Women’s Sport Needs Support Beyond One-off Ad Campaigns

By Nicky Vita, Head of Strategy, JOAN London

Every couple of years, the same story plays out in women’s sport. A big event, the Women’s World Cup, the Euros, arrives. Hype builds. Brands announce big-bang sponsorships, campaigns, tie-ups with high-profile sportswomen. If we’re lucky, we get a result like the Lionesses’ win. Then everyone celebrates how far women’s sport has come…and the activity quietly recedes until the next big moment.

Here’s the problem with that pattern: it isn’t a lack of attention holding women’s sport back. It’s a lack of endurance. Brands tend to be all in or all out, choosing short bursts of high-profile activity timed to key moments over the five-year commitments that actually shift culture. And without that consistency, and the financial backing behind it, it’s hard to move the dial in any lasting way.

To be clear, the moments matter. Role models like the Lionesses, Naomi Osaka and Amy Hunt are proving what’s possible, signing deals with Nike and Gucci that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Campaigns like This Girl Can have done the slower, harder work of making it normal for women to sweat and look imperfect while exercising (ignoring Sydney Sweeney), and have stuck around long enough to actually change behaviour. Both are real progress. Neither is enough on its own, because neither is what most brands are doing.

What’s at stake is bigger than any single sponsorship. Nearly half of girls in the UK who once considered themselves sporty (43%) will disengage from sport after primary school, driven mainly by fear of being judged and a lack of confidence. That’s not a gap a single tournament campaign will close. It’s a gap that needs consistent, visible backing that tells girls sport is something they belong in year-round, not just during a home World Cup.

Committing to that is a different discipline to sponsoring a tournament, which tends to mean spending a fortune over a short window. Sustained backing requires brands to think about where their money and attention go when there isn’t a trophy to attach it to.

Four key places require more involvement.

Grassroots movements

True grassroots involvement isn’t a tournament tie-in dressed up as community work. When the WNBA wanted something that would outlast another campaign built around the Draft or All-Star Weekend, it developed “Line ‘Em Up”. The campaign painted the league’s official three-point line onto outdoor courts in cities across the US, starting in New York and Indianapolis, with a donation made to every park that took part. There was no tournament attached to it and no expiry date, which was exactly the point.

It also worked because it borrowed credibility from something brands didn’t build. Community clubs like Gals FC in London (and now across the UK) have created that same sense of belonging on their own terms for years. They were built deliberately around fun over competition, so women who felt judged out of sport in the first place had somewhere to just show up and play. That is not a small feat.

These movements are the opposite force to the pressure that pushes girls away from sport, shaped by community rather than a brand budget. Backing organisations like that properly, rather than parachuting in around a big event, earns more trust than any pop-up activation ever will.

Underused channels

The second area to consider is underused social channels. Sports activation still defaults to big TV spends timed around big tournaments, or working with a star name like Serena Williams on a poster near Wimbledon.

But social is where long-term momentum lives, and the audience is already there: Wasserman research puts 73% of Gen Z female fans discovering athletes via TikTok or Instagram before they ever see them on broadcast channels.

Sportswomen don’t need Serena Williams’s fame to be influential creators. A real partnership on social, one that brings out a personality, an interest, a fashion flair, a point of view, can punch well above its media weight because it doesn’t need a single moment to justify it.

Unexpected categories

What we really mean is categories nobody expects. Women’s sport isn’t relevant to every brand, and it shouldn’t try to be; a tenuous link won’t land.

But there’s real opportunity outside the obvious territory of sportswear and drinks, for a brand willing to show up properly rather than just logo-slap.

Sephora’s partnership with Unrivaled, the US women’s basketball league, is the clearest recent example: it supplies players with beauty products through the season and runs the league’s “glam room.” It’s a genuinely useful role rather than a decorative one.

The Sofa

The fourth, and most overlooked, is the sofa. The two most-watched UK TV moments of 2025 were both Lionesses matches, and Women’s Sport Trust data puts total UK women’s sport viewing at 397 million hours that year; a record. Wasserman separately found 44% of female fans globally name watching at home as their number-one mode of following sport.

Almost no campaigns are built for in-home watching. Every pound still chases the stadium, or the in-person tournament experience, while the biggest audience is sitting on a sofa and has nothing designed for that moment at all.

Playing the long game

It should be said that none of this pays off the way a tournament sponsorship does. There’s no spike in sales the week after, no dramatic jump in brand tracking.

But what you do get instead is slower and more valuable: a real shift in how women see your brand, built up match by match rather than moment by moment.

Decide what you’re prepared to stand for, commit to it beyond the next big event, and back it properly. Do that, and the win isn’t just reputational. It’s a win for the fans, a win for the brand, and a win for the sportswomen doing the actual work of changing the game.