The NFL says it wants to welcome more female fans, but the number of women viewers has gone down over the last eight years and the league’s reactions to recent sex scandals make a turnaround less likely.
You’d think that Roger Goodell, the National Football League’s $64-million-a-year commissioner, might’ve been better prepared for the question.
It was no secret that the findings of the congressional investigation released December 8 were damning. Not only had team owner Daniel Snyder ignored and downplayed sexual misconduct by team executives for decades at the NFL’s Washington Commanders, but the league had actively helped him avoid accountability, according to the 79-page report. The results of the investigation went public the same week that quarterback Deshaun Watson returned from an 11-game suspension related to accusations of sexual misconduct from two dozen women. Watson denied the allegations, and settled lawsuits with most of the women. Then he signed the biggest fully guaranteed contract in NFL history.
Snyder, who disputed the findings and accused the Democrats behind the congressional investigation of playing politics, still owns the Commanders. Watson, now with the Cleveland Browns, is still slinging footballs on Sundays. If the NFL was trying to attract and keep female fans, as the league says is its goal, maybe this wasn’t the best way to do it.
In fact, NFL viewership by both men and women is down about 3% this season through Week 14 compared with 2021. The NFL hasn’t been able to grow its female TV viewership, whose eight-year high was 6.3 million in 2015. It’s on pace for 5.9 million this season, according to figures provided by the league.
Last week, at a press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Irving, Texas, standing behind a podium emblazoned with the NFL shield he’d all but sworn to protect, Goodell looked befuddled when asked about the decline in women watching.
“We’ll continue to make sure we invite women into our game, make sure they know they’re appreciated,” Goodell said. “This is a game that they all love, too. And they’ve been a big part of it. We continue our efforts with respect to getting more women involved, not just in our operation, but in our football operation, which I think is a really positive change.”
The NFL’s 2022 problem is reminiscent of its problem in 2014, when running back Ray Rice was caught on video delivering a knockout punch to the woman who was then his fiancee. (Rice hasn’t played since. He and his now wife, Janay, are expecting their second child.) It was also the year that former defensive lineman Greg Hardy was convicted of assaulting a woman. (Hardy’s conviction was later overturned after a financial settlement. He subsequently signed with the Dallas Cowboys.) Also in 2014, NFL cheerleaders sued the league, accusing teams of paying less than minimum wage. (Teams settled with the cheerleaders without admitting wrongdoing.)
While the loss of women fans isn’t a catastrophic tidal wave — and can’t be definitively blamed on what might be the worst year in the NFL’s checkered history of fraught attitudes toward women — it’s also a signal that the league, which has an all-time-high ten female team owners, nevertheless has yet to fully come clean about its priorities. That can lead to business losses, according to Tony Ponturo, a former Anheuser-Busch vice president of sports marketing.
“If you’re losing women, and you’re just being propped up by males, that will eventually catch up to you,” Ponturo told Forbes.
For the past eight years, the gender split in viewership has remained remarkably consistent, with women hovering between 34% and 36%, according to TV ratings furnished by the league. The NFL blamed this year’s loss of women fans on the move of Thursday night games to Amazon’s streaming service, where female viewership is 31%, from broadcast networks, where it’s 36%.
The importance of women to the NFL’s business model, and the success of its partnerships, is magnified when it comes to the Super Bowl, the most lucrative day on the calendar for the world’s most profitable sports league. The NFL says the percentage of women inches closer to 50% for the big game. As every fan knows, advertisers pay more for the Super Bowl, which typically draws an audience of 100 million, and advertisers love women because they tend to make the spending decisions for families.
NBCUniversal charged advertisers around $6.5 million for 30-second spots during the 2022 Super Bowl. The 2023 Super Bowl returns to Fox, and the network is reportedly seeking more than $7 million per spot. In 2020, the last time Fox aired the Super Bowl, the network sold more than $600 million worth of ads.
“The advertiser needs to look out for themselves,” Ponturo said. “Is there slow erosion coming from somewhere that you’re now overpaying for something that’s not there?”
Results of the congressional investigation underscore that the NFL still has a woman problem, said Carla Varriale-Barker, an attorney at Segal McCambridge Singer & Mahoney whose clients include the U.S. Center for SafeSport, which addresses sexual abuse and bullying. “It’s out of step with the times,” she said.
The surprise in the report wasn’t that Snyder had been running a workplace that was toxic for women. That was well known. It was the NFL’s role.
“The NFL allowed Mr. Snyder to choose his own punishment,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, said on the committee’s website, “so Congress must act to protect workers, because the conduct that took place in the Commanders’ organization is not acceptable — not in the NFL, and not in any workplace.”
Varriale-Barker said that the message Congress was sending to the NFL was: “‘Get your house in order or we’ll do it for you.’”
In response to the congressional findings, NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in a December 8 statement that the league had cooperated with investigators and was committed to a “professional and supportive environment that is free from discrimination, harassment or other forms of illegal or unprofessional conduct.”
Varriale-Barker said the fallout could go far beyond losses to the NFL’s audience. Government officials may start inquiring about the NFL’s tax-exempt status, making it more difficult for teams to issue bonds to finance stadium construction and even threatening the NFL’s antitrust exemption, she said.
“Women viewers could be turned off, but again, this is beyond a women’s issue,” she said. “This is a societal issue. It’s not just women. I think this sort of conduct could or would turn off people of either gender.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jabariyoung/2022/12/23/sex-scandals-dont-seem-to-be-helping-the-nfls-goal-of-attracting-more-women-fans/