The Decibel - The money behind the boom of women’s pro sports

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

The PWHL is wrapping up a successful inaugural season, with the three Canadian teams boasting big crowds for most games. The WNBA is adding a 14th team; this one’s in Toronto. And there’s a push from a group called Project 8 to launch a professional women’s soccer league in Canada by 2025.There’s an undeniable momentum in the realm of women’s professional sports in Canada right now. Rachel Brady, a sports reporter for The Globe, explains what’s happening this time around that has changed the game.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The Professional Women's Hockey League is wrapping up its first season. The final playoff game is Wednesday night. Back to a nurse and in front, Spooner! She scores! The PWHL isn't the only women's professional league that's taking off. The WNBA just announced a new team in Toronto. With that, I am honored to officially announce that we have awarded the city of Toronto the 14th WNBA franchise. On top of that, there's a push by a group called Project 8 to get a professional women's soccer league up and running in Canada by 2025. There are four potential teams currently signed on.

Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax. And we're expecting to get more news about the league any day now. This is all great for gender equality, but it's also a big moment for the business of sport. Rachel Brady, a sports reporter for The Globe, is on the show. She'll tell us how this boom in women's sports came together, who's investing, and what challenges are still ahead. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Rachel, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me today.

So there have been lots of efforts to professionalize women's sports over the years, but it feels like in the last year or so, with the launch of the PWHL and now the expansion of the WNBA, something is different, right? So what's changed? In the past, when women's sports leagues have either failed or they just failed to launch or they didn't exist for very long, they collapsed, they were kind of built without the proper resources or the patience from financial backers to see it through. The learning, I think, came from that to the point where now there is a shift in the serious investment in women's pro sports. Like investing used to be viewed as kind of like a charitable move. And now that's changed. It's seen as a wise investment, a viable sports and entertainment idea, right? Something to invest in. So just a big upswing really in revenue, investment in viable sports, just the

commercial viability has really changed. So we've gone from being captivated in Canada by our women's hockey and soccer teams to people getting really serious about let's monetize that. Let's capitalize on the popularity and let's get them in front of eyeballs more often. So it comes to like, you know, record breaking viewership occasions, right? So we've seen it in NCAA women's basketball, we saw it at the WNBA draft, Olympic hockey gold medal games, now happening in the in the PWHL as well. And it just has caught the attention of major brands, venture capitalists, people who want to get in on this, what's seen as a real moment. Can I just dig into that a little bit then?

So I guess why? Why is women's sports seen as a good place to invest in now? Yeah. So I think what's happened here is that it's seen as a good time to get in, right? It's like the hot thing at the moment to get in on. And because the entry point is pretty low, if you want to get into sports and owning something in sports, the entry point is actually comparatively right to buying into a men's established league that's been around for a

really long time. This is something that's like a nascent market. And so this is something that's seen as the price is low now and the opportunity for that return on investment could be really quite good. And if we've seen the examples of the National Women's Soccer League, for instance, or the WNBA, people are buying in and then, wow, the valuations are just skyrocketing for some of those franchises. And then you see, you know, famous names getting on board. So that begets more famous names to get involved. And it's also seen as kind of like return on opportunity is good too, right? Is that there's a great opportunity that comes out of that to be involved in something that's new and fresh and inspiring, I suppose, than what you've maybe been involved in before. Interesting. Yeah. And how much does visibility play into what's happening now? Like,

what about broadcasting rights of these leagues? Yeah, it's a challenge. Like the PWHL has done something really interesting where they put all their games on YouTube. So they are also available on linear broadcast, but they've also invested in making sure it's available to everyone around the world by putting it on YouTube. And so will that pay off in the long run? It's given exposure, but it's also giving something away for free, right? And so is it going to be easy down the road to sort of monetize that in another way? Or does that become the main place people watch it? It's hard to say. So but they certainly wanted to make it available and they invested in it. That's the other thing, too. They put their own money into making sure that it looks

