Women's soccer faces TV rights test after World Cup success

Most high-level female competitive soccer is unpaid. Fewer than 1,300 professional soccer players worldwide are women, compared to around 137,000 male professionals, according to Sporting Intelligence. Many of the paid female players are in the U.S., where the women’s game generates more revenue than its male equivalent.

That also means it won’t take a massive increase in funding to bring a step-change in salaries and training budgets. Famous clubs are promoting the women’s game more actively, with Real Madrid announcing this week it is starting a female team and Manchester United’s women advancing to the WSL next season.

In France, the value of broadcast rights is soaring. The top female league in the World Cup host nation secured 6 million euros ($6.83 million) by selling domestic rights to pay-TV broadcaster Canal+ over five years, according to Le Parisien newspaper. That’s 1.2 million euros a year, or six times what the rights were worth two years ago.

The teams in the top tier of the WSL only became fully professional last season and the game is beginning to draw sponsorship from big brands such as Barclays Plc and Budweiser.

Although stadiums were emptier than expected early in the World Cup competition, it has been drawing some record TV audiences. Around 6.7 million people watched England’s latest match against Cameroon on the BBC, 2.7 million more than for their Euro 2017 semi-final against the Netherlands -- the previous record for an England women’s game going into this year’s tournament.

Many of the England team players, who will meet Norway later on Thursday in the quarter-finals, ply their trade in the WSL, including Chelsea Football Club winger Karen Carney and Manchester United defender Alex Greenwood. The Norway match will be screened live to thousands of revelers at Glastonbury, one of the Britain’s biggest music festivals.

The challenge will be to use the World Cup to multiply audiences for club games, which still draw relatively small crowds. WSL match attendances averaged 996 in the 2018-19 season, compared to 38,495 in the Premier League a year earlier, according to Deloitte.

“A lot of kids are playing the game. They’re watching it on TV,” Kristine Lilly, who won two World Cup titles with the U.S. national team, said on the Bloomberg Business of Sports podcast. “If we keep the women’s game still visible for people to see, instead of just the World Cup every four years, that helps.”

Source: Iol.co.za

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