Women’s sports are undeniably on the up. Six and seven-figure sponsorship deals are becoming the norm for top female athletes, and individual players are reaping the benefits of the recent rise of women’s sports. But are brands investing in more than just athletes with influencer status? A recent study found that only 6% of Fortune 500 companies have team or league deals involving the major North American women’s sports entities.
Overall, great things are happening for the biggest names in women’s sports and at the league level. But we’re not necessarily seeing that same success reflected in the investment around individual teams. So, what’s the deal (or lack thereof)? Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of women’s sports sponsorships, specifically:
- The state of sponsorship today
- Proving value to sponsors
- What’s next?
The state of sponsorship
Women’s sports leagues have signed some massive sponsorship and broadcasting deals. They’re also benefiting from a huge surge in viewership, which impacts everything from ticket sales to merch revenue. Let’s take a look at some specific women’s leagues and their current valuations:
- The NWSL boasts a $1.6 billion valuation across all 14 teams ⚽
- Angel City FC leads the pack with a value of $250M followed by the Kansas City Current with $182M and then the San Diego Wave with $132M
- Talk about a new guard – These are three of the four most recently founded teams in the league!
- The WNBA boasts a $1.16 billion valuation across 12 teams 🏀
- Last year’s champions, the Las Vegas Aces, top the charts with $140M after making history this season as the first team to sell out their entire season ticket packages for the year
While this snapshot only covers the two largest women’s sports leagues in North America, across the board, strategic investors have noted–and are acting on–the growth potential of women’s sports. While most of the coverage is focused on big wins, the challenges for women’s sports teams when it comes to scaling, appealing to sponsors, building their brand, and connecting directly to their audience persist.
Challenges in structure
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With most women’s sports leagues still in the early stages of existence, we see a lot of variety between leagues in terms of ownership models. Some leagues have single-entity ownership of their teams, others rely on investors, and some leagues are a mix of both. Some leagues are also affiliated with or partially owned by men’s leagues. This creates a challenge: there’s no universal solution to sponsorship acquisition and different league structures may be challenged with different constraints. Basically, the playbooks are still being defined.
In addition to ownership, there’s also the universal challenge of differences between league-level and team-level investment. Brands tend to prioritize investing at scale, making it no surprise that larger partnerships start at the league level. What’s behind that, however, are the challenges these bigger deals present to teams when they’re looking for strategic commercial opportunities.
These league-level investments don’t always trickle down to individual teams, and they also complicate how league-wide assets are distributed amongst teams – making it more difficult for them to grow independently. For a small team, this might mean they have less inventory to offer to potential sponsors, meaning they have fewer resources to pull from to fuel their growth efforts. It can feel like a messy and self-sustaining cycle.
One positive here is that the bigger companies overlooking women’s sports teams have left room for smaller companies to fill their spots. Colorado-based Woody Creek Distillers did just that when they became the first premier American partner of the PWHL during their inaugural season. There are a lot of positives for smaller, more localized companies when it comes to partnering with a women’s sports team or emerging league:
- Women’s sports fans are notably more loyal to brands that invest in their communities
- It’s still significantly more affordable to invest in women’s sports than men’s – while still being a great investment.
- For every dollar spent by a women’s sports sponsor, more than $7 is generated in “customer value” for the company.
The data gap
It’s common knowledge that women’s sports receive a fraction of the media coverage that men’s sports receive, but this imbalance even extends to the world of data. Women’s sports events and athletes are rarely the subject of statistical analysis, leaving them in the dark when it comes to athlete development or commercial success.
There is, however, one key type of data that women’s sports teams have the agency to collect, own, and harness for their needs: first-party fan data.
Proving your value to sponsors
Having sufficient fan data is crucial to proving your value to potential sponsors. It’s not enough to just know how many followers you have on Instagram or how many tickets you sell each game; a robust database of fan information is crucial to proving your value to sponsors.
