The National Women’s Soccer League is preparing to announce a multiyear television broadcast deal with CBS Sports. The deal will see a handful of matches, including the April 18th season opener between the Washington Spirit and the Seattle Reign, on the over the air network, additional matches on CBS’ family of sports properties, and even more through an online streaming platform. The NWSL had previously aired on Fox Sports networks and later on ESPN, but the ESPN deal only came mid-way through last season, after the Women’s World Cup put up strong ratings.
I don’t think I need to tell you, but I will anyways — this is GREAT news. The NWSL features basically the entire U.S. Women’s National Team roster, selection pool, and developmental players. And seeing as the USWNT has the best 23-woman roster in the world (you know, because they won the World Cup) and some think the second 23-woman roster could make a deep World Cup run as well, you get really good soccer.
It’s also incredibly important that we give women’s sports a chance to shine, especially women’s soccer in the U.S. They’ve won 4 of the 8 World Cup’s played, including the last two in a row, yet they’ve consistently been relegated to second-chair behind the men’s side (that hasn’t really won anything and missed the last World Cup) in pretty much every category — funding, coverage, resources, pay, etc. In fact, the women’s team is currently pursuing a $67M gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation for that reason.
There are a number of tired, overused, and under-supported criticisms of women’s sports and why they “won’t work” or “aren’t viable” in the U.S. I want to unpack (and hopefully dismantle) one of them in particular because it goes to this new TV deal. The argument is something like “of course the women’s game shouldn’t be covered and funded like the men’s, it’s not as popular — people don’t watch.”
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and a vicious cycle. How can a sport and a league become more popular if you don’t broadcast it? If you aren’t broadcasting it, it’s difficult to attract fans, advertisers, sponsors, investors — all the things that generate revenue that enable growth and sustain a league. You can create hyper-local followings, but there’s an obvious and artificial ceiling without a way to show the product to anything beyond the people who physically go to games. So of course the league is going to struggle to be viable because it won’t make enough money. And when it doesn’t make enough money, it will fold, and people will say “see, it’s not popular enough to be sustainable.” But the structure, without a broadcasting arrangement, was dead on arrival. You can’t set something up to fail, then say “I told you so” when it does.
And another thing — for years we’ve dumped more resources into the men’s side, at all levels of soccer in this country. Do you think that resource disparity might have something to do with this perceived difference in popularity and viability? I do. We’ll give the XFL a TV contract, sight unseen, to broadcast C-tier football with guys who couldn’t make the NFL playing in mostly empty stadiums, but women’s soccer featuring the best players in the world has to fight tooth and nail to get a few games broadcast? Come on. That’s just sad. And it’s very, very wrong.
We need to work to correct all those years of imbalance before we can even begin to make a useful evaluation of what is and isn’t popular, what is and isn’t viable.
My little blog post is the tip of the iceberg. There are myriad other things we’ve done wrong, ways we’ve failed women’s sports, nuances to the arguments, and probably a bunch of stuff that I don’t know or understand. I am by no means an expert. But I know enough to recognize that we need to do better and that this broadcast deal is a step in the right direction.
The league did their part, they struck a deal to get matches broadcast. Now we’ve got to tune in, to boost the ratings, to talk about the league and create buzz, to show everyone that we want more women’s soccer, and to prove all the naysayers wrong.
The Lukewarm Take 