Our devoted Ladies’s Sport Group hosted its inaugural Ladies’s Sport Symposium on 29 February 2024 to debate key points throughout the ladies’s sporting panorama. Amongst different subjects, a panel of key figures and specialists, which was chaired by Sarah Butler (Founding father of Sports activities Enterprise Related), mentioned the pertinent subject of the commercialisation of girls’s sports activities rights.
Key Alternatives and Challenges
Ladies’s sport, and the commercialisation of its rights, is at an important crossroads in its growth. The exponential development within the viewership and visibility of girls’s sport in recent times has been extensively reported and rightly celebrated. As lined in a earlier Sports activities Shorts weblog put up, 2023 was one other record-breaking yr with 46.7m folks tuning in to look at ladies’s sport on linear TV, surpassing the earlier document set in 2019 by almost one million.[1] Ladies’s elite sport can also be predicted to interrupt by the billion-dollar barrier and generate international revenues in extra of $1bn for the primary time in 2024.[2] While the numbers make for excellent studying and current quite a few alternatives, in addition they deliver with them sure challenges.
Free-to-air vs. Paywall
By way of broadcast rights, the elevated visibility of girls’s sport has predominately been pushed by free-to-air channels. While the BBC and ITV solely accounted for 11% of the overall protection hours of girls’s sport in 2023, they accounted for 77% of whole viewing hours.[3]
Hannah Brown (Co-CEO of Ladies’s Soccer at DAZN) commented at our Ladies’s Sport Symposium that DAZN’s technique is to make ladies’s soccer “free to look at” at this stage of its growth. In January this yr, DAZN eliminated the paywall from all reside ladies’s soccer matches on its platform, thus eradicating that preliminary barrier to entry so as to proceed to scale and have interaction a worldwide viewers. The dilemma of how finest to monetise ladies’s sport is on the forefront of the thoughts of rightsowners’ too. While free-to-air protection has been essential in driving the expansion in viewership of girls’s sport, figuring out to what extent and at what level it’s applicable to pivot or transition to paid-offerings, shall be vital.
As a way to maximise the viewers for a lot of ladies’s sports activities properties, each rightsowners and broadcasters have relied on YouTube’s ready-made international attain and its complete datasets. There’s in fact a trade-off between such advantages and the ability of building a direct relationship with followers by way of the rightsowner’s or broadcaster’s personal platform and the larger direct business alternatives that such a first-hand relationship presents.
Pinnacle vs. Pyramid
As could also be anticipated, the document viewership figures in ladies’s sports activities have been pushed by worldwide sporting occasions that happen each few years. Final yr noticed the coincidence of a number of pinnacle properties, together with the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup, the Ladies’s Ashes Collection, the Netball World Cup and the Solheim Cup, which have been every additional boosted by England (or Europe) reaching the respective event finals or competing in nail-bitingly shut competitions. Soccer, specifically, stays the head sport, constituting 74% of whole viewing hours for ladies’s sport, with the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup accounting for 70% of these soccer viewing hours.[4]
There’s a nice alternative to capitalise on these document numbers off the again of those pinnacle properties. As these occasions solely happen each few years, the present problem is how finest to transform these eyeballs into constant shoppers of girls’s sport. At our Ladies’s Sport Symposium, Mike Llewellyn (Director at Squire Patton Boggs) commented on the necessity to make sure that ladies’s sport and its properties aren’t handled homogenously. A key problem for the rightsowners on this development section for ladies’s sport shall be for every of them to be taught extra about their particular person audiences, what their preferences are, and the way finest these might be served.
Julia Wall-Clarke (Head of Communications at Hexagon Cup) outlined this thrilling alternative for ladies’s sport to empower itself to undertake a start-up mentality and rip up the rule e book and work on new, revolutionary codecs and methods of considering. Even with main ladies’s soccer properties, that are among the extra dominant and established within the sector, they shouldn’t be immune to alter.
“With ladies’s soccer, it appears like a 100-year-old start-up; it’s a longtime sport, however the ladies’s sport continues to be comparatively new and has the chance to do issues in a different way.”
Julia Wall-Clarke, Head of Communications – Hexagon Cup
Bundled vs. Unbundled
As ladies’s sports activities properties proceed to develop in prominence, so there are larger requires these properties to be “unbundled” from their associated males’s properties – i.e. to permit ladies’s sports activities properties to create partnerships that align with values which are distinctive to these properties and their audiences.
