It was about to not air. The feat of the brand new world champions has not been limited solely to sports. The management of the broadcasting rights for the Women’s Soccer World Cup has been a real soap opera that was resolved barely a month before the start of the competition, after months of negotiations during which no one believed that women’s soccer could also become a phenomenon of audience.
On May 1, taking advantage of his presence at the Making Trade Score for Women meetings organized by the World Trade Organization, FIFA president Gianni Infantinose harshly dispatched the big European television stations, which he accused of making “disappointing” offers. and unacceptable.” It is the first time that FIFA has sold the broadcast rights for the Women’s World Cup independently, before they were sold as a package along with the men’s.
“Broadcasters’ offers, mainly from the European big five [Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the UK], remain very disappointing and simply not acceptable according to four criteria,” he said. “Firstly, 100% of the rights paid would go directly to women’s football, in our attempt to promote actions to achieve equal conditions and remuneration. Secondly, public broadcasters in particular have a duty to promote and invest Third, audiences for the FIFA Women’s World Cup represent between 50% and 60% of those for the Men’s World Cup (which are the highest for any sporting event), but the offers that are doing the televisions for the rights are between 20 and 200 times less”.
Indeed, while the rights to broadcast the World Cup in Qatar involved bids of between 100 and 200 million euros, in the case of the women’s competition they did not exceed 10 million. “This is a slap in the face to all the great players in the FIFA Women’s World Cup and, indeed, to all the women in the world,” Infantino said.
The FIFA president insisted on the “moral duty” not to sell the competition below its price and directly threatened not to broadcast it in Europe. More than a month later and five weeks after the start of the competition, on June 14, European telemarketers were turning to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to join forces, extending their broadcast rights agreement with FIFA to ensure that the World Cup would be seen in the 34 European countries that belong to the network, including Spain.
Summer is the time of the year with the lowest television consumption, and it is usually difficult to find proposals that prevail over outdoor activities. The time of a competition that is played in the antipodes did not seem, a priori, too favorable either. We are not in the habit of watching football with coffee for breakfast. Perhaps for this reason, RTVE opted for its second channel to broadcast Spain’s debut in the World Cup against Costa Rica, and garnered a not inconsiderable 13.3% audience share for a channel that rarely reaches double digits beyond the Tour from France. It would be the last game in La 2.
The final turning point would come in the round of 16. Spain’s win against Switzerland that put the absolute women’s quarterfinals for the first time shot up to 37.1% share. Interest was growing and the extra time of the match against Sweden would mark 45.4%, the semifinal would close to two million viewers and the grand final on Sunday would exceed 5.5 million. In the global balance, according to data from the consulting firm Barlovento, 27.6% of the Spanish population has connected at some point with the Women’s World Cup. Almost one in three Spaniards.
In fact, RTVE has taken the opportunity to test its new ultra-high definition (UHD) system, which will begin its regular broadcasts in February 2024.
These are the figures of a bombshell that heralds a new era in women’s sports. It is foreseeable that the next negotiation of emission rights will have a completely different development.
