and 92,003 fans packed the seats, breaking the previous world record of 91,648.
That popularity extended to the nation’s TV screens. As one example, the first NCAA college volleyball match ever to be streamed on Fox drew a shocking 1.66 million viewers.
Wherever you look in the world of women’s sports, attendance and ratings have skyrocketed.
- At the 2023 Women’s World Cup, 2 million fans attended, with average attendance per match at 31,000, while 2 billion viewers watched on TV.
- At the US Open, 3.4 million viewers tuned in for the final.
- The National Women’s Soccer League set an overall league attendance record, even though there was a month left in the regular season, not to mention the playoffs.
- On July 26, 2023, 6.4 million viewers tuned into Fox for a group stage match for the World Cup between the US national women’s team and the Netherlands, making it the most streamed WWC group match in US broadcast history.
- The Women’s National Basketball Association is averaging 560,000 TV viewers per game, and averaging 6,700 fans attending games.
- In Canada, the first game of the Professional Women’s Hockey League between Toronto and New York averaged 879,000 viewers and peaked at 1.1 million viewers during the second period. It was the most watched program on Canadian TV on New Year’s Day, and overall reached 2.9 viewers in a country roughly one-tenth the size of the US.
According to Jane McManus, the Executive Director of the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall University, the rise in women’s sports is partly due to the fact broadcasters and brands are no longer suppressing women’s events, but actively promoting them. “There’s often been a suppression of the marketplace because you have people who really care about men’s sports who don’t really want to have to ask those questions about women’s sports. They don’t want to address the marketplace.
“The broadcasters are getting smarter because their ratings are showing them that they need to spend more time thinking about [women’s sport],” McManus adds. “I think women at the VP level … are asking their companies why they’re investing in men’s and not spending sponsorship dollars on women’s sports as well. So I think that is going to change the way that a lot of people look at how they’re presenting women’s sports on television.”
That’s something I also saw in my own small way, as the father of a female hockey player, and coach of a girls’ hockey team.
When my older daughter started playing hockey in Canada, there was no girls’ team in our town, so she played on a boys’ team. Many of the parents were fine with it, but some were not.
One hockey dad showed up drunk at a practice, and told me girls didn’t belong in hockey, and said his son was going to “take my daughter out”. And he didn’t mean on a date.
He didn’t know my daughter was also in martial arts, so when he tried to ‘take her out’, he ended up with a bloody nose, and a short nap on the ice.
Later, as the coach of a girls’ team, I quickly learned that we would get all the worst ice times for our games and practices. The boys’ teams were considered more important, a fact that discouraged many of the girls from continuing in the sport.
Fortunately, that attitude is changing, and it’s partly due to the work of multiple companies and brands who are putting their reputations, influence and cash behind women’s sports.
The Brands That Are Promoting Women’s Sport
Now that brands have realized there is a real demand for women’s sports, several are actively working to promote leagues and teams at both the professional and collegiate levels.
Likely the most important group working in this area is the newly created organization The Women’s Sports Club, which is a collaboration between the Sports Innovation Lab founded by Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero, the banking giant Ally Financial, and a list of top global brands.
Together, these organization and companies have formed a group dedicated to increasing both direct investment into women’s sports, but more importantly, to direct their marketing and licensing dollars into the sector.
The Women’s Sports Club was unveiled on March 7, 2023 as a club that “will assemble a cohort of businesses that buy and sell sports media and sponsorships with a shared goal to elevate investments in women’s sports.”
The idea, the organization says, is to directly address the disparity in sports media between women’s and men’s sports by actively directing more of their advertising and marketing dollars to the women’s game.
“At its core, the Women’s Sports Club is built to solve what Ally and Sports Innovations Lab see as the vicious cycle that women’s sports have been in the grips of for decades: Brands say there is not enough media coverage to justify advertising dollars, while broadcasters say there are not enough advertising dollars to justify media coverage,” The Women’s Sports Club said in a statement at launch. “This vicious cycle leads to poor time slots and translates to lower viewership and smaller media deals, which eventually translates to lower value for leagues and lower pay for players.
“By bringing together the most influential buyers (brands) and sellers (media) in an open and honest environment, the Women’s Sports Club will solve challenges in selling and buying women’s sports inventory to break the vicious cycle.”
Most importantly, the Club does not see its work as simply supporting women’s sports as a charity, but rather as investing in women’s sports as an important way to boost revenues and brand engagement.
“Women’s sports have arrived, and everyone agrees it’s smart business to invest,” said Angela Ruggiero, co-founder and CEO of Sports Innovation Lab. “But there are real barriers inhibiting brands from placing scaled media buys. The Women’s Sports Club is addressing this challenge head-on, and we couldn’t have a better partner than Ally to achieve our collective goals.”
