The NWSL is fairly certain that it will return in 2016, but 2017 is still up in the air. Next year is season number four for the National Women’s Soccer League and no professional American women’s soccer league has ever survived beyond three seasons. So the NWSL has already achieved more than any of their predecessors, but 2016 is a critical crossroads year.
The league has a special unique opportunity to capitalize on growing interest in the game and maybe take it to new levels. That is, if they can market themselves correctly.
This past weekend was the NWSL semifinals (Kansas City won at Chicago 3-0, Seattle beat Washington Spirit 3-0 at home) televised on FOX Sports 1.
The final, KC vs Seattle, will be October 1st in Portland. It will also be televised on FS1.
The NWSL has seen a surge in popularity due to the United States Women’s National Team winning the World Cup. The league can ride this wave into next summer and the 2016 Summer Olympics, when the USWNT will be top trending topics once again.
However, no one showed up in Chicago for the league semi-final on Sunday, and that’s very troubling.
The league announced a tickets-distributed number of 3,031. The crowd seemed smaller, especially because the fans rattled around in 20,000-seat Toyota Park in Bridgeview instead of the Red Stars’ cozy, 4,400-seat home field at Benedictine University in Lisle.
The team had averaged about 4,210 spectators during the regular season, with eight of the 10 matches at Benedictine. That was a 43 percent increase over last season.
With TV and venue considerations causing the league to schedule the semifinal against the Bears opener Sunday at Soldier Field, that clearly had some effect on attendance.
Totally disregard that “tickets distributed” figure.
If you were at Toyota Park, or even if you watched it on TV you would have seen about 500-700 in attendance at kickoff, and maybe a thousand to 1,200 as the day went on. They never announced an attendance figure at the stadium, nor in the press box, at any point during the day.
What makes this disappointing no-show by the fans all the more discouraging and head-scratching is the fact that the Red Stars drew over 5,600 in the very same stadium exactly one week earlier (in a regular season game that had zero playoff implications too). It definitely helped that the World Cup trophy was in attendance and fans has the chance to get a photo-opp.
NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush was in attendance this past week, and he conducted a Q&A session with a group of reporters. His responses give insight into the NWSL big picture, past, present and future.
Plush saw the attendance issue stemming from the fact that the league’s core audience is youth soccer clubs who buy tickets in group packages. He claimed that they were all playing in their own soccer leagues on that day, and therefore unavailable to become spectators. He also brought up the fact that it was just a 6 day turnaround and logistics indeed were an issue. He didn’t disagree when a reporter brought up the problem of going head-to-head against the Bears.
“We didn’t get dealt the best hand on that,” Plush said.
That’s a legit excuse, because lots of people in Chicago do drop whatever they’re doing to watch the Bears. (Watch NASCAR make the same excuse this week, when they have poor attendance at Chicagoland Speedway for the Cup Chase).
Optimism and excitement for the Bears season is about as low as it gets right now, but their season opener still attracted 20 million viewers.
Truly, the best time to shop, go to the gym, drive anywhere, run any of type of errands in Chicago is when the Bears are playing. Of course, these are micro level issues relevant only to a specific market. Of course, these lessons do carry over to the national level when you consider macro level issues.
If the league is to reach a fifth season, sixth season, seventh season and beyond it needs to capitalize on the star power on the USWNT at every opportunity possible. The NWSL needs to do this by incorporating a marketing and promotional strategy based on the individual stars of the USWNT. I can speak from experience that it’s the individual name, not the NWSL team name that moves the needle in women’s soccer.
Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Julie Johnston, Christen Press, Amy Rodriguez etc. are the brand names that people know and love. Hope Solo is a household name too, but largely for the wrong reasons. Her reputation is deservedly toxic right now so the league doesn’t need to play up that association.
What sells tickets and gets ratings in the NWSL is the individual star, not the team crest. It’s like the NBA, with the proverbial “people cheer for the name on the back of the jersey, not the name on the front.”
The NBA’s product is a team sport, but it promotes and markets itself as an individual sport. This is the path the NWSL should take. Ride the wave of the World Cup Victory Tour into next summer and then market yourself in connection to the Olympics.
“It’s a little bit down to the clubs, they should know their markets better than we do at the league level,” said Plush about this idea.
“I’ve spent some time in my past with the NBA. Thatt works when it’s really star driven.”
Of course, this idea is far from perfect and it has a significant flaw:
“The other side of that is, when those stars aren’t there, where are you? I think soccer is different, soccer is much more about a club mentality. So I think developing that club ethos that no one is bigger than the shield, is probably the path that I prefer, but those are club decisions.”
Plush on developing marketing and promotions partnerships with the Olympics:
“It will be a robust conversation at our next board meeting which happens early October, my guess is you’ll see a schedule similar to the one we did this year.”
“I don’t know if we’ll do a break, but there’s certainly an argument to take at least a week or two off. What we did see is that when the eyes of the country are focused on our sport and on our players, the upshot of that is tremendous.”
Said Grandpa Abe Simpson in the 1960s:
“I’m trying to watch the Super Bowl. If we don’t support this thing, it might not make it.”
You could say the same thing about both the NWSL and their television partner FOX Sports 1. I’m rooting hard for both to succeed. America needs both a NWSL and a FS1. I can’t guarantee that my “place more emphasis on individual branding than team branding, even though it’s a team sport and not an individual sport” idea will work for the NWSL. I just know that it’s their best shot. In the social media and smart phone era of news consumption, headlines matter more than ever. So you need to get that individual star player’s name in the headline as much as possible in order to drive clicks, page views, unique visitors etc. and raise awareness of the product.
Yes, I know that’s not ideal for a team sport, but the ability to pay the rent trumps idealism. The NWSL has some major attributes in their favor. At a Paley Institute panel, the heads of the four major sports networks acknowledged the power in soccer’s popularity, especially so for millenials. NWSL games move fast and end quickly, which is really appealing to this demographic.
Then there’s this:
“I think more and more people are gravitating toward women’s sports,” Plush said.
“It’s not just soccer, either. Serena [Williams] was a massive story — still is and deserves to be, even though she fell the other night. Whether it’s Serena or Ronda Rousey, women are captivating the imagination of a lot of people that love sports. So we’ll continue to build upon that. We’re doing it within the biggest and most important sport in the world, and we have the best players playing in it.”
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is part of the FOX Sports Engage Network. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes to the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. He also appears regularly on numerous talk radio stations all across the country. Catch him Tuesdays on KOZN 1620 the Zone.
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