It’s like an investor pitch: you not only need to know your total addressable market but how you are meaningfully helping the sponsor reach a subsection of that market. A robust first & zero-party database is the first step in empowering you to find alignment between sponsors and a group of fans that have an affinity for their products.
The power of numbers
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In 2022, when FC Barcelona came to a rude awakening with an allegedly devalued sponsorship deal with Spotify, fan data was still a relatively new concern in the industry. The team claimed to have 350+ million fans, but when asked by the company how many “registered” fans they had (fans who consented to sharing their personal information), Barcelona could only lay claim to 1% of that number. Had the team been able to provide data-backed proof of the hundreds of millions of fans that Spotify could tap into from day 1 it’s likely their deal would have been substantially larger.
While women’s sports teams have the unique challenge of starting from the ground up as newer institutions, this is also an advantage. Unlike many men’s teams – some of which have been around for more than a century – women’s teams have the opportunity to start from a data-centric and addressable fan point-of-view when building a marketing database from scratch. This takes into account things like prioritising social growth while building strategies to get followers off social and into their owned databases to reach them more directly with stories, content, and specific offers.
With that in mind, here are some of the ways we’re seeing women’s teams approach sponsorship today:
Approaches to sponsorship
1. Tackling broadcasting
One of our favourite strategic activations of the year is one executed by our partners at Netball New Zealand.
At the beginning of their 2024 season, Netball New Zealand had a problem: they had data on fans purchasing tickets to watch their games but didn’t have much information on the fans watching from home. Working with their broadcast partner Sky Sport, they came up with a new broadcast strategy that they integrated throughout the season. Part of this strategy included a segment of the broadcast where fans watching from home could vote for their Player of the Match by scanning a QR code displayed on their screens.
This resulted in:
- Sky Sport adding an interactive element to their broadcast (something they were already interested in doing)
- Netball New Zealand capturing more information about who was viewing from home
- Increased engagement with fans – previously Sky Sport’s commentary team had the final say on the Player of the Match, but now fans were in control of which players to highlight
- More insight into which players were popular amongst fans.
Another issue that netball as a sport tackled was the lack of alignment within broadcasting between regions. Netball New Zealand, Netball Australia, and England Netball collaborated to create NetballPass, a service that allows international fans to watch Netball, without causing competition between networks. For example, for a match between Australia and England, any international fan could tune in through NetballPass, while audiences in England and Australia would tune into their local broadcast partners.
2. A whole new world of sponsorship avenues
While it has been done, industries that cater primarily to women are not frequent sponsors in the men’s sports space. Now, “there’s interest from new brands that have never ventured into the sports space before because they weren’t appropriate for men’s sports,” according to Erin Kane, vice president of women’s sports at Excel Sports Management.
Some examples of new sponsorship ventures include:
- Soccer star Megan Rapinoe becoming the face of underwear brand Knix’s campaign to destigmatize periods in sports,
- Sequel being named the Official Tampon Provider of the USL Super League for the current season,
- Cosmetics company E.l.f. activating across sports, from the Billie Jean King Cup to the PWHL, and
- The PWHL also partnering with Barbie creators Mattel, continuing to cater to their young fans (and future players).
What's Next?
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The CMO of Ally–the NWSL’s first league-wide banking sponsor–stated that overinvestment is the key to parity in sports. “You have to do a little bit of a different valuation when it comes to women's sports because there isn't parity yet,” she said at an event hosted by the NWSL. “And if we as brands don't overinvest, we're never going to get to that parity.”
The world of women’s sports is poised for growth. Though fans, players, teams, and leagues have to rely on sponsors to keep this momentum going, they aren’t powerless. Many of the challenges we’ve outlined so far are starting to be worked through. And the first hurdle teams can tackle to gain more power is to start closing that fan data gap.
Not sure where to start? We’ll be dropping our overview of ways to tackle the data gap in women’s sports soon. In the meantime…
Happy fan marketing!