🔥NWSL and WNBA show how broadcast enhancements maximise women’s sports investments🔴
0NWSL and WNBA show how broadcast enhancements maximise women’s sports investments
Women’s sport is booming. The pages of SportsPro are filled with news of record attendances in stadiums, lucrative commercial deals, and transformative broadcast contracts.
In the past week alone, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark helped Fox attract the largest regular season television audience for a women’s college basketball game in 25 years, Arsenal women sold out the Emirates Stadium, and Sony has included a female player mode in its ‘MLB The Show’ video game series.
There is still plenty of work to be done when it comes to representation and equality, but even the most shameless contrarian grifters on social media would struggle to dispute the fan interest and commercial potential of women’s sport.
Enhanced media coverage, whether its quantity, quality, or availability, is an important part of the equation.
US broadcasters in particular recognise this reality. Amid changing consumption habits, live sport has never been more popular and the growing profile of major women’s events has led to significant investments in coverage and more lucrative television deals.
ESPN has reached a US$920 million eight-year deal with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) that values the women’s March Madness basketball championship at US$65 million a season. Meanwhile, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is about to begin a new US$240 million four-year TV deal with CBS, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps.
The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) should also see a significant uplift from its US$40 million-a-year arrangements when its rights are up for grabs again in 2025.
Having made these investments, broadcasters understand it is their responsibility to maximise impact. The more professional the presentation and the more comprehensive the coverage, the more likely fans are likely to tune in and appreciate the product on offer.
Scripps, which will show two NWSL games every Saturday on ION television from the 2024 season, is planning pre-match, halftime, and post-match shows, along with regular highlights and preview programming to complement its coverage. These are the first ever weekly shows devoted to the league on network television in the US.
“We made a commitment to the NWSL, the teams, players and fans,” said Quinn Pacini, vice president of broadcast operations for Scripps Sports. “With that in mind, we’ve assembled a first-class team of soccer minds, voices and experts to showcase our Saturday night NWSL franchise. It’s a deep, talented, versatile group that will entertain and inform fans all season.”
The attractiveness of women’s sport as a product is also reflected by a multi-year partnership between the WNBA and Genius Sports. Using the latter’s Second Spectrum technology, the WNBA will be able to collect 3D player pose and ball-tracking data to create a wide range of basketball and commercial applications.
The resulting use cases will enhance television coverage and digital content, and also unlock new betting possibilities – deepening engagement. Such examples might appear trivial, but the explosion of sports betting and fantasy in the US is a huge opportunity for all professional leagues. Indeed, how many college basketball fans will be filling out men’s and women’s March Madness brackets this year?
The deployment of the technology in the WNBA – a first for any women’s professional sports league in the US – reflects the growing appeal of the competition and will help the league ahead of broadcast negotiations.
“Technology continues to fundamentally change the sports landscape,” said WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. “Deploying state-of-the-art optical tracking technology through Genius Sports will deliver rich data to our teams that they can leverage to enhance player performance while informing in-game strategy and enable a new wave of insights and media elements for fans.”
Women’s sport is a different type of investment for broadcasters. It might not attract National Football League (NFL) or National Basketball Association (NBA) audiences just yet, but the rewards are there for broadcasters willing to put the time, effort, and money into building something bigger that will benefit the entire ecosystem.