The man who launched one of the first professional women’s soccer leagues in the wake of the 1999 Women’s World Cup believes that times have changed regarding public acceptance and business viability of the women’s game.
He also believes the current women’s league has several advantages that his league did not.
Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks, who launched the Women’s United Soccer Association with $65 million in 2001, said the fact that the National Women’s Soccer League already is up and running with nine teams is the biggest advantage that his effort never had.
The WUSA started two years after the U.S. team’s World Cup win and folded after just three seasons.
“In 1999, we didn’t have a women’s league set up to immediately take advantage of all that publicity,” he said. “It took two years of pretty tough work to get the money together, get it organized, go through the drafting, so that we were able to launch in the spring of 2001.”
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Hendricks and Julie Foudy speak on behalf of the WUSA in Washington, D.C., in 2001.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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The NWSL, in its third season, should be able to better capitalize on the publicity and enthusiasm that came from this year’s World Cup tournament, which featured a championship game that was seen on Fox by 25.4 million viewers, more people than any other soccer match on a single channel in U.S. TV history — men or women.
The U.S. women’s national team proved to be so popular that Fox Sports agreed to carry NWSL games — which feature World Cup stars on every team — for the rest of the season. In addition, the early box office returns for the league have been impressive — with more than 13,000 greeting the returning players for a Chicago Red Stars-Houston Dash game and nearly 6,000 in Seattle for a Reign-Western New York game last week. Across the league, attendance figures are far higher than before the Women’s World Cup.
A longtime supporter of women’s soccer — his daughter’s Princeton team played against Carli Lloyd’s Rutgers team in college — Hendricks was so enthused after the U.S. team’s World Cup win in 1999 that he almost immediately started raising money to start a league. Hendricks convinced many of his cable industry colleagues to invest in the venture, and cable operators Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox ponied up $5 million each. Hendricks wound up raising $65 million and signed a TV deal with Turner. He was so beloved at the time that many players at an awards dinner before the 2002 championship game in Atlanta publicly referred to him as “St. John.”
Shanks: Think locally to grow
The best way for the NWSL to ensure success is by thinking and acting locally, said Eric Shanks, president of Fox Sports, which is carrying the league’s games.
“There’s no question that you need the support of your local market,” Shanks said. “You need full stadiums. Soccer in this country has grown the last 30 or 40 years at the grassroots level, generation by generation. Women’s soccer needs to capitalize on the popularity of the fact that all of the U.S. national team women are playing in the NWSL and get full stadiums. Get people talking about it in your local market. Like we’ve seen with MLS, you’ll start to have exponential growth.”
— John Ourand
But Hendricks pointed to one big miscalculation that was made early on with regard to attendance that particularly hurt the WUSA’s finances. He vividly recalled the euphoric feeling he had when more than 34,000 fans assembled in Washington’s RFK Stadium for the first WUSA game between Mia Hamm’s Washington Freedom and Brandi Chastain’s Bay Area CyberRays.
“With that initial enthusiasm, we thought that we would have regular attendance of 10,000 to 15,000 per game,” Hendricks said. “Our spending started to match that expectation in terms of marketing and player salaries. But what happened was that we settled into the 3,000 to 5,000 attendance level. It wasn’t enough to sustain that level of spending.
“We learned that it’s very difficult to survive if the local attendance is 3,000 to 5,000 per game. If it’s somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000, then it becomes very viable as a spectator sport that can attract sponsors as well as have the revenue to continue to grow salaries for these women who are playing professionally beyond college.”
Before the World Cup, NWSL attendance was in that danger zone, averaging around 4,411 per game. The questions are: How much of a halo effect will the Women’s World Cup have, and how long will it last? Hendricks expects that many of those who sample games in the weeks after the World Cup will become fans. “It’s just getting people to show up to games for the first time,” he said. “Once they do that, they get it.”
While Hendricks acknowledges that WUSA’s business model and spending were not sustainable, he also thinks today’s economy should help the current league last longer than his turn-of-the-century effort. He said it was especially difficult for WUSA to get beyond the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which occurred just five months after the league’s first game.
“One of the things 9/11 did was depress the sponsorship dollars,” Hendricks said. “We had a very difficult time selling sponsorships after 2001. A lot of sponsors cut back and focused their marketing dollars on their advertising rather than corporate sponsorships for things like golf tournaments or the women’s soccer league. That hit us pretty hard.”
When asked to give advice to the NWSL, Hendricks preached patience.
“It’s going to take a while to continue to nurture the fan base, which is important,” he said. “The cost structure is really, really important to keep under control. My advice would be that teams need to have a salary level for the players that helps them in their lives pursue their goal. It can’t be to the extent that threatens the economic survival of the league.”
