Women’s soccer and publisher Footballco turn to creators to score with brands

Sponsors and brands are in hot pursuit, thanks in part to the work of the league’s marketing team, led by former NFL brand chief Julie Haddon. When she joined the NWSL to build up its marketing team two years ago, Haddon had only an office cactus for company. “The joke around the office was that it was my first employee,” she recalled.

These days, the NWSL’s marketing and commercial team now has 35 employees, and it’s been bolstered by hiring from the more established pillars of American sport. Head of social and influencer marketing Jordan Dolbin and creative director Maureen Raisch both joined from the NFL, for example.

And as the NWSL season enters its final weeks, the work of Haddon’s team building up the league’s presence on social media is bearing fruit. According to Haddon, engagement across social platforms (the league prioritizes Instagram and TikTok) has increased 152%, while followers across all platforms have risen 32%. The NWSL now has over 305,000 TikTok followers.

In particular, the league’s willingness to embrace creator content has helped it pull in new brands such as Adobe, and most recently, Google Pixel. The NWSL has run a creator roster since 2023, which assigns between two and four social content creators to each team.

Given sideline access, the creators are able to capture unique moments — unusual angles on goal celebrations, stars speaking to fans in the stands or players psyching themselves up in the tunnel before a match, for example — which helps the league build up the characters and personalities beneath the uniforms, and promotes the game day experience to fans who aren’t there in person.

Dolbin, who runs the LCC scheme with assistance from social content agency Hat Trip, said the “live content correspondents” (or LCCs) have enabled the NWSL to “grow our well of content to help share the story of our game and our league, but also our players.”

“It’s definitely helped us reach an audience that maybe isn’t in that traditional TV broadcast audience,” she added.

Google Pixel joined as a sponsor back in February, which Haddon credits to the LCCs. “We built something that ended up becoming a sellable asset with one of the most powerful brands in the world,” she said. Both Haddon and Google declined to share financial details relating to the sponsorship.

For Google, the partnership provided an opportunity to “showcase creators of all types, not just photographers and videographers, and how they could use our phone and our technology,” according to Julia Cheney, Google’s U.S. sports and entertainment marketing lead for devices and services. Though she said Google hasn’t yet calculated the full impact of the campaign, she said it’s helped the company reach audiences located beyond the reach of traditional broadcast.

Future activity in Google’s campaign will incorporate footage and images shot by the NWSL’s creator roster, Cheney added.

The NWSL is not alone in looking to creators to reach — and monetize — broader audiences. In 2023, soccer publisher Footballco began building up creator-led vertical Front Three beneath the umbrella of established title Goal.

Like the NWSL’s sideline perspectives, Goal’s Front Three prioritizes soccer content that takes place away from the park, featuring quizzes and games alongside interviews with soccer talent. Unlike the NWSL, it prioritizes YouTube and, to a lesser extent, Facebook and Snapchat. “It’s all based around the sentiment that people want to participate,” said Xavi Sanchez, executive head of video at Footballco.

The publisher’s team of five creators (two of whom were recruited by Footballco as interns) each appear in front of the camera. Its YouTube channel has over 420,000 subscribers — 44% of whom are aged 18-24 — while it has recorded 373 million views across its video content on the platform in 2024.

Again, it offers a chance for viewers to get close to soccer personalities, something that’s rarely provided by the traditional game day press conferences or canned post-match tunnel interviews.

“Off the pitch content, shoulder content, whatever you want to call it … sometimes it has more social cachet than on the pitch content,” said Amar Singh, svp of content and creative at Dentsu agency MKTG.

While Footballco has pulled in advertising revenue via YouTube (Sanchez didn’t disclose revenue figures), Front Three has also burnished its direct offer to advertisers. Partners include Marriott Bonvoy and Expedia, which sponsored several Footballco brands during this year’s Champions League final.

According to Sanchez, Footballco plans to develop the channel by staging more frequent watch-along videos for Champions League games. It’s a format already popularized by independent creators including Mark Goldbridge and it will even appear on CBS, in its recently announced Beckham & Friends show.

“It pitches the talent against each other, creating a very good and engaging vibe on set,” he added.

For Singh, creator-led soccer content like that produced by Footballco or the NWSL offers brands a means of welding themselves to the fan experience.

“There’s a real opportunity to speak and put yourself at the center of the zeitgeist, the [soccer] and the conversation,” he said.