Women’s league seeks more fans, sponsors after U.S. title
Megan Rapinoe, the lavender-haired icon of women’s soccer, maintains that green is the key to her sport’s sustainability.
“For me, it’s about the Benjis,” she said.
Women’s soccer engages the U.S. every four years, then disappears for most fans like a comet leaving the solar system. In the wake of the Americans’ record-setting fourth World Cup title Sunday, the hard part remains: the weekly work of boosting the National Women’s Soccer League, where average attendance remains at a minor league level.
Fans have not handed over a sufficient supply of $100 bills displaying Benjamin Franklin’s portrait, and sponsors and broadcasters have not made enough of the six-, seven- and eight-figure agreements needed for the NWSL to rise to the level of men’s Major League Soccer.
“On the men’s side in MLS, they have owners with extremely deep pockets,” defender Crystal Dunn said. “If the women’s game is going to grow, it’s going to come down to us not kind of pennypinching on things and really putting a lot of resources in.”
The Women’s United Soccer Association, launched as the first fully professional women’s league, folded in
2003 after just three seasons. Women’s Professional Soccer started play in 2009 and also lasted only three seasons.
NWSL took the field in
2013 and has a management contrast with the U.S. Soccer Federation, which has listed nearly $8.5 million as expenses attributable to the league. The USSF pays the salaries of 22 allocated national team players, providing the NWSL a subsidy and the ability to market the top American players.
NWSL launched in 2013 with eight teams, increased to nine the following season and 10 in 2016, then went back to nine in 2018 — of which four share owners with MLS.
“When the league started, no one expected the league to survive seven seasons,” Utah Royals coach Laura Harvey said. “I think the biggest battle has already been overcome a little bit in the U.S. that a lot of women’s soccer faces across the world, is that people are willing to pay a ticket price to watch a game.”
MLS, which started with
10 teams in 1996, expanded, contracted and now has grown to 24 teams this season, with plans to expand to 30. MLS average attendance has risen from the
14,000 range at the turn of the century to about 22,000; the NWSL is between 5,000 to 6,000.
“The MLS, it’s well documented, had its share of growing pains when it was still a toddler and a youth, if you will. So. I don’t think any of us involved in the NWSL thought this was going to be an easy journey in establishing a viable women’s league,” said Mike Golub, president of business for MLS’s Portland Timbers and the NWSL’s Thorns, who lead the league with an 18,000-plus attendance average.
Just a handful of NWSL games were televised nationally from 2013-16 but the league announced a deal with A+E Networks ahead of the 2017 season in which the company would take an equity stake and broadcast a game of the week on Lifetime. But A+E cut short the deal last winter, a season early, and it took NWSL until last week to announce an agreement for ESPN to televise 14 games during the season’s second half.
NWSL’s staff is small. The league had three to five full-time employees when it started and now has 13, including five in its media office. The goal is to grow teams and staff.
“Not expansion just to expand,” said Amanda Duffy, who is in her third season running the NWSL office and in her first year as league president. “It’s expansion to get right with the right ownership, with the right facilities, the right market, the right infrastructure and the right ability to connect with the community and resonating in a market. And if we get that right, that will also at the same time broaden our footprint, broaden the relevancy.”
NWSL announced a sponsorship agreement with Budweiser, a deal negotiated by MLS’s marketing wing, Soccer United Marketing.
Houston, Orlando, Portland and Utah have shared owners with the MLS teams in their cities, and defending champion North Carolina has the same owner as the local team in the secondtier USL.