In November, Sky Sports UK learned – very publicly – that women are more than pink captions, matcha and “hot girl walks”.
After launching a female-focused TikTok channel called Halo, pitched as the “lil sis” to its main sports account, the broadcaster shut it down just three days later following backlash over content audiences labelled “patronising” and “unbelievably sexist”.
For Thayer Lavielle, Managing Director of Wasserman’s women’s advisory arm, The Collective, the misfire neatly captures the industry’s problem.
“Sports marketing in particular is still following that male-centric playbook,” she told Mediaweek. “Maybe I don’t want them to call it tokenism. I would call it more a lack of imagination.”
The Sky Sports UK moment now stands as a textbook example of what happens when brands attempt to court female fans without genuinely understanding them – the very disconnect at the heart of The Collective’s global study into women’s fandom and buying power.
The report, The Collective Economy: Her Fandom, Her Buying Power, draws on insights from 7,100 women across 10 countries and is supported by broader findings from The Collective Economy and Her Love of the Game (2024), which surveyed 35,000 respondents across 30 countries.
Despite women now holding unprecedented economic and cultural influence, many still feel disconnected from the teams and brands vying for their loyalty.
“We did this study because we wanted to understand how women feel as consumers and fans of sport. What we found is that many of us feel unseen and disconnected from the teams and brands that represent the game,” said Lavielle.
“Everyone keeps asking how to build loyalty with women, but the answer is simple: you have to serve us better. Right now, you’re not even talking to us.”
Thayer Lavielle
Billions in value, but engagement lags
The commercial opportunity is vast.
Globally, women are projected to control nearly $100 trillion in wealth by 2048, influence 75% of discretionary spending by 2030, and drive 85% of household purchasing decisions worldwide.
At the same time, the global sports market is forecast to hit $602 billion by 2030, with $782 billion spent on advertising in 2024 alone.
Yet The Collective’s data shows that engagement strategies have failed to keep pace with women’s growing economic power. While 72% of women globally identify as avid sports fans, sports marketing remains anchored in a familiar pattern, as Lavielle describes.
“Sports marketing in particular is still following that male-centric playbook,” she said. For Lavielle, the problem isn’t deliberate exclusion – it’s creative inertia.
Feeling misunderstood and underserved
The report found a significant disconnect between how women see themselves and how they feel brands represent them. 68% of women do not feel confident or empowered by the way women are portrayed in marketing. 78% don’t believe brands fully understand them. And 56% say they are the primary decision-maker for most purchases.
That influence deepens at a household level. 93% of women are key decision-makers for daily purchases. 76% are key decision-makers for sports-related purchases. 95% say family drives most daily decisions, while 77% of non-mothers feel brands still don’t understand them.
For Lavielle, the solution isn’t complex, nor is it necessarily expensive.
“The reality is there’s still a lack of understanding of who she is and how to reach her – and how simple it can actually be. There’s a perception that doing things differently is more expensive, when in fact you can test and learn relatively cheaply, or work with brands on value-in-kind partnerships that don’t require big budgets. It’s about making women as consumers and fans feel better served, better seen and properly valued,” she said.
Put the fan first
The study also challenges teams and leagues to rethink their priorities, arguing that relentless focus on operations and revenue can come at the expense of experience.
“Most teams are busy putting on games, servicing brand partners, fans and players. They’re trying to fill seats, sell tickets and move signage. But ultimately, the number one priority should be the fan experience – putting the fan first, full stop.
“That’s especially true for women. If you create an environment where we feel relaxed, appreciated, and genuinely cared for,” Lavielle said.
Lavielle believes brands, rather than teams, are often best placed to drive that next phase of growth in women’s sport and fandom. With deeper pockets and broader creative resources, she argues brands can move faster and take bigger swings than rights holders juggling the weekly demands of competition.
“I think brands are actually the accelerants for their rights holders, meaning they have more dollars to play with,” she said. “If they have more dollars and more agency dollars, they also have more creative resources at their behest and a broader swath of opportunity to pull from within their toolkit. That’s something teams don’t necessarily have, because they’re trying to put something on the field every day or every week, as the case may be.”
For Lavielle, the danger is that too many operators remain locked in a transactional mindset -focused on ticketing, signage and short-term returns – rather than the long-term relationship with the fan.
“What our proposal really looks at is how, as an operator, you stop just operating and stop just trying to put butts in seats – that should be table stakes,” she said.
Instead, she says, the real commercial upside sits in the experience layer, particularly for women. Brands are uniquely positioned to unlock that by sharing data, insights and funding that teams alone often can’t activate.
“That’s where brands can really accelerate the experience for fans, but particularly for women, because they can start to share data, share insights around who these women fans are, how they operate, how they want to be spoken to and how they want to participate in the ecosystem,” Lavielle said.
“Then brands can help pay for that and find deep return, both in loyalty and spend on the other side.”
Resistance, not fear, holding progress back
Despite pockets of innovation, Lavielle says meaningful change is still too often limited to one-off campaigns rather than sustained strategy.
“I think it’s less fear and more resistance to trying something really out of the box and new. That resistance comes from a place of, ‘Well, we’ve never done it before, and I’m not sure it won’t be completely uphill.’
“Nobody is really doing it consistently across the board to the point where women feel, ‘Wow, that’s an experience I would continue to go back to – it was worth the money, it was worth my time, and I came out feeling happy about the whole experience, every single time, from top to bottom.’
“That’s a hard bar to cross, but I do think we can at least keep trying to make strides to get there.”
A cultural cost behind the commercial one
For Lavielle, the disconnect between women’s influence and how brands treat them is not just a marketing failure – it’s cultural.
“Look, it doesn’t surprise me at all, because working in this space for many years now, there has always been this need to explain ourselves and improve ourselves every single day in order to drive investment. That can be exhausting. But it’s also built on millennia of inherent misogyny. Most men aren’t trying to be that way – and neither are women – it’s just the way culture has been built,” she explained.
For brands, rights holders and leagues, the message from The Collective’s data is blunt: women already hold the power.
The question now is whether the industry is prepared to catch up.