In a year which saw the Fifa Women’s World Cup capture the imagination, the Football Association’s brand lead explains why the summer spectacle gave English soccer’s governing body confidence to launch a streaming service dedicated to the Women’s Super League.

A year ago, Uefa set the tone for 2019 by signing the governing body’s first exclusive sponsorship for women’s soccer in Europe. Fast forward 12 months and the commercial opportunity around the women’s game remains a hot topic of conversation.

In the year since confirmation came of Uefa’s seven-year deal with Visa, the success of the 2019 Fifa’s Women’s World Cup, which drew one billion viewers globally, has spurred more rights holders into action, with many now looking to build over-the-top (OTT) streaming services with a strong focus on the women’s game.

In June, Uefa itself announced the launch of Uefa.tv, a free service that will offer live streams of its women’s, youth and futsal competitions, among other properties. Then in October, UK-based streaming company Red Bee Media and sports rights company Spring Media unveiled plans for Wnited, a digital platform that will focus exclusively on women’s soccer when it rolls out early next year.

Elsewhere in August, England’s Football Association (FA) launched its own streaming service, the FA Player, which has given fans free access to every live match from the domestic Women’s Super League (WSL) club competition and original content featuring the Lionesses, England’s national women’s team.

Following the launch of that service, SportsPro caught up with Rob Mitchell, the brand lead for FA competitions, including the WSL, to discuss the governing body’s decision to create a dedicated OTT offering for domestic English women’s soccer, how its brand partners are benefitting, and what the future holds for the platform.

How did the concept for the FA Player come about, and why did you choose women’s soccer for the OTT service?

This has been in our thoughts for the past 18 months. It takes time to understand the OTT market and, once we make the decision to go down this route, to then identify which competition to partner.

When we started building the product earlier in the year, we knew the Fifa Women’s World Cup was going to be a key moment in the game, so on the back of the tournament - where 11.7 million people UK watched the Lionesses v the USA in the semi-final - that really gave us a confidence to go to market.

A year ago, we had around only 11 per cent of our WSL broadcasts contracted, so whereas we previously had a 12-games contract, to then be able to stream all 132 games live, and have full highlights, and Lionesses content to drive the digitisation of our archive, it is a really exciting time for us.

How are you sustaining recent audience growth in the women’s game?

We have a role to play in providing marketing for the WSL and to support the clubs as well, by taking data from the FA Player to drive insight that helps their marketing effort. The FA Player plays a role by allowing us to have a dialogue with fans of the WSL every day of the week, and not only on a match day.

During the first two weekends of the ongoing WSL season, we exceeded the attendance for the whole of last season and there will be more of the bigger games that will come round in the New Year, where we can focus on making those a showcase.

There is a lot of work to do, but we have a dedicated team across the FA and our broadcast partners as well as our sponsors, including Barclays, in addition to the clubs themselves to help with that push.

How is the platform building the profile of the players?

It is very important that we are able to build a relationship with the players themselves, and especially the Lionesses. We have had access to them during England camps and they are super excited to be a part of the product because they haven’t really had access to their own matches in the way that they have now.

So, the FA Player also enables people to learn more about them, as well as the club they pay for, and I think that is part of the journey; rather than only having live content, highlights, and goals, we want to bring in more magazine style material to the FA Player, which is kind of the next step we are taking.

The two brands that are visible in the FA Player are Barclays as a title sponsor of the WSL, and Continental around its title sponsorship of the League Cup. We have kept is very clean and I think we have to take it step by step before building out our proposition.

Why was it important to make a free product?

For women’s football, it is hugely important. We have a job to provide visibility, reach, access, and breadth of coverage of the sport, so we don’t want to put up barriers. Therefore, it is a freemium product where you have to subscribe, and that helps us know and understand who the people watching are, the frequency of their return, what content they view, and that all helps us to provide and tailor our content as best as possible.

We have got a commitment not to have a paid product for a number of years, and that would not help the women’s game. We need to bring in as many people as possible, and it’s also important to understand that this isn’t solely a female audience we serve; it’s football fans and compassionate players, who want to access but may never have been able to find elite football to watch outside the world major tournaments.

The FA's brand lead Rob Mitchell speaking during SportPro's 2019 OTT Summit held in Madrid in November

What’s the key to retaining subscribers?

There is a huge marketing effort around our customer relationship management, paid-digital work, organic use of channels, and stadia branding, which is all important within our acquisition drive. However, very quickly we are about to shift that balance to include the retention and engagement of existing subscribers to make sure they remain active and they frequently visit the platform.

In terms of the broader market place, the Fifa Women’s World Cup has demonstrated that there is a market for women’s football, not only in the UK, but also across the world. We have got elite level sportswomen taking part in multiple markets, so we have additional broadcast deal in other regions where the FA Player has helped facilitate those agreements, to demonstrate that there is a market and there is demand.

At a certain level, some broadcasters do have challenges around capacity and cannot have all rights all the time, so how we work together with them and balance [our content] is really important.

Do you have plans to scale the product?

For the first time, people all around the world have had access to the [men’s] Premier League, and its clubs. The opportunities that presents us to tap into their fanbases around the world are very exciting.

We want keep moving at a decent pace; we have had a very strong start to the season, but we cannot forget that we must have the technology to ensure the user experience is good, because if it breaks, we have to start again. While we are working hard, we know that we also have to be really careful.

We are positively forensic in terms of understanding what’s working, what hasn’t, and what’s the solution. We take the view that we can make a mistake once but we can’t keep making the same mistake. While that is common sense, it is part of our day-to-day world, and is hugely important.