The future is female, and perhaps one of the best examples of that shift is the modern sports landscape. While men's sports may dominate the airwaves now, women both as athletes and fans are on the cusp of leveraging significant power.
According to a panel of experts at the Rally Innovation conference, women represent both the best opportunity for growth in sports as well as an untapped market of buying power. Jen Welter (former NFL coach, chief marketing officer of the Arena Football League), Zora Stephenson (broadcaster for NBC Sports), Christie Jenkins (former athlete and founder of sports investment firm FC32), and Lydia Davies (founder and CEO of Osprey) talked about how women are changing the future landscape of sports.
A New Way To View Opportunity
Christie Jenkins puts her money where her mouth is — investing specifically in soccer teams around the world. And everywhere her and her team get involved, they do it with both the men's and the women's teams. "Every team we buy, we do men’s and women’s," Jenkins says. "When I look at women’s sport I am so pumped about the growth: $2 million in 2020 has grown to $53 million today. Women’s sport has gone from 4% to 15%. Will be over $1 billion for the first time ever."
But, Jenkins says, the stand-alone teams and leagues aren't profitable yet. For one, they're dealing with being a new force in an entrenched market. "If you’re an investor looking at this space you’re either going to have to have deep pockets, be diluted, or do men’s and women’s together and share the cost base between genders," Jenkins says. But she believes that early investment will be more than worth it in the long run. The increasing popularity in women's sports means television contracts aren't far behind.
"It will be incredibly valuable in the future," she says. "It’s the TV deal; Men’s teams have hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Within the next decade we’ll be there with women's sports, too. It's all about media contract cycles."
Investing In Athletes For Their Stories, Not Just Their Talents
Jen Welter says one of the big things is getting fans invested in players beyond just their talents. It's something the Olympics tends to do very well, since with very few exceptions, most athletes at the olympics are relatively unknown to most television audiences before broadcasters start talking about their lives and journeys. With female fans and athletes in particular, this factor plays a big role.
"Fandom happens through relationship," Welter says. "I am not a basketball person, but I want to see Caitlyn Clark because I love her journey. I love her rivalry with Angel Reese. I want to see that play out in realtime. Most of those things in our life play out in private. Sports play out in public and allow us to love the humans in that journey."
Jenkins agrees, and sees a focus on athletes as individuals as also beneficial to their independent brands.
"We follow the athlete more than the team," Jenkins says. "And we care about stories. Those two truths unlock different things for us in marketing and branding and entertainment. I’m excited about content. We control the platforms and you can have a blog, a Patreon, a YouTube, a TIkTok. You Can do whatever you like and control your own content. That’s how we start to learn about the athlete and care about you on the field. If you stand up for something, people will stand for you. What do you care about as an athlete? What do you care about as a team or a team owner? Stand up for something and you are attracting the other people who care about that issue. And then athletes are getting to build their own businesses. As an athlete I can start to build a business off the platform I have."
Zora Stephenson, who covered the recent Paris olympics for NBC, saw that firsthand. And the best franchises and sports organizations realize it, too. That's why they make the experience of going to an athletic event much more than just the even itself, like in the case of a race that is otherwise quite short. "The race itself is less than 10 seconds but you’re there for 2 hours and you don’t even realize it," she says.
The Buying Power Of Women In Sports
If for no other reason, women represent such an opportunity in sports because they hold so much of the buying power in the United States. "87 percent of the disposable purchasing power lies with women," Welter says.
This fact alone means companies who advertise around athletics and sporting events should care a lot more about reaching women than they may have in the past. And some brands fully understand that. Look at beauty brand e.l.f, which became the first ever beauty brand to be a primary sponsor in the Indianapolis 500. Or at Athleta, which was all over the olympics.
"One that stood out to me in Paris was Athleta and 'the power of she,' Stephenson says. "Not just for sponsorship, but they give female athletes a platform." Those marketing relationships tend to work out better than simply paying a lot of money to plaster your logo on things.
Welter says women are the "growth" market in most sports, meaning they're the segment with the most potential to grow the overall audience. That's particularly true in football, which super-serves its male audience. "It's the final frontier in football," Welter says. "There’s about $6 billion unrealized on merchandise. Women are buying the gear. Why not create a culture that’s inclusive?"
For her part, Welter is also using reach out to women via her program, "A Day in the Life of an NFL Player," which is a camp specifically designed to teach women how to play and understand football. "Every woman should learn how to tackle, period," she says. "Now you can step into those conversations in the board room. Any place where we as women can’t enter a conversation, that’s where business is being done. When you feel welcome to enter, you can enter."