The Women’s Super League is constructing its personal distinctive viewers, with over 8million individuals tuning into the ladies’s high flight however not the Premier League in 2022, new analysis from the Women’s Sport Trust has claimed.
The examine celebrated one other banner yr for UK home ladies’s sport, with 37.6m watching it in 2022, beating the earlier document of 32.9m in 2021.
A complete 8.4m viewers watched reside WSL soccer final calendar yr however didn’t see any reside Premier League soccer, in keeping with the visibility report, whereas 6.8m watched each.
The distinctive WSL viewers additionally noticed a 3.3m year-on-year enhance from 2021, when 5.1m individuals watched the WSL however didn’t watch the lads’s high flight.
The Trust’s newest report appeared to level to a promising pattern of ladies’s sport drawing in separate audiences from males’s competitions, after 1.8m individuals watched the ladies’s Euros however didn’t take within the males’s World Cup.
In addition, 53 per cent of those that watched the Euros and have been new to ladies’s sport went on to look at extra after England lifted the trophy.
It was not simply soccer that attracted ladies’s sport-specific viewership, in keeping with the examine. In cricket, 1.5m solely watched the ladies’s Hundred whereas 4.8m consumed each the lads’s and girls’s competitions.
In rugby league, 1.3m watched the ladies’s World Cup matches with out additionally tuning into the lads’s video games.
Overall, the Women’s Sport Trust analysis – with broadcast perception from Futures Sport & Entertainment – uncovered the typical viewer within the UK watched eight hours and 44 minutes of ladies’s sport in 2022, a whopping 131 per cent enhance on the earlier yr’s determine of three hours and 47 minutes.
Tammy Parlour, the Women’s Sport Trust co-founder and chief govt, mentioned: “While previously the focus has been on ensuring that women’s sport is visible in broadcast, which remains really important, to ensure the commercial sustainability of women’s sport we need to maintain and grow the time that fans are spending consuming women’s sport content.
“A big focus for the industry in 2023 should be how to continue to build visibility across all platforms, not just TV, as this will help build connection and habit with women’s sport, which in time can then be commercialised.”