When ABC’s cameras pan over thousands of soccer fans in the capacity crowd for the U.S.-Denmark match at Giants Stadium on Saturday, everyone with a stake in the success of the Women’s World Cup will be daydreaming about something different.
That game will open a three-week, 16-team tournament that by most measures–attendance, television exposure, sponsorship support–is the most ambitious women’s sporting event ever staged.
Organizers hope to see proof of their contention that women’s soccer can sell to the masses as well as the die-hard fans. After years of relative obscurity, players and their agents hope for more recognition for their sport and the potential for greater off-field financial rewards.
Corporate sponsors and advertisers hope to reach a demographically attractive slice of the population: affluent suburban families with soccer-playing kids and sports-conscious professional women. That fan base is quite different from the heavily ethnic, traditional crowds who attended the men’s World Cup here five years ago.
“There’s a buzz out there about women’s soccer,” said Lance Helgeson, managing editor of IEG Sponsorship Report, a Chicago-based newsletter that tracks corporate sponsorship trends. “It has a wholesome, family image, attributes that companies want ascribed to their brands.
“Suddenly you have an audience paying enough attention to this sport that it merits an investment by a company rather than spreading its message across a lot of different media.”
The Women’s World Cup, detached from the traditional drawing power of the Olympics or the rah-rah regional loyalties of collegiate competition, should test the true commercial clout of women’s sports.
With 460,000 tickets sold and counting, event organizers can rightfully lay claim to staging the largest women’s sporting event in history–at least under a capitalist regime.
The audience will easily surpass that of the previous domestic high-water mark, this year’s 64-team NCAA women’s basketball tournament, which drew slightly more than 300,000 for all rounds at all sites combined.
If sales continue to go well, World Cup attendance could eclipse the mark of 510,000 set at the inaugural tournament in 1991 in China. That turnstile count is widely acknowledged as soft because government officials declared work holidays and handed out tickets at factory entrances to ensure packed venues.
All 32 matches will be televised–27 of them live–by ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, a diametric shift from the ’96 Olympics, when NBC chose not to show the women’s Olympic soccer final, won by the U.S. team before more than 76,000 fans.
The U.S. network feed is being provided to the marketing arm of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, which is distributing it to 72 countries. No rights fees were sold in the United States; ABC and ESPN are covering production costs and recouping through advertising.
Corporations have kicked in a total of $21 million to be associated with the tournament. (The Tribune is a media partner for the Chicago venue only in an agreement that involves advertising and signage.)
Official sponsors–the highest level of sponsorship, involving a commitment of between $1 million and $4 million–include Adidas, Coca-Cola, Bud Light, Gilette, FujiFilm, MasterCard and McDonald’s. Marketing partners, who anted up a minimum of $500,000, include the insurance giant Allstate, which is attaching its name to a sporting event for the first time in its 68-year history.
The company has mounted a national ad campaign and is registering children for a one-shot, million-dollar kicking contest that will take place at halftime of Thursday’s U.S.-Nigeria match at Soldier Field. Corporate spokeswoman Julie Capozzi said Allstate is aiming to raise its profile with young families and women, who increasingly are making major financial decisions.
Grand experiment
Impressive as the numbers are, this World Cup basically is a giant lab experiment: No one is sure how the bottom line will read, how many television viewers will tune in or whether any other players will join the now-omnipresent Mia Hamm as a super pitchwoman.
It is hard to make useful comparisons with other women’s sporting events. The NCAA women’s basketball tournament, for example, does not have distinct sponsors or a separate television deal, because the NCAA negotiates a package for all its events. The women’s pro golf and tennis tours are spread out over a much longer period.
Unlike the 1994 men’s World Cup, which had a $275 million operating budget and made a whopping $50 million profit, Women’s World Cup organizers say their intent is simply to make back approximately $30 million in expenses.
Nor is it incumbent on the Women’s World Cup to break ground for a professional league. One of FIFA’s conditions in awarding the men’s ’94 World Cup to the United States was just that–the concept that eventually became Major League Soccer.
Plans for a women’s league stalled several years ago and are now back at the drawing-board phase. No start-up is envisioned until after the 2000 Olympics.
