There’s been a persistent narrative around women’s football that the sport is in its ‘startup’ phase. Given most leagues around the world only turned fully professional in the last five to 10 years, things are certainly in their infancy. But when it comes to the business itself, the startup label is only partially true.
Much like startup Silicon Valley projects, women’s football rights-holders are predicting huge revenues – tens or hundreds of times more than they currently earn. But unlike their California-based cousins, women’s football isn’t starting afresh.
It has inherited a clunky, century-old ecosystem that belongs to men’s football – an ecosystem that took over 100 years to mature. Football isn’t known for its economic innovation. It prefers boom, bust and bailouts. Women’s football needs something different.
Having experienced a boom era from 2019 to 2023, women’s football now has a growth problem. It’s not an engagement issue, nor is it a fan increase dilemma. This is a problem that begins and ends with money.
Just like any growing business, women’s football needs an injection of investment to reach its potential.
Over the past year, the sport has battled to increase revenues at the same rate as it has been gaining fans. It has particularly sought big increases in media rights fees – a desire largely met with resistance from broadcasters around the world.
The 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup was the most high-profile example of a wider impasse between rights-holders and broadcasters. Deals in major football markets, including in the country of eventual winners Spain, were struck at the eleventh hour as Fifa held out for what it believed to be fair value,
Fifa president Gianni Infantino bemoaned European broadcasters for the “disappointing” offers that were made.
“To be very clear, it is our moral and legal obligation not to undersell the Fifa Women’s World Cup,” Infantino said. “Broadcasters pay $100m to $200m for the men’s FIFA World Cup, but they offer only $1m to $10m for the Fifa Women’s World Cup.”
In many ways, Gianni is right. The broadcast market has been slow to take to women’s football – particularly in Europe. This is despite a fairly widespread acceptance that women’s football has been undervalued for decades.
Compared to the WNBA’s latest $200m-per-year domestic media rights deal – struck on the back of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese’s game-changing rivalry – women’s football isn’t getting the love.
At present, the broadcast money generated by European leagues like England’s Women’s Super League is not enough to provide significant revenue for clubs. The majority of clubs are still relying on investment from their affiliated men’s teams, alongside their own sponsorship deals and ticket sales.
The ambition of women’s football clubs and the corresponding wage demands from players are increasing at a faster rate than women’s football can currently commercialise.
Earlier this year, Deloitte’s Annual Revenue of Football Finance reported that England’s WSL clubs generated total revenue of £48m in the 2022-23 season, an increase of 50 per cent on the previous campaign. Total matchday revenues, thanks to more games being played in larger stadiums, also grew to £7m.
However, buried within the positive headlines were growing pre-tax losses (£21m), wage costs (£36m) and a worrying inequality between teams. The cumulative wage bills of the league’s four biggest clubs – Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City – accounted for 57 per cent of the league’s total wage bill.
These issues mirror the men’s football ecosystem the WSL has borrowed from. In the Premier League, wages account for an average of about 90 per cent of clubs’ total revenue. Women’s football seems destined to follow the same path, despite hopes of reaching a sustainable future.
Commercial catch-up
Women’s Professional Leagues Limited, the company now responsible for the WSL and Championship, is now playing commercial catch-up with little option but to use the structure it has inherited from the Football Association. A new broadcast deal with Sky has pushed things in the right direction, but there is still much work to be done.
Zarah Al-Kudcy, chief revenue officer at WPLL, has been given the green light by WSL clubs to expand the league’s sponsorship portfolio and use brand partnerships as a growth tool for women’s football.
There is a widespread acceptance that women’s football has been undervalued.
“This will be an immediate priority for us, but it will be more than just revenue,” Al-Kudcy told The Long Game. “We want to work with brands that want to be partners in the truest sense of the word, investing in women’s football above and beyond their fee.”
The WSL’s renewal with Barclays as title sponsor saw a strong uptick in cash and commitments to grassroots women’s football – an increase of about 400 per cent to £15m per year from 2024-25.
For the bank, the association with women’s football isn’t about making a direct return on investment, as with its sponsorship deal with the Premier League. It’s a much more long term and grassroots play.
“What we get with the Women’s Super League is amazing brand association and people feeling closer and warmer to us as a brand because of it”, says Katy Bowman, head of sponsorship partnerships, UK at Barclays. “It is much more of a reputation play with the Women’s Super League. But we’re there at the beginning, and we hope that it will grow to the same level that we have with the Premier League”.
This is the reality for most brands in women’s football. However, there is a legitimate first-mover advantage for those that get in early. Aligning with a league in its infancy can make your name synonymous from the start and even influence the logo, colour palette and branding. The ‘Barclaysmen’ trend that swept social media is a prime example of that.
Another key element of brand partnerships, hospitality and activations, also have a different flavour at WSL games. Brands often use their partnerships to entertain clients at matches, usually in luxurious corporate boxes.
In the WSL, more games are being held at main club stadiums than ever before, but there are still plenty of matches at lower league stadiums such as Crawley Town’s Broadfield Stadium, Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road and the Totally Wicked Stadium in St. Helens. Though these stadiums do have corporate facilities, they lack the allure of the Emirates Stadium and Stamford Bridge.
