Broadcasting giant reports huge bump in audience figures on the back of England Euro 2022 victory
Pay-TV network Sky Sports has revealed that the Women's Super League (WSL) has attracted 70% more TV viewers this season than it did during the last campaign.
This marked increase comes on the back of the England women's teams triumph at the UEFA Women's Euro 2022.
These figures were presented by a prominent Sky Sports executive at the SportsPro OTT Summit in Madrid. The Sky spokesperson also revealed that this latest 70% jump follows a 171% increase in viewership during the 2021/22 season, the first year of Sky's broadcast deal with the English top flight.
The deal between Sky Sports and the WSL is set to be worth some £15m per season to the league, and will expire at the end of the 2023/24 campaign. It represents the biggest domestic TV deal ever for any women's league.
Speaking at the SportsPro OTT Summit, Gary Hughes, Director of Football at Sky Sports, said:
“Our numbers have gone up huge amounts, we’ve got some lofty targets for the WSL. We want to position the game and we want to work with the FA to get the best slot. We don’t want to just see big TV audiences, we want to see people through the turnstiles in the grounds."
“I think some of the bigger clubs – the Arsenals, Chelseas, and Manchester Uniteds – are doing more games in the main stadiums, which is great. We had Arsenal against Man Utd at the Emirates during the other week, which had 40-odd thousand and a huge audience of nearly half a million people watching. The impact of the summer, we’ve picked up from that and our numbers are good.”
Hughes also went on to discuss the stellar production values of the Women's Super League on Sky Sports, while comparing the coverage to that of the men's top flight - the English Premier League. Gary Hughes added:
“We treated it as a premium right. We look at scheduling and put it on our Main Event channel. We try to do everything that we do with the Premier League and replicate it."
“We use our same Premier League studio, we adapted the set, obviously changing the colour palette to match the WSL brand colours. We photographed the players head to toe, we gave them the hero photography dynamic lineups we do for the Premier League. We wanted to really champion the game and make a real noise out of it.”
Fans of the WSL will have to wait and see if Sky Sports remains the home of premium women's football in England, with the current rights deal set to expire at the end of next season.
It is clear that the broadcaster would like to continue the partnership, but they can expect competition from other pay-TV networks and OTT providers.
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