Eimear Ryan: Sponsors getting in on ground floor of women's sport movement
Capitalising on their All-Ireland win last year, Galway camogie has signed a game-changing five-year deal with manufacturing firm Westerwood Global to the tune of €250,000.
Anyone tiptoeing back to the cinema in recent months has almost certainly encountered a baffling pre-film advert starring actor Matt Damon. Walking through a gallery, Damon passes CGI renderings of conquistadors, mountaineers, aviators, and astronauts. “Fortune favours the brave,” he intones, before a logo for Crypto.com flashes up on screen. Cryptocurrency is the final frontier, the ad seems to be telling us. The only way to be brave nowadays is to invest your money in a murky unregulated market. Be a crypto conquistador!
As an ad, it doesn’t quite work, but you can see why they pitched it this way: investors want to feel like pioneers, like they’re getting in at the start of the next big thing. In the sporting world, women’s sport is beginning to be recognised as a canny investment for businesses wanting to get in on the ground floor in a flourishing growth area.
Lidl is a prime example of this, having this week reaffirmed their stellar support of the LGFA until 2025, amounting to €10m investment over 10 years of sponsorship. This year’s innovations include a subscription streaming platform for all games, in addition to the already comprehensive broadcasting of matches on TG4. (Us camogie fans can only dream of such coverage.) The women on the pitches are going from strength to strength, and smart companies are showing them the money. And not a blockchain or a non-fungible token in sight.
Last month, the video platform and social media giant TikTok was unveiled as the first title sponsor for the Women’s Six Nations, rebranding the tournament as the TikTok Women’s Six Nations for at least the next four years. It’s a landmark moment for the women’s code and a reminder, too, that sport is a young woman’s game — TikTok’s base is overwhelmingly Gen Z, with 60% of its users born after 1996. (I have downloaded it to my phone, but have thus far been afraid to open it.)
In terms of helping to spread visibility of the women’s game, TikTok is a smart choice: the app has more than five billion views for its rugby content to date, with ‘Six Nations Rugby’ a frequently trending hashtag. There are already a couple of breakout rugby TikTok stars — USA sevens player Ilona Maher and England’s Jodie Ounsley both have big followings on the app, posting memes, outtakes from their training days, and insights into their lives as elite players. (As a deaf player, Ounsley also posts about the challenges of communicating on the pitch, sometimes to hilarious effect.)
Besides getting women’s rugby in front of as many eyeballs as possible, TikTok is a flexible and adaptable platform: if a busy working mother is unable to sit down on the couch for an afternoon of sport, then catching up via short-form videos on a personal device is a more viable option.
Controversially, though, the value of the sponsorship deal has not yet been revealed, nor has it been confirmed if it includes a prize fund. This would be a first for the women’s tournament: for context, the Guinness-sponsored men’s Six Nations now has a prize fund of almost €20m. With TikTok’s revenue hitting $58bn (€50.75bn) in 2021, there’s surely some loose change they could throw towards the winners.
Capitalising on their All-Ireland win last year, Galway camogie has also signed a game-changing five-year deal with manufacturing firm Westerwood Global to the tune of €250,000. A Galway jersey without the Supermac’s logo might seem like a tough sell — the burger chain have sponsored the hurlers for 30 years, and the camogie team for 20 — but the new Galway camogie jersey is a beaut, from its subtle Celtic knot shadow pattern to the Pride colours on one sleeve. The deal shows a streak of independence and statement of intent from Galway camogie.
As chairman Brian Griffin said frankly: “A few years ago, our ambition for sponsorship was to be able to defray the costs of jerseys and kits for our teams... Every girl and young woman who plays camogie in Galway will benefit from this deal.” Sponsorship is no longer used to merely offset expense; now, it’s investment in excellence.
Another team going it alone is the women’s soccer team formerly attached to Scotland’s Raith Rovers, now playing under the banner of McDermid Ladies. I’ve written previously about crime novelist Val McDermid’s sponsorship of Raith Rovers, her beloved childhood club, who since 2014 have had the legend valmcdermid.com across their jerseys. However, when striker David Goodwillie — who was ruled a rapist in a civil court case in 2016 — was signed by the Scottish club, McDermid cancelled the long-standing sponsorship deal in disgust, saying that the signing “shattered any claim to be a community or family club”.
She was not alone: the captain of the women’s team, two directors and 30 volunteers also resigned in protest, and chants of ‘sack the board’ were heard at the most recent home game.
A u-turn by Rovers on Goodwillie’s contract did little to deter the public outcry. “We got it wrong,” said chairman John Sim in a statement, admitting their blinkered approach. “In reaching our original decision, we focused far too much on football matters and not enough on what this decision would mean for our club and the community as a whole.”
They have said that Goodwillie won’t play and that his contract is under review, but McDermid will not consider a return while Goodwillie remains on the club’s books.
Meanwhile, the newly-minted McDermid Ladies played their first game last Sunday. Their hastily assembled new strip bore not McDermid’s name as sponsor, but that of the Scottish charity Zero Tolerance, which works to end violence against women. The team lost 4-0 to Livingston. Not the most auspicious debut, on the one hand; but a fresh start.