good because if it doesn't look good on TV, you can forget it. Yeah, that's an important part for sure. What is the case that's being made for as to, I guess, why it's important to have professional sports for women? So you talked about the return on opportunity, Rachel. What exactly is this? Yeah, I think that there's a lot of things, right? I think it stems a little bit from the Me Too movement, right? That certainly gave it some momentum. It's seen as a step in the right direction of pushing a more equitable society to make opportunities. Men have been doing this for a really long time. Why haven't women had the opportunity? So that is seen as something that's important. When we look at numbers of C-suite women across the world who are in top jobs, many of them tell you they played

team sports when they were kids. Interesting. So something about that competitive. There's absolutely a connection there between learning from an early age, camaraderie and teamwork and strategy and all the things that come from sport, right? So it is a really good laboratory to get those sorts of skills. And then it's just also the inspiration piece there of giving to girls and women role models, like role models there that didn't exist and jobs that didn't exist. Like, why shouldn't you be able to have a job doing professional sport or working as a broadcaster or a business person or an athlete or a trainer

or whatever it is? And why shouldn't they be competing at the things that they did alongside boys when they were kids? Yeah. So we're seeing more investment. Let's talk about where that investment is actually coming from, though. So do we know who is actually putting money into these leagues? Everybody has heard all the famous names, obviously, who have invested into like Angel City FC in National Women's Soccer in Los Angeles is kind of seen as a shining example of what kind of spectacle and trendsetting can happen when famous people put their money into something, right? So we have people like Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, members of the 99ers, right, who were the women from the 1999 U.S. women's team to win the Women's World Cup. So you're seeing athletes and celebrities teaming together to form these big ownership groups. So it's like one person doesn't have to front the whole thing. You can work together as a collective. We saw the Super Bowl winning quarterback Patrick Mahomes invest in the Kansas

City team. We saw in the case of the PWHL, we see the LA Dodgers, sort of the money and the minds behind that. Billie Jean King Enterprises is part of the advisory on that. So steering that and that's a centrally owned thing. So it's not one team. It's that they own that whole league. So it's a really interesting case. With Project 8, you're seeing like the Vancouver Whitecaps have bought into one of the teams that was early announced there. And they have not only a major league soccer team, but they have youth soccer as well. And then you have Andre DeGrasse, who's said that he's going to invest in one of those teams, the team that would be in Toronto. So many big names. Yeah, it's big names, but it's also different groups of people. And then you're seeing the traditional groups, too. Just last week,

obviously, we have Larry Tannenbaum putting his hand up for a WNBA team landing the first team that will leave the United States. He's doing it as his own separate company. Obviously, he's such a big part of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Raptors and the Leafs. But this is going to be, you know, a different effort that's separate from that arm, right? A different arm. Let's talk about where that money is going. So let's look at the recent announcement of the WNBA expansion, right? This is the news that a team is coming to Toronto. What kind of investments are being promised there? Yeah. So what they promised to

do is that they would invest into making Coca-Cola Coliseum, which is the 8,700 seat arena at Exhibition Place. So they said, we're going to improve the back of house areas. So we're going to make better locker rooms there and warm up spaces and some premium kind of spaces for fans. What they also said is we're going to build a practice facility for this team, which is big. It's not easy to get something built in Toronto, right? So that's really putting a stamp on things and putting yourself right out there and making a promise that you can't back out from. Like they definitely also said, you know, we will be purpose driven and we'll be a part of the community here. So and then they also said they were going to invest in putting games in other parts of the country, which is a big promise to write to say we're going to take it to other parts of Canada. So let's actually talk a little bit more about Canada specifically then, Rachel, because

we've been talking about, you know, broadly money in women's sports. But what is the business case for professionalizing women's sports in Canada? We know that there was a research paper that was done. There have been two white papers by a group of women, about a dozen women from Canadian women's sport who are across different sports and have come together. And so a year ago, they looked at the business viability in Canada, and they showed it to be given a market size of 150 million to 200 million in Canada. And basically, they've pointed to other places doing it successfully in their trajectory that you've seen in the U.S., whether it's the WNBA, the NWSL, the Women's Super League, even women's cricket in India.

