It seems you can’t look anywhere without hearing about the growth and profitability of women’s sports. The refrain has gone from “no one watches women’s sports” to “everyone watches women’s sports” in a matter of just a few years. For longtime fans of women’s basketball, women’s soccer and women’s hockey, the meteoric growth of leagues like the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) can feel exciting. But with all this growth comes more complicated feelings too.
The argument for investing in women’s sports often falls along capitalist lines such as “there’s money to be made here, and it would be unwise to pass it up.” A new report from Deloitte estimates that global revenue generated by elite women’s sports will exceed £1.8 billion (approximately $3.3 billion in Canadian dollars) in 2025. With investment opportunities increasing exponentially, women’s pro sports leagues are signing sponsorship deals with major companies left and right. However, which brands these leagues are choosing to partner with now that there is money available is increasingly at odds with the presumably progressive values these leagues have been perceived to have by long-time fans.
The WNBA players, in particular, have made a name for themselves with their commitment to racial justice activism and social justice advocacy cause that they dedicate each season to (there is even a documentary about their activism, called Power of the Dream). In women’s soccer, the U.S. Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay often transfers to perceptions of the NWSL because many of the same players are represented. Even though those values and actions come from the players themselves, the public perception often applies those views to the leagues as a whole. In the public sphere, the distinction between the league (a corporation with its own interests in mind) and the players (individual workers with their own views) is often flattened.
But why would a league that is being heralded as “a beacon of social and political activism” think that partnering with Amazon would align with its values? Amazon is well known to be a company that, among other things, exploits workers, puts them in unsafe working conditions, helps fund ICE, has a terrible environmental record and is single-handedly responsible for killing bookstores. Perhaps for the same reason they thought their new partnership with Alex Cooper’s Unwell Hydration drink was a good idea? Cooper, the host of the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, is a former employee of Barstool Sports and has done little to distance herself or her brand from Barstool’s toxic and offensive content in the years since she left the company. Not only that, her Unwell Hydration beverage is a Nestlé product, which is currently the subject of multiple boycotts for reasons that include political, environmental and human rights concerns. In Canada, the company faces boycotts from the Council of Canadians and the indigenous rights organization Lakota People’s Law Project for extracting water from watersheds that have recently seen droughts. All of the leagues have at least one official partnership with a company that is on the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) list.
Been watching PWHL - it’s free on Youtube! It’s amazingly good hockey and broadcasting is generally really well produced as well. I’d love to see the league grow and for that they need money. Wish there was a way to do that without dropping into the dirty pit dubious bedfellows that the NHL keeps, but unfortunately I think that might be a hard ask at this point.
Thank you for sharing, it’s an important question, but it’s not ok to expect this from women’s sport. It’s taken so long to reach the top, we live in a capitalist society and it’s not ok to expect women’s sport and participants to be political first and women’s sport secondary, even at the risk of destroying the thing that they are, women’s sport, by nit picking who sponsors them. Why is it OK to so hugely police women’s behaviour and actions, especially when they are not in any way in a stable position to choose. But men skate by completely unmentioned. Because men will be men? This entire line of thinking ties into the socialisation of women to hugely police their own behaviour and be policed from birth, and plays into the oppression of women as a class. You can not start with the underdog, and expect them to take down capitalism. That’s our job as consumers. And our job to put pressure on the bigger fish, the men, to start questioning their sponsorship choices. Push hard on the men and that will by default make choices for women’s sport and sponsorship easier. Because currently they can’t be picky, they’re still fighting against decades / centuries of oppression. Women used to be predominant in sports, until they started beating the men, then they segregated the sports and banned women from participating. Your fight is with capitalism, and what people who aren’t in a position to choose have to do under capitalism isn’t right to police, because the stakes are too high for them and they have no power to weild. Similarly people who are wage oppressed may want to participate in the boycott, but have been forced into a corner of “buy the things on the boycott list, or starve”. You are furthering capitalism to further its oppression, by raging at or taking down its already oppressed components, you aren’t fighting against capitalism in this method. Capitalism relies on oppression and racism, sexism, othering and punching down, poor, homeless, segregation and war, all feed capitalism / are the core root of capitalism. It doesn’t survive without these things. These things are artificially created by capitalism, if you force oppression or oppress, you may feel like you’re fighting against it, but you are not, you’re feeding it.
This could be taken out of context and twisted to an extreme version, it doesn’t mean oppressed people are without judgment of their actions, it means if you have an argument like this, you take it to the top dog, first. And by default, the choice you create then rolls down the hill to the oppressed. If you want to make space for this choice for oppressed people, stop the biggest most privileged, first, set a precedent they can easily apply. Put pressure on the boycott list, pick one and as a large group attack that one brand at a time, finding its largest source and take it down from there.
Like coke, they opened a factory in occupied Palestine and tried to say it wasn’t. Nestle who starved babies to death in head spinning numbers. All businesses operate under these motives and possibilities, under capitalism. There are no morals to capitalism, without regulation it goes unchecked, it’s main operandi is to keep making more money, even if that pathway leads to the deaths of the consumers, if that happens, unchecked, they just rebrand.
If your fight is the boycott list or capitalism, trying to take it down from the lowest, least powerful rung, isn’t effectual at all. To have the best effect, you aim for the top, you take down the biggest source and you do it en masse. If it becomes not ok, for the biggest sports icon to have that particular sponsor, then by default that choice is afforded women and minorities. If top sports (that currently still being men with the most power and privilege) are shamed into dumping a sponsor, that has hugely more effect to your cause. That has more power to be noticed. If women ignore a sponsor, it’s not noticed nearly as much. It has much less effect overall. So I suppose you have to ask yourself, are you mainly aiming to strategically take down the boycott list and capitalism or just only police women’s behaviour and choices.
