The explosive growth of women’s sport is the most exciting story in the industry.
All over the world, a dizzying array of audience and attendance records has fallen. In 2023, Australia co-hosted a FIFA Women’s World Cup that produced AUS$1.32 billion in economic impact, with 70 per cent of the population watching some of the tournament on television and a total two million people going to games.
New properties like cricket’s Women’s Premier League have emerged to create unprecedented and long-overdue earning opportunities for female athletes. In the US, basketball’s WNBA is still expanding its fanbase after 25 years, while last November the National Women’s Soccer League signed a $240 million set of four-year broadcast rights deals – 40 times the value of the previous term.
Survey after survey has demonstrated an ever-greater appetite for following women’s teams. But the reality, at many levels of the sports business, is that capitalising on that excitement is not straightforward.
At many clubs, women’s teams are based at smaller venues, playing in front of smaller crowds and with less advanced infrastructure in place for players and supporters alike. There are more limited resources to deliver marketing plans or animate the live event around the on-field action.
The key challenge lies in establishing a communications framework that can unite fans behind their women’s teams. Tiparra’s customisable digital platform tackles this in two ways.
First, it removes barriers to attending women’s matches. Tiparra provides personalised digital replacements for some of the facilities that are lacking at the smaller grounds at which women’s teams currently play, reducing the sense of compromise for fans and keeping them closer to the action.
Research shows that women’s fans in particular are more open to using digital engagement platforms to increase their enjoyment of live sport. Through our work with the Brisbane Roar in Australian football’s A-League, we see fans at women’s home games demonstrating a 7.8x higher engagement rate with game day digital activations in our Tiparra platform than fans at home games of the men’s team.
Secondly, Tiparra increases exposure to women’s teams through a whole-club approach to fan engagement. Fans who come to the platform to initially consume information about the club’s men’s team are organically exposed to content about the women’s team and, as a result, are more likely to become women’s fans in their own right.
For example, when presented with mixed ‘Goal of the Month’ content from both men’s and women’s teams, Brisbane Roar fans who hold only men’s team membership are 26% more likely to vote for a goal scored by a women’s player than the membership distribution suggests. Without the whole-club content approach delivered through the Tiparra platform those men’s fans would most likely have not engaged with that women’s team content at all.
Using this strategy can bring more clubs closer to replicating achievements like those of teams in English football’s Women’s Super League. Arsenal have played several games this season in front of crowds at or near the 60,000 capacity of the Emirates Stadium – home of their men’s Premier League team – after carefully targeting existing fans to spring the community into action.
And from a supporter’s perspective, Tiparra combines many functions like ticketing, news and retail into a bespoke, accessible mobile app. It instantly elevates the fan experience and provides the basis for bigger things ahead.
The potential has never been clearer. Now is the time to unleash it.
