When Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal of the World Cup for the 1999 US Women’s National Soccer Team during penalty kicks, she celebrated by taking off her jersey and falling to her knees. It didn’t take long before her celebration became an instantly recognizable moment in sports history.
The USWNT star was subsequently courted by brands like Nike, Gatorade, and Bud Light, and she appeared in commercials for those brands in the years afterward, but even then, she recalled, she was the exception, not the rule.
“The landscape wasn’t ready for us,” Chastain told Marketing Brew. “We had good soccer, but we didn’t have a good stadium, we didn’t have great sponsorships, we certainly didn’t have media outlets.”
The landscape certainly looks different now compared to when Chastain was playing. More fans and sponsors are paying attention to women’s soccer than ever before, and NWSL team valuations are approaching a collective $1.5 billion as expansion teams like the Utah Royals and Bay FC join the league. Chastain is a co-founder of Bay FC, and more than two decades after she retired from the national team, she’s still in demand among brands: She recently served as the keynote speaker at a June conference hosted by Bay FC sponsor Contentstack.
Ahead of the conference, Chastain spoke with Marketing Brew about the business of women’s soccer in the US and the state of its sponsorship and fan landscape.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You mentioned that when you were playing, US Soccer had a great on-pitch women’s product, but the sponsorship support wasn’t there. What’s changed since then to get more brands to invest?
You have to look at the women in the sports space. Billie Jean King is the greatest advocate for women and women in sports…and honestly, I think it really took generational time for those people [in corporate America] who have daughters and girls, not just to say, “Okay, my daughter likes soccer, I’ll dip into my pocket.” It’s, “I see this as a corporate endeavor that could produce a lot of great attention.” The space and the stories that go along with these women are truly fascinating, and they’re inspiring, and I think that was really, to me, the tipping point—those first few [brands] like Visa. They really pushed US Soccer outside of its comfort zone…They put some pressure on US Soccer to see that [splitting Visa’s sponsorship dollars equally between the men’s and women’s national teams] was a great opportunity for both of them.
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As a team co-founder, how do you think soccer organizations can capitalize on the boom of interest around women’s sports in general and learn from other leagues like the WNBA?
How do we go out and get women who—in whatever sector they live, work, play, or exist in—have never felt welcome to sports? How do we embrace them? I’ve said this at the beginning of when we started Bay FC that we need to literally open our gates, welcome every woman from six months to 60 to 80 years old, and say, “This is for you. You don’t have to feel uncomfortable. You don’t have to know all the answers. Come and be a part of this…” This is not a knock on men’s sports, I just feel like this is a fact: They’ve been around longer. They have grown to humongous, humongous valuations. The space is really desirable, but it’s really compact, and now, there’s a great amount of space between the athletes and the fans, and that’s hard. That’s hard for a fan. Now, fans want to feel like they have something invested. They can really impact the space, and I think that’s genuinely, for me, why I love sports so much, whether I’m playing or watching someone play, to have those emotional connections and feel like my presence in the stadium helps make a difference. That’s pretty amazing.
A lot of athletes these days, especially women athletes, are focused on building their own brands in addition to working with sponsors. Was that a viable strategy to grow an audience when you were playing?
The landscape has changed so much that you almost can’t compare most things to what has happened in the past. I think the thing that you can connect is that women have always had to hustle…I was up in the Northern California area doing an event with Bank of America and [former national team star] Julie Foudy, and a woman came up to me and said, “Man, I was a basketball player, and I think I was born three generations too late,” and I got what she meant. Even me, who had a big moment, even trying at that point to make a brand was not easy. I probably could have done much better had it been in this day and age, with the outreach and the eyeballs and the good side of social media. But on the flip side, we also have to be aware that not everybody has to be a brand…I think that’s not for everyone.