“It is not an objective of this tournament to leave a financial legacy,” said World Cup Organizing Committee CEO Marla Messing, a Glenview native who was an executive vice president of the ’94 organizing committee. “In 1994, it was very important to establish the commercial viability of the sport.
“We’re in a different place in the growth of women’s soccer. I’d like to pour as much money into the tournament as I possibly can without going into the red. As we’ve revised our ticket projections, we’ve revised our expense lines as well.”
Growing expectations
The grand scale of the Women’s World Cup makes it easy to forget that the initial blueprint for the event was far more modest and that countries weren’t exactly clamoring for the honor of throwing the party.
The U.S. bid to be host to the 1999 tournament, awarded in June 1996, was unopposed. FIFA officials requested that the tournament be contested entirely within one time zone for “cost containment and travel containment” purposes.
U.S. Soccer’s original plan called for all matches to be played on the East Coast. Only two of the proposed venues–RFK Stadium in Washington, and Rutgers Stadium in New Jersey–qualified as major stadiums. The rest were college or city-owned fields, some as small as 6,000 seats.
The players’ reaction?
“I was so mad,” veteran U.S. midfielder Brandi Chastain said. “I thought it was a joke. Most of us were like, you’re kidding me. You can’t have a World Cup on one side of the country. That’s asinine.
“We knew we could pull this off, draw in fans and pull in new fans. The more people started to talk about it, the vision came to everybody: We could do this bigger. Let’s not be afraid of doing this bigger.”
Expectations changed drastically two months later, when Chastain and her teammates won the Olympic gold medal. Messing, then six months pregnant with her first daughter, was one of the converts as she sat among the largest audience in history to witness a women’s sporting event.
“I was astounded, not just by the number of people, but the fact that they were knowledgeable people who knew what the game of soccer was all about,” Messing said. “They cheered at the right time, they booed at the right time. The makeup of the audience and the numbers convinced us that this had potential. Everyone’s eyes opened up.”
Yet, mostly because television ignored the event, the only player who reaped real benefits in terms of endorsements was Hamm. Her shampoo spots, which began shortly afterward, was brokered by Nova Lanktree, whose Chicago-based agency matches sports personalities with ad campaigns.
Lanktree is skeptical that other players will attain Hamm’s level of endorsement appeal despite increased media exposure.
“If ever there was an event that showed itself to be catalytic to women’s sports, it was (the) Atlanta (Olympics),” Lanktree said. “I expected a flood, a real strong building process, and that didn’t happen even though there was all kinds of warm and fuzzy talk about it. The only athletes who really had anything happen for them were Mia and (basketball players) Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes.”
Predictably, several player agents strongly disagree, including Sue Rodin, who represents U.S. co-captains Julie Foudy and Carla Overbeck.
“I think there’s room for several to emerge as celebrities,” Rodin said.
Next to Hamm, the Stanford-educated Foudy has the highest national profile of any U.S. player, thanks to her ABC commentary for the men’s ’98 World Cup and a well-publicized trip to a Reebok soccer ball factory in Pakistan the year before.
She is featured on the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated for Women and has upcoming appearances in Elle and Women’s Sports and Fitness magazines. Foudy also goes solo in a Bud Light spot in which she kicks a doctor across the room when he taps her knee to test her reflexes.
For the sake of her clients, Rodin said she hopes the World Cup seeps into mainstream consciousness. That will largely depend on media attention, since the lion’s share of seats already has been sold to hard-core fans. About three-quarters of all tickets sold thus far were snapped up by soccer associations before sales to the general public began in April.
But the real intangible–and the one thing, presumably, that organizers cannot control–is how the U.S. team will fare on the field. Part of the pressure on the favorites is the knowledge that interest in the event will drop precipitously if the U.S. makes an early exit.
“If they didn’t advance out of the first round, which I think is highly unlikely, that probably would be devastating,” Messing said. “If they were to lose in the semifinal, you’re still talking about the championship game, and I think there would still be interest in it.
“You know that saying, `Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan?’ As the organizing committee, we are a separate corporation, liable for all our debts. There’s nobody guaranteeing this event.”