There have been challenges for ladies’s sports activities properties which were unbundled for the primary time, significantly from a broadcast perspective. Nonetheless, as soon as that daring transfer has been taken and a selected worth has been ascribed to these properties, then their business worth might be extra precisely decided and develop for future rights cycles. For instance, final yr it was well-publicised that FIFA initially struggled to achieve agreements with broadcasters in key markets for the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup which met their goal valuations. Nonetheless, given the success of the event and TV audiences achieved, it’s troublesome to not foresee that rights values will improve materially for the event’s subsequent version.
The unbundling of sponsorship rights can also be predicted to collect tempo.[5] Lately, this has led to ground-breaking, ladies’s solely partnerships, together with these between Charlotte Tilbury and F1 Academy (the wonder model’s first ever international sports activities sponsorship), in addition to Stella McCartney and Arsenal Ladies (making a bespoke limited-edition equipment and clothes vary for the ladies’s group). While these ladies’s solely offers current distinctive alternatives for manufacturers to enter into the sports activities sponsorship market, the problem is to make sure that these offers complement, reasonably than change, different core business partnerships.
“There could be a battle between business partnerships for the boys’s and ladies’s groups as golf equipment could search to prioritise core sector partnerships (e.g. within the monetary companies or insurance coverage sectors) with the boys’s group as these are extra profitable. Partnerships between the likes of Charlotte Tilbury and F1 Academy are very attention-grabbing and nice for selling ladies’s sport, however in fact we don’t need to restrict partnerships to sectors corresponding to magnificence manufacturers on the expense of core sector offers.”
Rachel Knight, Managing Director – Ladies’s Sport Group
Scheduling
With an more and more congested sporting calendar, it’s essential that girls’s sports activities properties are scheduled appropriately so as to maximise their publicity to each their present fanbase but in addition the chance to entry new audiences. As we’ve got mentioned in a earlier Sports activities Shorts weblog put up, there continues to be a lot dialogue round whether or not the present protected interval on a Saturday afternoon might present a devoted broadcast slot for ladies’s soccer.
Not solely does scheduling play an important position in enhancing the visibility of girls’s sport on TV, and in flip driving the worth of broadcast rights and sponsorship offers, however it is usually pivotal in encouraging matchday attendance. While matchday could not essentially itself be the most important standalone income generator for ladies’s sport, it performs a significant position in producing an environment, enhancing the product and in addition advancing these different income streams. As Hannah Brown (Co-CEO of Ladies’s Soccer at DAZN) famous at our Ladies’s Sport Symposium – from a broadcaster’s perspective, “Matchday is vital. If we don’t get matchday proper, we don’t win“. Investing in making a compelling matchday product, which might be aided by beneficial scheduling to advertise greater matchday crowds and larger in-stadium buzz, in flip drives broadcasting and sponsorship worth.
“Matchday is vital. If we don’t get matchday proper, we don’t win”
Hannah Brown, Co-CEO of Ladies’s Soccer – DAZN
Exploiting the chance
Ladies’s sport is at an thrilling and essential juncture in its growth, with nice capability for additional development. As a way to maximise its development alternatives, plainly a basic precedence is for its numerous rightsowners and stakeholders to realize a larger understanding of their present fanbase and the alternatives for this to develop. It’s only by gaining this larger perception into its followers (and their pursuits and traits) that rightsowners give themselves the best alternatives to maximise the breadth and depth of the commercialisation of their properties. While ladies’s sports activities rightsowners can at all times look to extra conventional and established males’s properties, it is vital that they don’t really feel wedded to blindly comply with their established order and are empowered to cater to their distinctive audiences and attain new ones. As outlined above, there are quite a few essential choices to be made, and the optimum resolution (knowledgeable by knowledge) would require a joined-up method throughout stakeholders, together with golf equipment, leagues, media, sponsors and broadcasters – as properly, in fact, as additional funding.
[1] Visibility Uncovered, 2023 – The Yr in Assessment: A Ladies’s Sport Belief Report into Visibility, Ladies’s Sport Belief (February 2024), p 7.
[2] Deloitte, “Breaking the billion-dollar barrier: Ladies’s elite sports activities to generate greater than $1 billion in income in 2024” (29 November 2023) [accessed online here].
[3] Visibility Uncovered, 2023 – The Yr in Assessment: A Ladies’s Sport Belief Report into Visibility, Ladies’s Sport Belief (February 2024), p 11.
[4] Visibility Uncovered, 2023 – The Yr in Assessment: A Ladies’s Sport Belief Report into Visibility, Ladies’s Sport Belief (February 2024), p 56.
[5] Deloitte, “Ladies’s elite sports activities: Breaking the billion-dollar barrier” [accessed online here].