So we're able to look at other places in the world where it's happening and the trajectory that they're experiencing. And then they pointed to the fact like Canadian women are inspiring and winning internationally and on your televisions here in Canada. And then they leave because they're going other places to make money. are inspiring and winning internationally and on your televisions here in Canada. And then they leave because they're going other places to make money. And they are bolstering the bottom line for leagues in other countries. So why not here? Just to clarify, so this group is called Canadian Women in Sport. That's right. And they're dedicated to studying this.

And they're the ones who put out these two papers. That's right. Interesting. Okay. Do we know how success is being measured here, Rachel? Like if we look at the PWHL, right, which is just wrapping up its first season, how will people running that league know that they've had a successful year? So I think attendance is obviously big. We heard over and over again that there were

sellouts in the Canadian Women's Hockey League this year. They sold out small size arenas in Toronto and in Montreal. They sold out medium size and they sold out the big NHL venues in those places. And same in Ottawa, they sold out their building. There were some struggles across the board, a little bit in some of the U.S. markets early on in New York, particularly. The PWHL also looked at things like its YouTube subscribers, its social media. They were looking across the board at the number of sponsors. They had more than 40 sponsors come on board, which is nothing to sneeze at, really, in the first year and probably will even continue to grow. What about merchandise, too? Yeah.

Merchandise has always been, like, this year, the PWHL told me a couple times, like, they struggled to make enough of it. Wow. I know when the WNBA game was in Toronto last year, it sold out, like, early in the game. Like, you could not get a piece. I mean, that sounds like a great problem to have. Yeah. It's too in demand. Totally.

I mean, you do create demand maybe. And like this idea that this is a coveted item that's, you know, really hard to get. But you're leaving money on the table if you don't have enough available. And it's kind of amazing in the PWHL because they don't have any team names yet or logos. That's true. So what you were buying was something that said Toronto or Minnesota. You weren't even buying something with the logo. So maybe you view it as, oh, this will be a collector's item when they eventually name these teams. But it's a pretty cool thing to know that you sold out things that just said PWHL on it, right? Or just said a city name on it that doesn't even have the logo. So maybe that's another opportunity to sell again when they actually do create those. We'll be back in a minute. So we've talked about some of the momentum behind the sports here and the money as well, Rachel, but let's talk about the fans. So generally speaking,

who are the fans? Who is watching women's sports? Who is watching women's sports? So the study from Canadian Women's Sport says that this is a very educated group, that this is a socially engaged group of fans. It was a study of 2,000 Canadians, but it was done before the PWHL was founded. It was done last fall. So they determined that two thirds of those people and therefore two thirds of Canada, which may be a reach, but two thirds of Canada calls themselves fans of women's sport. So that's a big number if you projected that out across the country, right? So I would like to see this study done again now because it says it's 53% men, which is interesting.

I mean, being at the games, I see lots of little girls, lots and lots of little girls with hockey jerseys on, holding up signs, lots of families. Those games also have large presence of LGBTQ representing groups, proudly holding signs, wearing t-shirts. It's a diverse group. What the studies show is that this is a group who really cares about the people that put money into this. So they're conscious in terms of, you know, who am I spending my money with and who is investing in this league? Because I want to know what they believe in. And they tend to be engaged particularly on the young side of the fan group. People in women's sport are excited about that group because it shows promise like a lot of room to grow. So we've talked a lot about money, Rachel, when it would be, you know, big picture money when it

comes to these leagues. But let's talk about pay, because this is a really important part to talk about, too. What kind of salaries are these female athletes getting? Yes. There are examples, obviously, where men and women do earn the same in sport. I'm talking mainly there about tennis, because Billie Jean King fought for that 50 years ago. So at the US Open last year, you saw Coco Gauff get that check for $3 million, which is the same as her male counterpart would get, right? So this does happen in places, not everywhere, certainly in tennis, and certainly not standard across the board. In basketball, Kaitlyn Clark, for instance, the top pick there, she will earn $76,000 US. 76,000.

