NWSL kicks off 14th season with new marketing strategy

The NWSL season kicked off on Friday with two new teams and a new approach to marketing.

The league’s fourth annual marketing campaign, “Imagine Missing This,” will be targeted more narrowly than campaigns from previous years, though it’s still geared toward top-of-funnel goals like awareness and brand building as the NWSL continues to grow, according to Andrew LeRay, the league’s director of brand marketing. The 2025 season capped off with a record-breaking championship game that averaged more than 1.2 million viewers, up 22% from the previous record set in 2024.

“Last year, we had the same goal, but I think the strategy was a bit too broad,” LeRay told Marketing Brew. “We did a lot of research at the end of last year, some segmentation studies, that gave us two very distinct audiences that we felt it was most appropriate to target this year.”

The campaign may also represent the league’s most high-energy to date—literally. It’s narrated by NWSL superstars Trinity Rodman, Mallory Swanson, and Sophia Wilson, who earned the nickname “Triple Espresso” during the USWNT’s gold-medal run at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The combination of targeting and talent is meant to capture two different types of soccer fans while also positioning the NWSL as the league to watch for everyone in between.

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One group the NWSL’s marketing arm is focused on this year is young women who are “predisposed to soccer in some way,” LeRay said. That could include women who play soccer, have family members who play, or are fans of the sport in general but don’t yet follow the NWSL.

“We’re in a very unique position where our audience is also on our stage, and putting the spotlight on them and letting their personalities shine is a great way to make connections with exactly who it is that we want to bring into this fold,” he said.

To maximize those potential connections, “Imagine Missing This” features players beyond Rodman, Swanson, and Wilson, who are all active now after last taking the field for the NWSL during the same time period in November 2024. There’s also voice-overs from last year’s leading rookie goal-scorer Riley Tiernan and back-to-back MVP Temwa Chawinga, as well as on-pitch shots of players like Gotham FC midfielder Rose Lavelle and Kansas City Current midfielder Lo’eau LaBonta.

In addition to the TV spot, which is running across NWSL-owned channels, paid social, and TV, the campaign includes Times Square billboards for the second year in a row, LeRay said. The billboards will be up through March 29, with rotating creative to promote various matches, he added.

To measure the campaign’s effectiveness, his team is tracking aided and unaided brand awareness, as well as its reach, impressions, and views. Within 24 hours of its release, the spot had four times the engagement on Instagram as the 2025 season kickoff spot had for the year, LeRay told us.

There have been other wins for the league in the last several years. In 2024, the NWSL reached $75 million in team sponsorship revenue, according to SponsorUnited data, and the league started its 13th season last year with 13 sponsors, including newcomers e.l.f. Beauty and Alex Cooper’s Unwell Beverage Brand.

This year, e.l.f kicked off the season by expanding its three-year partnership to include an additional player partnership and a presence in the league’s newest cities of Boston and Denver. Boston Legacy FC debuted to a crowd of more than 30,000 at Gillette Stadium, the biggest crowd for a team’s first game in league history, and across the eight opening weekend matches, more than 129,000 fans turned up, a record for opening weekend.

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The second group the campaign targets, LeRay said, is “people who are interested in elite soccer.” This audience tends to skew a bit older than the first, and includes more men, he added.

“The second audience is more conversion-focused,” LeRay said. “We feel like this second group has a better opportunity to take an action more immediately…These are folks who are already tuning in on Saturday morning to [English Premier League] matches.”

The ad showcases several significant goal-scoring moments, like a game-winning volley from Rodman, highlighting the elite-level of play that could help attract fans who are hungry for more top-notch soccer amid a World Cup year.

For the other group—especially Gen Z fans—the tagline, “Imagine Missing This,” is meant to hold some weight, LeRay said. His team wanted to convey a sense of FOMO associated with the NWSL without coming across as gatekeeping or demanding, he said.

“We don’t think [Gen Zers] necessarily want to be told what to think or what to do, and so we didn’t think an authoritative tagline really made a lot of sense, but we want to focus on our players, and we want people to feel like if you’re already a fan, you’re ahead of the game,” LeRay told us. “If you know, you know, and if you don’t, we’re going to show you exactly what everybody’s talking about.”