By Caitlin Fisher
The SportBusiness Group hosted a stimulating conference last week on Women and Sport at the CBI Centre in London. The conference brought together a wide range of stakeholders including professional female athletes, business leaders, sponsors and the media, with the aim of looking at the growing world of women and sport in the UK and its future.
One of the main themes coming out of the conference was the notion of untapped potential existing in women’s sport: panelists sought to address the questions of how to build on existing momentum and how to take advantage of the great opportunity at hand for women’s sport to have a much broader positive impact in the UK and beyond over the next decade.
The panels explored the issues from a variety of perspectives–the media, sponsorship, marketing and funding–and it proved to be a comprehensive approach. The discussions forced participants to think through pressing issues of how to legitimize women in sports, how women and men consume sports differently, the acceptability of marketing female athletes as sex objects, how sport can be made more accessible to a wider audience, and the crucial roles that men can play in supporting women’s sports, among much more.
As an ex-professional female athlete, I can say that these are all issues with which I am quite familiar and I found the dialogue generated at this event to be quite useful. Throughout my soccer career, after recognizing that not even the majority of my own teammates enjoy watching the women’s game, I came to the conclusion that something major in the marketing of many women’s sports needs to change, or maybe even in the game itself–a smaller field, perhaps?
While the panelists at this conference did not offer a silver bullet on how to reframe or propel women’s sports into a new realm–nor could we expect this of them–the conversations were very engaging and presented some innovative approaches.
I would agree that there is a huge untapped potential in women’s sports from numerous angles–sporting, commercial, cultural, health and general well-being–but I believe that unleashing this potential is going to require a complete paradigm shift. What that looks like, I am still brainstorming.
Caitlin Fisher is interning periodically at Glasshouse Partnership. She is currently studying an MSc in international development at the London School of Economics and was formerly a professional football player in the US, Brazil, and Sweden.