“The Premier League deal allows us to get to the absolute key clients that we couldn’t get to in any other way,” Bowman adds. “If we put them in a room with a Premier League manager, for example, that is the only time we would ever be able to be face to face with some of those clients.”
She continued: “We don’t have that ability to do that with the Women’s Super League, yet. All of it is a yet.”
With sponsorship looking like a steady burn rather than a sharp upward trend, Al-Kudcy believes the market for women’s football clothing and merchandise can move much faster. Arsenal are leaders on this in English football, regularly dropping women’s specific shirts and club clothing lines, but it’s in the US where women’s sport has really tried to cash in on ‘merch’.
“The ‘Everyone Watches Women’s Sport’ T-shirt is the perfect case study,” Al-Kudcy says. “It’s generated more than $1m in sales in less than a year, for one T-shirt. There is clearly a demand from fans for women’s sports merchandise, now we collectively need to service it.”
Sustainable incentives
As Al-Kudcy and WPLL work to grow centralised revenues, the clubs themselves are getting better at spending it. Transfer fees are becoming more common in women’s club football as revenues grow and there is no sign of clubs volunteering to take a more sustainable path than their male counterparts.
Maggie Murphy, the former chief executive of third-tier Lewes Football Club, believes there must be incentives for clubs to prioritise their own commercial growth, especially for teams that exist independently of men’s Premier League clubs.
The chase for promotion and success on the pitch takes precedence for most clubs. In that race to the top, a commercial race to the bottom can quickly emerge. Murphy believes this model is harming the growth and sustainability of the women’s game.
“I think [it would be good] if we could find a way to hold back 10 per cent of the central revenue from the (WSL and Championship) broadcast deal, or from the centralised sponsor fund, and provide that as a bonus if you manage to hit certain financial targets,” she says.
Murphy also references the findings of former England international Karen Carney’s review of women’s football that was delivered by the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport last year. In the report, Carney highlighted several priorities for women’s football over the coming years, including financial sustainability.
“I feel very strongly that we should be thinking about means testing. Perhaps you still distribute the [centralised WPLL] funds 75/25 across all the 24 clubs in the top two tiers, but within the club distributions, you have a small nuance based on means testing. If your costs remain under a certain percentage of revenues, there has to be some kind of financial incentive.”
Jet fuel
Women’s football clearly has a dilemma. It wants to grow revenues like a startup, all while keeping the balance sheets positive. Aside from instating the salary caps and collective bargaining agreements seen in US sport, there is one way to achieve this: external investment.
Private equity has long been seen as a last resort for sports rights-holders struggling for growth. However, with media rights fee stagnating across the UK, Europe and Asia, it is an option being considered by more rights-holders than not.
Several firms have been circling women’s sport looking for opportunities, but the speed at which funds are committing money is slow and the funding pots much smaller than seen in men’s sport. So far, big name funds are yet to show concrete interest – perhaps sensing that solid returns could be decades away.
Boutique, special-interest fund Mercury13 is currently one of two investment groups with big ambitions around women’s football. It plans to become a multi-club ownership group and claims to have $100m ready to invest in the sport. However, the group has acquired just one club to date: FC Como Women in Italy’s top-tier Serie A Femminile.
American businesswoman Michele Kang has been the most aggressive investor in the space, acquiring the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, Olympique Lyonnais and the London City Lionesses via her Kynisca Sports International vehicle.
Kang is currently the only person operating a multi-club model in the women’s game and is perhaps the sector’s biggest bull, publicly proclaiming that she expects women’s football to become a multi-billion dollar business sooner rather than later.
While these two firms have been catching headlines, they are outliers in the sector. The WPLL and its constituent clubs are yet to receive any private equity investment. A £20m interest-free loan from the Premier League is the largest cash injection to date.
According to Kerstin Lutz, chief executive of the Billie Jean King Cup, private equity is the fastest route to commercial growth for women’s sport.
Lutz spent 25 years working in European club football for Team Marketing, the agency responsible for commercialising the Uefa Champions League via traditional revenue streams. Upon her switch into women’s tennis, however, she saw first hand the boost that private equity can provide.
“In the case of the Billie Jean King Cup, without this private equity investment it would continue to be the number two property within the ITF, if not number three or four because it would never have gotten the investment to be a commercially viable property.”
“Without that money, we couldn’t invest in making this [the BJK Cup] something that’s now actually interesting. If you don’t have the investment, I think you’re losing out. And the quickest way to get that investment is private equity.”
Sports industry executives are all in agreement that the growth curve for women’s football can only go up from here. Waves of Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans will eventually grow media, sponsorship and matchday revenues as their purchasing power grows.
How quickly the sector grows is largely about its appetite for risk. Can women’s football afford to wait for organic growth? Or must it strike while the iron is hot?
For Lutz, there is only one option.
“It would be great if federations could come up with some sort of scheme where they can make the money themselves. But at the moment, if you don’t have private equity, it’s difficult. I think that there are other ways to grow, but they just take a lot longer and you’re just being left behind.”
“Everybody’s progressing if you have private equity money, but if you don’t, then where are you going to go?”
