The last time Americans saw the U.S. women’s soccer team on the pitch, it was with more than 26 million people watching on TV and more than 50,000 fans in the stands.
The next time the players are seen in a game, there will be no nationwide audience tuning in, and the crowds will be much thinner. The question is, will those numbers and the ones that follow be high enough in their own right to bring to the National Women’s Soccer League the long-term success that eluded two prior efforts at women’s pro soccer in America?
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Carli Lloyd, the U.S.’s breakout star, plays for Houston in the NWSL.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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“This level of momentum is fantastic, and you can’t replace this bright light that is now illuminating our entire sport,” said NWSL Commissioner Jeff Plush. “But just because there’s going to be a bump in interest, it’s not going to replace the hard work we need to do to succeed long term.”
The immediate effect of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup win for the U.S. national team was already noticeable for the NWSL last week. Twenty-two of the U.S. team’s 23 players were set to play their next match in the NWSL.
The nine-team league did not halt its season despite 53 players leaving for their respective national teams during the monthlong tournament.
The Houston Dash was expecting to sell more than 13,000 tickets for the return match this past weekend of national team star Carli Lloyd and teammates Meghan Klingenberg and Morgan Brian. That number will far surpass the Dash’s previous high of just more than 8,000 tickets, which came in its inaugural match in 2013, and the roughly 4,000 it has averaged this season. Similarly, both Seattle and Kansas City expect to sell out their next home matches, with more than 6,000 and 3,000 tickets sold, respectively.
Across the board, NWSL clubs are expecting increased ticket sales for their matches for the remainder of the season, as both the league and the individual clubs plan to highlight the national team players in their local markets. Those sales will provide a much-desired boost for a league that has averaged about 4,200 fans a match over its first three years of play. But it also harkens to previous post-World Cup bumps that did little to sustain the sport long term.
Two years after Team USA’s landmark win in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, the Women’s United Soccer Association was formed. It folded after three seasons with cumulative losses of more than $100 million.
The next attempt at women’s pro soccer came in 2009, when Women’s Professional Soccer began play. In 2011, the U.S. national team advanced to the final of the Women’s World Cup, and a number of WPS attendance records followed in the wake of that run. Still, WPS folded just before the start of its fourth season in 2012.
“The difference now is that we were pleased where we were at going into the World Cup. Now, we’re even more pleased,” said Plush, a former MLS board member who took over as commissioner in January after Cheryl Bailey, who led NWSL for its first two seasons, stepped down. “We’ve been able to take learnings from those other leagues, and it wasn’t all negative. I’m very confident about our future.”
Chief among the differences of the NWSL and its predecessors is its structure: The league is subsidized by the U.S. Soccer Federation, the Canadian Soccer Association and the Mexican Football Federation. The three federations pay the salaries of their national team players, a group that represents 42 players across the league. Each team operates with a $265,000 salary cap, with a minimum salary of $6,842 and a maximum of $37,800, more modest figures than the previous women’s leagues and amounts that do not include the national team player salaries.
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U.S. women’s keeper Hope Solo plays for the NWSL’s Seattle Reign.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Still, those at the club level understand that the onus of long-term success falls heavily on them.
“In 2011, attendance numbers doubled or even in some cases tripled following the World Cup, most of which held through the remainder of the season,” said Arnim Whisler, owner of the Chicago Red Stars, who also competed in the WPS with Whisler as owner. “But as much as that financial windfall and attention is great, we know we can’t just wait every four years for a bump, and it’s up to the teams to make sure this league gets the attention it deserves.
“NWSL should be able to absorb this attendance and sponsor growth and use it to get a few more teams past break even [and] move to expansion and even more league stability,” Whisler said.
The Portland Thorns are the outlier in the league, averaging more than 14,000 fans a game, well above the league average. Portland also is considered the league’s most financially successful team, though the NWSL does not make league finances public. But team owner Merritt Paulson, who also owns the MLS Portland Timbers, knows the opportunities at hand run across the league’s teams.
“Everyone in the league has a good opportunity now to make sure that this momentum is not just a bounce, but a lift,” he said. “When you have the wind at your back like this, you need to capture as much of it as you can.”
Part of capturing that attention involves linking these new national stars to their local teams — such as tying Lloyd and Klingenberg to the Dash in Houston.
“We want to make sure that when a local is tweeting about Carli Lloyd, it’s ‘the Houston Dash’s Carli Lloyd,’” said Amber Cox, Dash chief marketing officer.
Cox and the Dash provided the MLB Astros and NBA Rockets club-branded images if they wanted to share support for the club on digital platforms — something those teams, in turn, have done. Individual efforts have been made as well, such as Astros outfielder George Springer sporting a Dash scarf in his locker that is visible during postgame interviews.
“For a new league, it’s all about awareness,” said Cox, who before the Dash spent nine years with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. “Even with the success we had in Phoenix [WNBA titles in 2007 and 2009], when we drafted Brittney Griner [in 2013], there were still people who said, ‘We have a team here?’
“If only for a short amount of time, we need to make sure we introduce them to the Dash — as our biggest opportunity is that first-time person who wants to come out and see the team.”
The Dash used the excitement of the World Cup to host free watch parties, at which it collected data on attendees that sales representatives are now using for ticket-sales opportunities.
For the Boston Breakers, that excitement around the national team is presenting an opportunity that’s unique compared with most sports, team general manager Lee Billiard said.
“If LeBron James comes to play the Celtics, maybe a few extra tickets get sold just so people can boo him,” Billiard said. “When [national team star] Alex Morgan comes to play the Breakers [with her NWSL Portland team], she gets cheered, and we might sell another 1,000 tickets or so, which is a huge deal for us.”
Billiard said that while the strategy of highlighting national team players on opposing teams coming to town as a way to sell more tickets might not last that long, “we need to capture that interest while we can.”
“As a league, we need to do our best to market all of the World Cup players right now, because what we sell best is the experience when you come to a NWSL match, so we need to get as many people in the seats as possible,” he said.
Still, Bill Lynch, owner of the Washington Spirit, said any long-term gains for the NWSL won’t come simply because of the national team’s success.
“The players coming back as the best in the world and the league getting that extra boost of attention is great, but it’s not as if we didn’t know it was coming, and we even had an expectation it would happen,” Lynch said. “This will help us get ahead more quickly than we would have otherwise, but our long-term success is going to come down to how well we’re creating that large pool of people interested enough to make the business work.”
With a celebration tour of matches planned, as well as the buildup to the chase for a fourth consecutive gold medal during the 2016 Rio Olympics ahead, the profile of the women’s national soccer team and its players will likely only increase. For the NWSL, it will continue to seek ways to leverage those boosts, but the hope among league executives is that one day the league will get to a point that it no longer needs such jolts.
“I believe we’re building a platform that survives stars coming and going, or any one particular event,” Chicago’s Whisler said. “While there is still work to be done, like getting every game on television or even just getting our scores printed across the country in newspapers, we’re taking the steps to build something that truly binds fans to teams beyond just these bursts of momentum.”
