The Future of Sports is Female: Women’s Leagues Rise as Platforms for Live Games Proliferate

By any measure, women’s sports is where much of the sector’s growth will be found in the near term as sports and media are buffetted by the transition to digital streaming and on-demand platforms.

The miracle season this year for women’s sports, spurred by the heat behind the NCAA women’s basketball tournament in the spring, has set the stage for a new generation of stars and fans to embrace female athletes and leagues like never before.

The upsides and downsides of the cultural and technological changes affecting sports were discussed at length during Variety and Sportico’s Sports and Entertainment Summit, presented by City National Bank. The July 12 gathering at the Beverly Hilton, brought together movers and shakers in sports, TV, marketing and advertising for lively conversations about the future of live game presentation, courting fans and building franchises. Highlights from two panel conversations — one about the rise of women’s sports, the other on the future of live game presentation — are featured in this week’s episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business.”

“There’s an assumption that the blueprint has already been established with men’s sports,” said Michelle Haines, VP of marketing for the National Women’s Soccer League. “Even if you can reinforce through the data and through the performance and continued success and growth that we’re all seeing that it equates to not only a great opportunity but a greater share of voice with a new, emerging business entity. And that there is a opportunity to look at it from a different point of view, or with different partners that we have access to that can tell stories and create activations around for both our fans and our players that would not make sense for men’s sports,” Haines said. There’s an exciting new moment (that) you’re kind of seeing happen in real time.”

Also featured in the discussion are Diana Flores, quarterback for Mexico’s Women’s Flag Football team and a sports analyst; Nastia Liukin, a five-time Olympic medalist and entrepreneur; Constance Schwartz-Morini, co-founder and CEO of SMAC Entertainment; and Ashlyn Watkins, a member of the NCAA’s reigning women’s basketball champions, the University of South Carolina Gamecocks.

The momentum behind women’s sports was also a theme in the panel on the state of the art in live game presentation. The conversation quickly zoomed in on the need to balance the art of appealing to “the avids” – the rabid fans that never miss a game – and “the casuals.” As Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, explained, the casuals are where the action is at for leagues and their TV partners.

Causal is how you win,” Magnus told the crowd. “The avids are going to be there. It’s obviously a balance in your presentation in terms of how you appeal to both of those groups. But the business runs on the casual fan – that’s all the upside, right?”

Magnus and others pointed to the momentum in women’s sports that has benefitted established leagues, none more so than the WNBA.

“What’s happening in the WNBA, where we have new superstars coming into the league, and we’ve experienced their rise in women’s college basketball, it’s sort of a seamless transition,” Magnus said. “Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese were in the Final Four and literally three weeks later, they’re playing in the WNBA. There was almost no gap. And so that was a huge opportunity. And they’ve obviously lifted the audience.”

Also featured in this discussion are Craig Barry, executive VP and chief content officer for TNT Sports;
Lori Conkling, global head of TV, film and sports partnerships for YouTube; David Eilenberg, Roku Media’s head of content; Stacey Rosenson, head of U.S. Sports Marketing for Amazon Prime Video; and Shannon Willett, CMO of NBCUniversal’s Peacock.

“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.

(Pictured top: Constance Schwartz-Morini, Diana Flores, Nastia Liukin, Michelle Haines and Ashlyn Watkins)

Jack Dunn and Selena Kuznikov contributed to this report.