This week’s (March 18) UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter final at Real Madrid’s Estadio Alfredo di Stefano was labelled a ‘disgrace’ by Arsenal legend Ian Wright.
The state of the muddied pitch, home of Real Madrid’s men’s reserves, prompted outcries on social media and comparisons with the 1975 match between Derby County and Stoke City played on the now-demolished Baseball Ground.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the women’s game though, however outraged Wrighty might rightfully be.
The good news is that women’s football revenues grew 35% last year to €117m.
The even better news is that commercial revenues accounted for two-thirds (66%) of total revenues, according to Deloitte, emphasising the unique, authentic value of women’s football is delivering for commercial partners.
However, put in context of the men’s and women’s games, top flight clubs in 2023/24 generated a record €11.2 billion, an increase of 6%, with Real Madrid becoming the first football club to generate EUR 1 billion across a single season.
To edge closer to the giant revenues of the men’s game, European women’s football should take heart and learn from the exponential rise of Women’s college basketball in the USA, as reported by Claire Fahy in the The New York Times last week (March 16).
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The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship in 2024 saw the women’s final reach an audience of 19 million, compared to the men’s at a little shy of 15 million.
This is the first time since the inception of the NCAA women’s championship in 1982, that the women’s final drew more viewers than the men’s – but why now?
A lot of the success is attributed to seemingly trivial, personality driven, Gen Z rivalry between all-time leading scorer, 23-year-old Caitlin Clark of Iowa and Angel Reese of Louisiana State. Their games attracted sell-out crowds and smashed TV viewership records.
With Clark and Reese now playing in the WNBA, women’s college basketball audiences continue to grow with ESPN audiences up 3% from last season and advertising spend on women’s sports more than doubled last year.
TV marketing firm EDO reported earlier this month that TV advertisers spent $244 million on women’s sports in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 139%, with basketball benefitting from the most investment of any sport.
The actionable insight in the EDO report is that ads during women’s sports programs were 40% more impactful than the average primetime advertisement.
Ads containing messages from WNBA players during WNBA games were 103% more effective than ones that didn’t, the report said.
In the USA women’s sports are perceived as one of the most valuable areas for advertisers, in a large part attributed to contextually-relevant ads featuring recognised player-influencers.
By bringing the talent front and centre to the advertising messaging – the effect is authentic, personal content that creates relatable experiences for audiences.
Global fans of women’s sports are a diverse group, 43% of women’s sports fans are male and they are young, tech savvy, highly engaged, according to Nielsen.
So here’s the take away; size matters but not as much as quality.
Nielsen contends that in order to maintain and grow the momentum around women’s sports, there are four key areas that brands, federations and clubs should consider:
- Big up the content by making women’s sports content as discoverable and ubiquitous as men’s sports.
- Develop household names by taking a leaf out of the WNBA Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese playbook, create fierce rivalries and big, heroic, visceral sporting moments.
- Enhance event experiences because despite growing enthusiasm for women’s sports, many marquee events are still housed in small and antiquated venues. See Arsenal legend and TV pundit Ian Wright’s ‘disgrace’ comment at the beginning of this article.
- Measure everything and do it holistically – abandon vanity metrics that showcase absurdly large audience numbers but with little engagement or quantifiable results.