Motivational Factors That Influence the Intention to Watch a Spectator Sports Product: The Case of the National Women's Soccer League

Introduction

The history of women’s football, also known as women’s soccer, can be traced back to the 1880s (Williams, 2011; Scottish Government, 2019). The first golden age lasted until the 1920s, by which certain matches counted audiences as large as 53,000, as was the case on Boxing Day 1920, when the popular Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. played at Goodison Park in Liverpool, England (Alexander, 2005; Skillen et al., 2022). In 1921, however, the English Football Association banned women from playing football on grounds with spectators, a decision that was adopted by other countries as well (Williams, 2003; Dator, 2019). Nevertheless, women’s football started gaining new popularity in the 1970s due to new gender equality laws (e.g. Title IX in the USA) resulting in promotional efforts fostering gender equality in sports in different countries (Williams, 2011; Mumcu et al., 2016). Further important milestones were reached in the 1990s. The first Women’s World Cup sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale De Football Association (FIFA), an international governing body of association football, was held in China in 1991 and the second was held in Sweden in 1995 (Williams, 2003). Additionally, women’s football debuted as an Olympic discipline in Atlanta, USA, in 1996 (Olympics, 2019), presenting the sport to a wider audience.

These large-scale promotional platforms led to a considerable increase in global viewership in the decades to come. For example, 1.12 billion people watched coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup staged in France (FIFA, 2019). Moreover, the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship held in England became the most watched Women’s Euro in history with more than 280 million viewers across Europe (EBU, 2022; UEFA, 2022a). The popularity of the 2022 tournament and the English women’s team winning the trophy may have had a positive impact on the popularity of the English Women’s Super League (WSL), England’s top-tier of women’s football. Various clubs reported that sales of season-tickets increased as much as 254% from the previous season in the final week of the 2022 Women’s Euro (Mians & Majid, 2022). Similarly, the sport’s increasing popularity led to more lucrative sponsorship deals. For example, Barclays, a British multinational financial institution, signed a £30 million deal to sponsor the English Football Association Women’s Championship from 2022 to 2025 (Sky Sports, 2021).

In order to support the current momentum, continued professionalization of the sport and categorical marketing efforts are needed to exploit the growing interest in women’s football and increase sponsorship, fandom, and credibility (Leslie-Walker & Mulvenna, 2022; Rosen, 2022). Various federations and leagues across the globe have professionalized women’s football, especially in Europe and the USA (Adachi et al., 2022). Although two professional women’s football leagues in the USA had to be discontinued due to financial instability and lack of fan support in 2003 and 2012 respectively (Mumcu et al., 2016), the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the third attempt and current professional league in the USA, has seen substantial viewership growth and interest from investors since its inauguration in 2013, possibly due to a more elaborate marketing and media coverage strategy (Reuters, 2021; Schad, 2022). This is also underlined by the presence of high-profile owners of NWSL franchises, such as actor Natalie Portman co-owning Los Angeles-based Angel City FC (Herbst, 2022), basketball player James Harden owning a minority stake in Houston Dash (DuBose, 2020), and former Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Steven Temares being a majority owner of NJ/NY Gotham FC (Gotham FC, 2022), to name a few. These kind of investments in the NWSL add status and prestige to the league’s profile.