DaNGeROuS KiLLeR Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 Fans were thrilled with Hope Solo's shutout streak in the World Cup, but can she keep that excitement going with her professional team, Seattle Reign F.C The United States women’s soccer team won the World Cup on Sunday before 53,000 fans in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a domestic television audience of 26.7 million people. On Friday, the team will be celebrated in a ticker-tape parade down the so-called canyon of heroes in Lower Manhattan, as the Yankees, the Mets and John Glenn were before them. And next month the team will begin a 10-game victory tour, with an exhibition against Costa Rica at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, home to the N.F.L.’s Steelers. More than 30,000 tickets have been sold for that match, and the upper level of the stadium has been opened, presumably in hopes of filling the 65,000-seat stadium. The team’s po[CENSORED]rity, however, is unlikely to continue at that pace. The attention from a quadrennial global event will recede in the coming weeks and months. And there is no high-powered women’s soccer league to continue the marketing push, as the N.B.A. did after the success of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team. Soccer fans and the news media will soon shift some of their focus to the start of the men’s European leagues’ seasons. Having World Cup teammates diffused around the N.W.S.L. might be a challenge for the league, but its commissioner sees opportunities in games pitting players like Megan Rapinoe, left, against Lauren Holiday. Credit Craig Mitchelldyer/Getty Images Meanwhile, 22 of the 23 players from the championship women’s team will reconnect with their regular jobs in the three-year-old National Women’s Soccer League, which has nine teams spread from Boston to Portland, Ore. Carli Lloyd, the breakout star of the United States team, will head to the Houston Dash. Hope Solo, the goalkeeper, will go back to Seattle Reign F.C. Alex Morgan will put on her Portland Thorns F.C. uniform. Can the league sustain the momentum generated by the World Cup victory? Attendance is averaging 4,411 this season. Thorns matches rank No. 1 at 13,769. Sky Blue F.C., averaging 1,298 a game at Rutgers University, ranks at the bottom. Games are streamed on YouTube, but images occasionally blur when cameras pan too quickly to keep up with the action. The N.W.S.L. has found little stability with media rights. Fox was the broadcast partner in 2013, ESPN in 2014, then Fox again this season. The one-year agreement calls for Fox Sports 1 to televise six coming games and stream four on its Fox Sports Go service. Fox is covering the costs of producing the games but is not paying the league a rights fee, a reflection of the league’s fledgling status. “You have to crawl before you walk,” said David Nathanson, Fox Sports’s head of business operations, describing the modesty of the deal. Still, he said, it is better than the one Fox gave the league in 2013. “We can showcase the competition in the best possible light and highlight the stars that people are familiar with from the World Cup,” Nathanson added. Fox and the league, which is considered one of the world’s best for women’s soccer, are unsurprisingly bullish about the improving po[CENSORED]rity of women’s soccer. But the league is still new and well behind the growth cycle of the men’s league, Major League Soccer, which is celebrating its 20th season and succeeding increasingly in reaching millennials and Hispanic fans. M.L.S. is in the first season of an eight-year television contract worth $90 million annually with ESPN, Fox and Univision. M.L.S. viewership on the English-language networks is between 234,000 (on Fox Sports 1) and 237,000 (on ESPN and ESPN2), which suggests that Fox struck a good deal with the N.W.S.L., which averaged 143,805 viewers for six games on ESPN2 last year. The women’s league has many challenges. First, it must endure beyond its third season, unlike its predecessors, the Women’s United Soccer Association and Women’s Professional Soccer, which folded before they could start a fourth. It needs to show itself worthy of a bigger, longer-term media contract, and must lure fans to games despite not having a critical mass of national team stars on any single club. “There’s no replacing the specialness of all of them on one team,” said Tonya Antonucci, former commissioner of Women’s Professional Soccer. “Having them diffused is a challenge we’ve seen in past leagues.” Jeff Plush, the N.W.S.L. commissioner, disagreed, seeing the benefits in watching Lloyd play against a World Cup teammate or Morgan play for Portland with a Canadian star like Christine Sinclair. The league also needs to expand its pool of national sponsors — which consists of Coppertone, Nike and the National Mango Board — and stay topical when the World Cup afterglow is gone. “We want to take advantage of this very bright spotlight on the league,” said Plush, “and we have stories that go beyond the World Cup — like players who didn’t play this year and others who will play in the next one. We need to tell our story and tell it more often and more efficiently.” But, he added, the league does not have a big marketing budget to tell that story. “We have to build that over time,” Plush said. “So we have to be laser-focused in the near term.” These challenges are not unlike those encountered by most Winter and Summer Olympic sports, which receive enormous attention every four years but scramble to be noticed in between. Consider bobsledding, gymnastics and swimming. Plush acknowledged the similarity but suggested that soccer’s profile is higher than many Olympic sports and that another major event for women’s soccer, the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, is on the horizon, a neat bookend to the World Cup.
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