Why Fox Sports’ Coverage of the Women’s World Cup is a Game Changer
From the beginning of his tenure at Fox Sports, David Neal had a clear directive about how to cover women’s soccer. After legendary former chairman David Hill and current President Eric Shanks hired Neal as Executive Producer of FIFA World Cup and Vice President of Production, they shared their vision for the upcoming 2015 Women’s World Cup.
“In the very first meeting we had after I’d come on board, they told me, ‘We don’t want you treating the Women’s World Cup like a laboratory for the men,’” Neal recalls. “‘We want the exact same full-throttle resources applied to the Women’s World Cup that will be applied to the men’s.’ There was complete equity, and that’s a real tribute to the leadership here.”
The approach worked. The 2015 tournament broke all viewing records, demolishing the tired but persistent argument that audiences are not interested in women’s sports. The final between the U.S. and Japan was the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history, attracting more than 25 million viewers.
To put that in perspective, the first time the USWNT team won a World Cup in 1991, American news outlets barely paid attention. The tournament itself bore no resemblance to the international spectacle surrounding the men’s game. In fact, FIFA wasn’t sure they wanted their brand associated with women, dubbing it the ‘1st FIFA World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup.’ The dubious logic behind this decision was based on the idea that the main sponsor, Mars, was the parent company for M&Ms. When the world champion U.S. team returned home, their plane was met by four people: two reporters, the coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team, and a friend of star midfielder Michelle Akers.
Twenty-eight years later, Neal and Fox Sports have been part of a fundamental shift in media coverage of women’s soccer, both through investment and the nature of the coverage itself. The sheer amount of money and resources Fox devoted to the 2015 World Cup was unprecedented and the overwhelming response has made even more possible as 2019 approached. “It was an emphatic validation of the fact that the women rightly needed to be covered and broadcast exactly the way we do the men,” says Neal. “The enormous success we had in terms of viewership gave us great momentum.”
Success is nothing new to Neal. In his 30 years at NBC prior to joining Fox in 2012, he produced nine Olympics, four NBA finals, two World Series and a Super Bowl pregame show. Along the way he earned 33 Sports Emmys and two Primetime Emmys and was recognized with a Peabody Award for NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in Beijing.
One of his first moves at Fox Sports was hiring a broadcast team with an ability to break down the game for an increasingly soccer-savvy audience. In previous years both fans and players had noted that commentators tended to focus more on backstory and less on analysis during women’s games. For 2015, Neal brought on several people known more for their work on the field than behind a mic, including former USWNT midfielder Aly Wagner.
Their coverage of the World Cup was critically acclaimed and Wagner in particular has become known for an ability to break down the technical aspects of the game and zero in on performances from players who often go unrecognized. She has since become the first woman to call a men’s World Cup game. According to Neal, Wagner exemplifies what he’s looking for in a commentator. “A litmus test that we apply is for our team to tell the audience ‘why, not what,’” Neal says. “Ally can explain why someone scored or turned the ball over, not the fact that it happened. You can see that for yourself. That’s what our best commentators do, regardless of the gender of the players on the field.”
Another change had to do with storytelling. In previous World Cups, reporters seemed to go out of their way to make players seem approachable and non-threatening. The term ‘girl next door’ was used so frequently by journalists that one columnist sarcastically wrote an article entitled ‘Reports: Girl Next Door a Dental Hygienist, Not a Member of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team.’
In contrast, Neal and his team focused on players as athletes. “Far from emphasizing some sort of perceived feminine qualities, this was about a world championship and we wanted to go at it full speed ahead,” he says. “There was no real variance from how we would cover men. That was the guidance I was given initially and consistently throughout, and it was the right way to go.”
That doesn’t mean storytelling went out the window, but the nature of it changed to reflect more about who players actually are than what might make viewers comfortable. “We had someone like Megan Rapinoe who was so open about her sexuality and her focus on being the best in the world at what she does, or like Carli Lloyd who is so driven that she would go out in the snow in the dead of winter in New Jersey and still work out,” says Neal. “People like that who open up to our profiles and features unit and allow us to tell their stories, that’s key to attracting and holding on to a significant television audience.”
With the U.S. men’s team failing to qualify for World Cup 2018, it’s an interesting time for U.S. Soccer, he believes. “The men’s program obviously needs to be overhauled. The women, on the other hand, are the reigning world champions. They’re the beacon of hope on the horizon.”
As the 2019 World Cup got closer, other countries have begun to invest more resources and coverage into their women’s teams. Neal hopes that approach becomes commonplace in the future. “I’d love to see women’s sports in general reflecting what we’ve been able to do with the Women’s World Cup,” he says. “Excellent athletes should be given appropriate coverage and it’s really not a question of men vs. women.”
Meanwhile, he’s kept a whiteboard in his office that tells him exactly how many days until the tournament kicked off. “You can be absolutely certain that as we built up for the Women’s World Cup, it had exactly the same resonance and emphasis that any men’s event would have,” says Neal. “We’ve been looking forward to France.”
