The National Women’s Soccer League will have “ammo” when its TV rights deal expires at the end of 2023, according to Angel City FC main investor Alexis Ohanian, as media executives and FIFA believe that the women’s game deserves a larger slice of the pie.
The NWSL signed a deal with CBS in 2020 and emerged as one of the few North American leagues unaffected by the COVID-19 epidemic, with massive viewership increase after becoming the continent’s first to emerge from lockdown.
The opening game of the inaugural Challenge Cup in June 2020 got 572,000 viewers on CBS. Helped by being one of the first leagues to resume play during the pandemic, the league’s matches have been doing numbers ever since.
A year and a half later, an average of 525,000 viewers came in to watch the final match on CBS, which aired at 12 p.m. ET (1600 GMT), far from prime time.
“When we were given CBS as the stage, we either competed with – matched or even outperformed – the MLS,” Ohanian told Rueters. “Facts over feelings. When we’re put on that stage, the fans show up. So I think we’re going to have a lot of good ammo to go into that negotiation.”
This season’s 34 Major League Soccer regular-season matches on ABC and ESPN averaged 343,000 viewers.
While the vast majority of NWSL matches were streamed on the Paramount+ and Amazon-owned Twitch platforms in 2022, the handful of games on CBS throughout the regular season and Challenge Cup had viewership ranging from 349,000 to 461,000.
The “sheer explosion” in all women’s sports, according to Joseph Markowski, CEO North America of global streaming platform DAZN Group, is pushing the needle. He cited record crowds at European soccer events, with ESPN noting that the top three largest attendances in Europe through August of this year were for women’s games.
“As broadcasters we’ve had some great deals that are going to get more expensive for us and quite rightly too,” he said on Monday at the Financial Times Business of Sport summit.
“The metrics around broadcast and attendance and various other things around women’s sport are all demonstrating this, the sheer growth of it in the last five years.”
