The Growth And Potential Of Women's Soccer: A Positive Outlook
Transcript
00:00 You know, you didn't know what to expect, Mike, because with the United States going
00:04 out as early as they did, you weren't sure what kind of attention it would get here nationally.
00:10 And I thought, you know, the semis and the final did pretty well and had a little bit
00:14 of juice.
00:15 They did.
00:16 And obviously you have to remember as well, you had to get up early for those games.
00:21 The England-Australia semifinal was at six.
00:24 The final was at 6 a.m. in the east.
00:26 If you're in the West Coast, it's a 3 a.m. start.
00:29 It's brutal.
00:30 I got up for most of those games and it isn't easy.
00:35 I got really tired by the end of the day.
00:38 So my wife says, "Hey, I do this every morning.
00:41 What are you complaining about?"
00:43 But it did affect the audience.
00:46 I would have liked to have seen what would the audience have been if that were in a normal
00:51 time slot.
00:52 If it were a 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday kind of deal or something like that,
00:58 what would we have seen in terms of the audience?
01:01 But I thought that the audience responded well to what they were up against.
01:07 And you wrote about how does this jump now, women's soccer, after that.
01:11 That's kind of the question that gets asked after every women's World Cup, especially
01:16 the ones where the United States have won.
01:18 But how does this now further, where does women's soccer go next?
01:22 What do you think about that?
01:23 We're seeing continued growth in investment and attention and interest.
01:28 And one of the most telling things I wrote in the article that I wrote was that the Bay
01:32 Area, they call it Bay FC, the National Women's Soccer League expansion franchise in San Francisco
01:40 area, they paid over $40 million for their franchise.
01:44 When LA, the Angel City down in LA only paid $2 million, I think, three years ago.
01:50 So that and the fact that somebody willingly paid that, eagerly paid that, says a lot about
01:56 where women's soccer is going.
01:58 And the tech executive, the investment executive who wrote that check, so to speak, said, look,
02:05 I'm not doing this for charity.
02:06 I'm doing this because this is smart business, because years from now, people are going to
02:10 look back at this and they're going to be shocked that people didn't want to get in
02:14 at this price.
02:15 He believes that it's on a growth trajectory.
02:18 Cindy Parlo-Cohn, the president of U.S. soccer, former U.S. national team star, she is very
02:24 bullish about the growth of the women's game.
02:26 I think we're seeing that in England, Spain, and certainly here in the NWSL.
02:32 And I think it's really positive that finally this game is being embraced in the way that
02:37 it should be.