By Lori Ewing
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Women’s sports advocate Rebecca Sowden was at Wembley last year when Chloe Kelly scored the goal that made England European champions before tugging off her shirt and whipping it around her head in a now iconic goal celebration.
The largest ever Women’s World Cup kicks off on Thursday with FIFA touting an expected global audience of two billion, nearly double the 1.12 billion viewers of the 2019 tournament in France, and Sowden is hoping for more such moments.
The New Zealander, founder of Team Heroine, a women’s sports marketing and sponsorship consultancy, believes such major events can provide a huge boost to women’s sport.
“What Euros did for women’s football in the UK, it’s just completely transformed it,” said Sowden, who played 10 internationals for the Football Ferns in the early 2000s.
“Us advocates can talk about the value of women’s sport, how you should sponsor it and support women’s football etc, (but) until people feel it, they really don’t know what’s in it.
“Getting sponsors, getting media, getting fans to feel it and see this quality of product on the field, and this unique vibe in the stadium – it’s so unique and different to men’s, then they go ‘Hey, this is actually pretty powerful’.”
While women’s football has made huge strides since the first World Cup in 1991, the structure under national team level remains undeveloped even in some major football-playing countries.
Olympic champions Canada will not launch the country’s first women’s pro league until 2028 but they are still hoping the World Cup will help.
“The World Cup, as any big tournament of inspiring young players; we have young eyes on TV sets seeing phenomenal role models do their thing,” said Canada midfielder Sophie Schmidt.
“It’s an amazing springboard for what’s to come with a potential league coming to Canada.”
Three franchises are already on board, in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, but founder Diana Matheson hopes to ultimately have eight teams in two conferences.
“It’s been the case for however many World Cups now, when you go down the player list and see what club they play for, it’s really only been Canada where the bulk of their players aren’t playing at home,” Matheson told Canadian Press.
“Hopefully this is the last World Cup we see that.”
‘DO OR DIE’
Kara Nortman, a venture capitalist and co-founder of National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team Angel City FC, knows well what impact the Women’s World Cup can have on domestic football.
Despite the strength of the United States team, the NWSL was on shaky ground in the lead-up to the 2019 World Cup.
A&E Networks ended their broadcast deal prematurely in February, before the national team launched their pay equity fight and collected their fourth World Cup title.
The inaccessibility of women’s club football in a World Cup year was like watching a “Heineken commercial and then there’s no Heineken in the store for four years,”, she said.
Nortman was exchanging texts with Natalie Portman only three weeks after the World Cup ended when the Oscar-winning actor floated the idea of bringing a team to Los Angeles.
They kicked off their inaugural season in 2022.
“I felt this immense amount of stress and pressure around the 2019 World Cup,” Nortman said.
“You had just all of these things happening where it felt like we need to make sure that this gets on the global stage and that we – the world – watches it and pays attention … one felt like history depended on it for some reason …
“This one feels a lot calmer to me. 2019 felt do or die – we needed things to work.”
Only 166,000 tuned in to watch the NWSL championship match in 2019. Three years later, the season finale pulled in an average of 915,000 viewers despite going up against Game 2 of baseball’s World Series.
Australia’s A-League Women (ALW), which includes New Zealand’s only professional team in the Wellington Phoenix, owes its existence in part to Australia’s run to the quarter-finals at the 2007 World Cup.
It still lags behind the NWSL and big leagues in Europe, however, with a $25,000 minimum wage next season, but Hayley Raso is one of many Australia players who are hoping the World Cup will have a transformative impact on the domestic game.
“I was in England when the Lionesses won the Euros and I saw the change in football afterwards,” the former Manchester City winger told The Guardian.
“I look at that as something that could still happen in Australia; we have this amazing tournament with the world coming to our country and where fans … will be inspired.
“I just can’t wait to see what it will be like once that tournament is over, to see how far the game has grown.”
(Reporting by Lori Ewing, editing by Nick Mulvenney and Peter Rutherford)
