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The lineup
The Women’s National Basketball Association, initially conceived by National Basketball Association owners as a way to fill up arenas in the offseason, is the model that offers hope to the fledgling football leagues. After initially struggling a decade ago, the WNBA has blossomed into a healthy sports business, with 13 teams, a solid fan base, TV coverage on ABC and ESPN2, and a lineup of heavy-hitting corporate sponsors, including Toyota, Adidas, AOL.com, Discover Card. Most players are paid salaries in the $30,000 to $90,000 range.
By comparison, women’s football is a Wild West scene, with a constant churn of teams and ever changing divisions.
The three leagues all play the same game, with minor deviations from NFL rules, but they approach the business in very different ways.
The Women’s Professional Football League, formed in 1999, is the only woman’s league to go head-to-head with the men’s college and pro seasons in the fall. The WPFL bills itself as the most accurate replica of the men’s game and as the league with the highest standards — enforcing minimum roster requirements, and ensuring that owners have the financial wherewithal to keep a team playing, even if ticket sales flounder.
“We are studying everything the NFL does,” says Jody Taylor, WPFL media relations director — from the halftime entertainment to how water is delivered to players — in an effort to make WPFL the household name for women’s football.
The WPFL fields some of the strongest women’s teams in the country, including the Dallas Diamonds, which maintains a 52-week training schedule, and regularly draws some 3,000 fans. But the league has lost teams in recent years, pushing up travel costs for the remaining 13 teams scattered across the country.
Masters, a former marketing consultant with the WPFL, saw playing against the men in the fall as a losing proposition and, in 2000, established a rival league that became the National Women’s Football Association.
Her business plan is based on increasing exposure for the women’s game.
“A big part of it is television,” she says. “… Until you get TV you’re not going to get the revenues you need to model yourself after any professional league.”
Although the NWFA is growing, Masters also has seen several teams defect to join the upstart Independent Women’s Football League in the past two years. The departures have come amid growing criticism of what some see as her autocratic management style, high license fees ranging between $20,000 and $35,000, and controversial marketing tactics — including a recent pay TV reality show titled “The Gender Bowl,” which pitted some of her league’s best players against a group of middle-aged men whose playing days were well behind them.
The IWFL, a nonprofit that started with four exhibition teams in 2001, now has 31 teams, including one in Montreal. Teams pay just $3,000 to $4,000 in annual membership fees and league decisions are made collectively by the team owners.
Although it includes some of most successful teams in the country — like the New York Sharks with a roster 50-60 strong — it also opens its doors to fledgling teams that can barely fill all the positions. To try to give such teams a fighting chance, the league is launching a multi-tier system that will allow less accomplished teams to play at their level until they improve enough to be competitive at a higher level, similar to the professional soccer structure in Europe.
“Since our focus is providing an opportunity for women to play the sport, we kind of measure our success in terms of how many women we have registered to play,” says IWFL CEO Laurie Frederick. “There were 1,281 last year, up from 60 women at first. We define that as pretty successful.”
The quest for NFL blessing, and backing
The deciding factor in the three-way battle for female football supremacy ultimately could be the NFL, which could lend instant credence by throwing its support behind one of the leagues.
So far, the league is staying on the sidelines. An NFL spokewoman declined to comment on whether it has plans to support any of the leagues.
“We currently do not provide financial support to semi-pro leagues — male or female,” wrote NFL Corporate Communications Manager Adina Ellis in a message to MSNBC. “However, we focus our attention on promoting football on a grassroots level with numerous programs, such as NFL Punt, Pass and Kick, NFL FLAG football and other educational programs in which girls and women participate.”
But individual teams and players already have stepped up to help local women’s teams.
For instance, the Tucson Monsoon persuaded the Arizona Cardinals to donate their uniforms. And the New York Sharks have cut a deal with the New York Giants to run football clinics for teenage girls at Giants Stadium in March. If those go well, the team says it will ask the NFL to launch the program nationwide, working through the IWFL.
But there is growing consensus that three leagues are two too many. And many involved in the women’s game say their sport will have to undergo a painful consolidation before owners and players can even dream of turning it into a profitable venture.
“There is no way 80 some teams can be profitable…” says the Vixens' “Moose” Hoaglum. “If we want to be big, even WNBA big, there has to be consolidation… so that the NFL does take a look at it and says, ‘OK here’s the top 30 teams, here’s our WNFL.’”
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