Ally Financial, as the main investor behind the club, made a number of commitments to the program, the most important being to announce a five-year initiative called the 50-50 Pledge, vowing to reach parity across its paid media spending in men’s and women’s sports.
As its first action based on that pledge, Ally teamed up with the National Women’s Soccer League and increased its media investment with CBS to help move the league’s 2022 championship match into prime time on broadcast television for the first time ever.
Additionally, Ally paid for a media sponsorship with Disney and ESPN that puts 90 per cent of its spend into women’s sports first. The deal with ESPN will see more women’s sports highlights being played on SportsCenter. It also announced a sponsorship of The Ally Women’s Open, which is a new women’s esports tournament produced by a women’s esports platform and led by an all-female management team.
“For us, it’s as simple as putting deeds over words,” said Andrea Brimmer, Ally’s chief marketing and public relations officer. “We already know emphatically that investing in women’s sports is good for business. That’s one reason why we committed to reaching equity in our sports media spending.”
That said, Brimmer also acknowledges that in these early days, women’s sports will have to grow further in order to take advantage of increased spending from brands and advertisers, and that’s going to require more planning and more direct investment.
“The real challenge is figuring out where we’re going to put our money,” Brimmer says. “There just isn’t enough inventory in women’s sports to get us to 50-50. And that’s a problem the Women’s Sports Club is going to solve, together with some of the biggest brands.”
In addition to Ally, several brands have jumped on board with The Women’s Sports Club, which now includes representation from PUMA, Adobe, Athlete (The Gap), Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, espnW, fuboTV, Gatorade, Meta, Michelob, Morgan Stanley, Nike, and a number of sports organizations.
Chief Takeaways for Brand Licensing
The growth of women’s sports is a good thing on its own, helping create a level of parity and equality between women and men in the world of professional and collegiate sports. However, it also represents a very real and potentially very lucrative opportunity for the brand licensing space.
Nancy Hensley is the head of innovation and a founding member of Mercury/13, a fund that invests in women’s soccer/football. She says many brands that are still on the fence about women’s sports stand to lose a precious first mover advantage.
“For those still on the fence, take notice; women’s sports aren’t just emerging, they’ve blossomed into the next big thing in sports’ financial landscape,” Hensley says. “Here’s a sponsorship opportunity that can also synergize perfectly with your corporate social responsibility (CSR) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals. The question I keep asking myself is this: Why aren’t more sponsors running toward this opportunity?”
Hensley says that at this stage the data on the high Return on Investment (ROI) in women’s sports is not making its way to the decision makers at many companies. However, that is changing fast, and Hensley says that companies who move quickly will get the best deals, while those who sit on the fence will lose out on what will soon be seen as amazing bargains.
“While sponsorship in women’s sports is relatively nascent, and from what I have seen, the current investment threshold for investment is lower than that of men’s sports, it’s very likely this window will narrow,” Hensley explains. “A recent report from Sports Innovation Lab states that while only 9% of the media budget was expended on women’s sports, a resounding 83% of brands plan to upscale this spending next year.
“As demand continues to grow, so will the price of entry.”
Already, a lot of smart money is diving into licensing deals with women’s leagues, teams, and players. For example, consider that spending on sponsorship deals for the Ladies Professional Gold Association increased by 30% from 2021 to 2022, and that in the same year Dick’s Sporting Goods launched branded team jerseys, basketballs and footwear in partnership with the WNBA. The print-on-demand supplier BreakingT signed a licensing agreement with the NWSL for apparel, and agencies are now working directly with women’s leagues, with OneTeam Partners representing the WNBA and NWSL.
The global advertising and marketing services company WPP is so bullish on the brand and licensing opportunities for women’s sport, that’s it’s bluntly warning clients about ignoring such a fast-growing opportunity.
”There is a lot of catching up to do, and this represents a tremendous opportunity for rights-holders and brands alike,” the company wrote in an analysis of the sector. “Not only has women’s sport historically been left behind, but so have those more prone to following it.
“Fans of women’s sport typically differ in their demographic—with notably more female fans—but also in their behavior—with a stronger brand recall of sponsors, and a higher propensity to purchase sponsors’ products than fans of men’s sport.
“Investing into women’s sport is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do,” WPP advises. “At WPP, we recognise that women’s sport is fast catching up. It is up to rights-holders and brands associated with sports to decide whether they capitalise on the momentum that has been generated, or they too will need to catch up.”
Or put another way, for brand and rights holders, the ball is now in your court.
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