Cup has challenge to increase player visibility – 07/18/2023 – Sport

Marta received the ball on the left wing. With a crescent heel, she left a marker behind, invaded the area and cut another defender before finishing what is perhaps her most beautiful goal, in the 2007 World Cup, when Brazil had its best campaign.

Do you remember the opponent? The phase of the competition in which the duel took place? The game score? Or even where were you when the “goal of genius” happened, as the narrator Luciano do Valle (1947-2014) defined it?

It would be hard to find a Brazilian, football fanatic or not, who wouldn’t have these answers on the tip of his tongue if we were talking about anthological moments of the men’s team or even disappointments, like the 7-1.

But there is a gulf between the visibility of women’s and men’s football.

It is one of the reasons why the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) launched a campaign named #AcordaPraElas to encourage people to wake up in the early hours of the morning from this Thursday (20) to follow the Women’s World Cup.

Played in Australia and New Zealand, the competition has the Oceania time zone as an obstacle to reach a large audience in Brazil, with matches at dawn or in the early hours of the Brazilian morning.

Brazil will debut at 8:00 am (Brasília time) next Monday (24th), against Panama, and may have games at 4:00 am and 5:00 am throughout their journey in search of the unprecedented trophy.

The tournament matches will be broadcast on TV Globo and CazéTV, from streamer Casimiro. The broadcaster from Rio promises to show at least seven matches on open TV, including all from Brazil, and at least one from each stage. SporTV, also from Grupo Globo, will broadcast 34 games, and CazéTV will show all 64 matches.

Globo broadcast live on open TV 56 of the 64 games of the World Cup in Qatar, in 2022. Only matches that had conflicting schedules were shown on VT in the early hours.

According to the broadcaster, this is a change that will also affect men’s football in the future, as the channel intends to show 52 of the 104 games in the 2026 World Cup, the first with 48 teams.

At least in Brazil, FIFA (International Football Federation), however, had no problem closing the sale of broadcasting rights for this year’s Women’s World Cup. In Europe, just last month the entity reached an agreement to avoid a blackout of the championship in some countries of the continent.

After having complained about the value offered by broadcasters, which he called “unacceptable” because they were “from 20 to 100 times smaller than those received in the men’s Cup”, Fifa reached an agreement with the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) for the open transmission in 34 countries.

In this scenario, the players themselves act to increase the visibility of competitions, although they also need to fight for their own recognition individually.

Social networks offer a parameter to show the challenge faced by them in the search for more fans.

Together, the Brazilian national team players have about 3.6% of Neymar’s total followers on Instagram. The number 10 of the selection in the last Cup has 210 million followers, while the players of the Canarinho team total around 7.52 million.

Elected six times the best in the world by Fifa, an award that is among Neymar’s individual ambitions, Marta is the one who attracts the most interest from the public and adds up to 2.6 million people on her official profile on the platform. That is, she concentrates 34.5% of the total cast of Pia Sundhage.

“This just demonstrates how important it is for women’s football to gain more space and audience in all media channels”, says Ivan Martinho, professor of sports marketing at ESPM (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing). “That’s how the number of onlookers increases and, consequently, the athletes’ followers on social networks.”

Having fewer followers than male players is not exclusive to Brazilian women. One of the highlights of the US national team, Alex Morgan, 34, world champion in 2015 and 2019 and about to compete in his fourth Cup, has 10.1 million followers.

Morgan appears in third place in the ranking of players who have the most potential to influence the platform, according to a study carried out by Nielsen Sports.

The leaders are the Swiss Alisha Lehmann (13.7 million) and the Spanish Alexa Putellas (2.9 million), elected the best player in the world by FIFA in 2021 and 2022.

Fábio Wolff, sports marketing professional, observes that, despite being expressive, the number of female players’ followers is much lower in comparison with male athletes. Striker Gabigol, from Flamengo, for example, has never played in a World Cup, but has 11 million followers.

“If there is already this difference in the number of followers, imagine if there were no movement to contribute to the appreciation and dissemination of the modality”, points out Wolff.

FIFA, however, has high expectations for the global audience of the Women’s World Cup. The entity estimates that 2 billion spectators around the world should follow the tournament’s matches. In the previous edition, in 2019, the audience was 1.12 billion.

With growth, there is also a promise that the prize pool will be bigger. FIFA must distribute around US$ 150 million (R$ 721 million) to women. In the 2022 World Cup, US$ 440 million (R$ 2.1 billion) was spent on men.

The Brazilian crowd hopes that a good part of this amount will remain with the cast from Canarinho so that, who knows with the title, the glories of the women’s team can capture space in the national affective memory.

About Marta’s goal: it was the last goal scored by Brazil in the 4-0 defeat of the United States in the semifinals of the 2007 World Cup.