In her first year. The top players in that league are making about 240 250 and those players are supplementing their income in many cases by going overseas in their off season and playing basketball somewhere else in europe russia in the pwhl the lowest was 35 000 the average is about 55 some of the top players were $85,000. And some of the top echelon are just edging into those top six figures. But generally, in women's sport, women are making more money from the things off the court or off the field, off the pitch, off the ice than they are by salary. So you're talking about like endorsements and things?

Exactly. For instance, I did a feature on Sarah Nurse this year, the hockey player in Toronto. Although the league doesn't disclose what each woman makes, we know the range and women are not getting rich off the salaries in the PWHL. But the agency that reps Sarah Nurse, for example, and she has more major sponsors than nearly anyone in hockey, has made in the millions on the business side is what they told me. So, yeah. And she does all kinds of things like beauty products, Dyson.

Like there's all kinds of deals that she's got going. Right. Lots of social media activations. She does, you know, she really engages on TikTok. So I'm a professional hockey player. I've been to the Olympics, but confidence doesn't always come easy. Being disciplined with your actions and intentional with your habits are what really help being successful.

To be able to play in that first ever game on January 1st is like nothing I will ever experience ever again. She's not shy about showing how she does her hair, how she does her makeup and engaging with people. And the sponsors really like that. So certainly that's when something that she kind of manifested on her own by being really engaging with her community online, people that follow her about like, here's some insight into my life. And here's a sponsor going, oh, we could be involved in that. We could really get on board

with that. Okay. Yeah. So she's found some ways to make some more money there as well with those deals. But Rachel, let's come back to the pay gap between professional male and female athletes. Like what needs to change there to bridge that gap? Well, it's revenues, right? Like, so you can't expect a league to pay millions of dollars when they don't make that in revenues, right? So if the league doesn't have a big broadcast deal where they're making loads of money off that, if they're not getting all kinds of sponsorship money, if they're not selling out big, big stadiums every time, where's the money coming from? It's an in and out. That's why the WNBA things are really changing for them on the size of like they have charter flights now for the first time in the WNBA. They were always traveling commercially. Things start to change there, which really helps because more revenue that comes in, the more you can spend on these kind of things. So, yeah, there has to be a commitment on ownership side and you have to increase your revenues in order for that to happen.

So increasing revenue is one challenge then. What are some of the others? Yeah. As a reporter, I think I'm going to be looking at whether they can sustain these large audiences when the novelty of the firsts wears off. You know, will that continue to bring people in when it's a regular season game in the middle of the season or a team isn't winning? Building the pipeline for talent will be key, right? Are universities and colleges going to continue to invest in these women's programs where that talent is being developed and girls' programs too? You can't be cutting those types of programs when that's where the talent is going to be feeding

into these leagues, right? And girls traditionally have been dropping out of sport in teenagehood. Can these leagues afford to expand? And they're going to need to if they're going to accommodate this talent that's coming from the NCAA or U Sports or Europe or wherever these talents are coming from. Can they create rivalries and stars that people are going to want to watch? That is probably key because if there aren't interesting, talented players that are making headlines and drawing people in, what is your product, right? So you have to continue to make your product faster, more competitive, better, more exciting every year. And so it's going to be a challenge to invest the right amount of money into doing all that. Just lastly here, Rachel,

you've covered women's sports for a while. What might the landscape in Canada look like for women's sports in a couple of years from now? What are the possibilities here? Yeah, well, we already can project that the Professional Women's Hockey League will have a couple of years under its belt by that point, and they will probably have to move into some bigger places or at least be playing some of their games in bigger arenas. We might see more teams in that league, maybe. The WNBA will be in Toronto by 2026. We know that the WNBA is not done expanding. They want to get to 16 teams. And we know that Project 8 plans to be in the marketplace by then. And so there's going to be a lot of competition for the sport fans dollar. Rachel, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Aja Sauter. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.