Global streamer boosts investment to increase sponsor and fan engagement

In 2015, DAZN was launched as a new streaming option for sports fans around the globe. Over the years, deals like DAZN’s NFL Game Pass, its boxing business, and access to the FIFA Club World Cup have helped solidify its place as the largest global sports streamer. Nearly a decade later, recognizing the growing demand for women’s sports, the platform has made a significant investment in this area.

DAZN has adapted to shifting viewing trends by securing an extensive portfolio of media rights for women’s sports competitions. The streamer began investing in women’s soccer in 2021 with global rights to UEFA Champions League. This commitment allows it to offer unique methods of fan engagement, from live and prerecorded programming to interactive content that enhances the viewing experience. By prioritizing women’s athletics, DAZN has demonstrated its dedication to fostering growth in this burgeoning sector of the sports industry.

Sitting down with SVG, DAZN Co-CEO, Women’s Sports, Esmeralda Negron discussed why the company decided to increase its investment, how it has maintained internal collaboration to market its efforts more effectively, how it has capitalized on the rise in popularity to better monetize its digital offerings, and its goals for 2025.

How has DAZN invested in women’s sports overall?
DAZN has been a leader in investing in women’s sports, and we currently hold the largest and most valuable portfolio of women’s-soccer rights in the world. We have global rights to the UEFA Women’s Champions League Liga F, which is the Spanish League globally, and Serie A Femminile, the Italian League. And we have the Arkema Premiere Ligue and Frauen Bundesliga in major EU markets, plus the U.S. We are very heavily invested in women’s soccer.

Obviously, these leagues come with some of the biggest club brands in the world, like Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Bayern Munich, as well as PSG and Olympique Lyonnais. We’ve also recently expanded beyond soccer and have begun partnering with other leagues outside of these sports. We recently announced a global partnership with EuroLeague Women, which is basketball, and we just announced a partnership with League One volleyball, a new league launching in the U.S. in January, which will be a global partnership as well.

Of the partnerships and moments from this year, are there any specific ones that you are especially proud of? What do you see as a partnership that is moving the needle for women’s sports through DAZN?
I think we’ve had an incredible year. We reached a million subscribers on our dedicated women’s-soccer YouTube channel. We are the biggest women’s-soccer YouTube channel in the world and one of the biggest women’s-sports channels as well. I’m really proud of that.

In January 2024, we launched our free women’s-sport environment within DAZN. We’re giving fans free access to women’s sports so that anyone around the world can watch women’s soccer as well as EuroLeague Women and volleyball. This was done in an effort to accelerate audience growth and ultimately, in turn, drive commercial success by working with brands and advertisers who want to reach these audiences. I think that’s the really special part about what we’re doing and the investment in women’s sports.

We also launched a successful partnership with Visa, and we did this across the knockout rounds of Women’s Champions League last spring. Visa came on to sponsor The Fan Zone, a fan-engagement feature on the DAZN platform that allows fans to participate in community chats, predictions, polls, and Q&As for a chance to win prizes. This feature supports this aspiration to build fan communities. That was a big success for us: it had a 40% engagement rate, which was the highest Fan Zone engagement rate across any Fan Zone in both men’s and women’s sports. It was exciting!

We also recently won an award at the World Media Awards for brand- and media-owner partnership. The partnership with Visa was a great opportunity to showcase what we can do with brands and partners that want to reach this audience and how we engage them in a meaningful and valuable way by creating great product experiences for them beyond the live match.

Another highlight has been the expansion into other women’s sports, like basketball and League One volleyball. And, from a marketing perspective, we’ve adopted a collaborative approach. We realized that women’s sports are on a growth journey, right? To accelerate growth, we needed to partner and work collaboratively with leagues, clubs, and publishers.

Since we came on board to launch a dedicated women’s-sport vertical at DAZN, we’ve worked with publishers by sharing clips and collaborating with them on social media to get our women’s rights and our women’s sports out to more audiences. We’ve also collaborated with the clubs on social media to reach and engage their global fanbases, and we’ve aggregated club content on our platform to make it easy for fans to access behind-the-scenes content featuring their favorite players.

I think, with this collaborative approach and free access, we’ve reached and engaged new audiences. For example, for Women’s Champions League, our 2022 average view time for the final was about 30 minutes on the DAZN platform. In 2024, the audience that we’ve attracted since launching the free offering watched an average of 70 minutes of the match. Which is a really big increase, right? It’s exciting to see that we’ve been able to reach and engage new audiences as well as ones that are obviously big fans of the sport.

With the rise of these sports and the increased content, do you find that both viewers and advertisers are growing with it? How has the rise and change of these sports changed the ways they are being monetized?
I think the more we can do to build out the product experience and build out these fan-engagement features like we’ve been doing at DAZN, with the alternative viewing experience as well as Fan Zone, you start to attract newer and younger audiences. Tapping into those younger Millennials and Gen Z audiences who are used to multitasking, engaging with content, and the social experience.

I think that’s an incredible benefit. Launching these additional features and this new experience unlocks opportunities to engage advertisers and sponsors with what we’re doing. Visa was a great example, but, across DAZN, we’ve launched many different things. In Italy, for men’s Serie A, we’ve had a betting company sponsor a poll to choose the top four men’s players in Fan Zone at the 80th minute. We’ve had Coca-Cola invest in alternative viewing experiences with influencers in Italy. By enhancing the product experience and engaging that younger generation, we create opportunities for sponsors to activate beyond traditional advertisement and broadcast sponsorship. These features allow brands to build brand affinity and engage fans in new and valuable ways.

What do you see as the benefit to having this global sports presence for women’s sports? Do you see better fan engagement?
From a discoverability standpoint, it’s easy to have one marketing message: for women’s sports in particular but with all the other content in the ecosystem, too. It’s a question of “how do you break through that clutter and how do you make it easy for fans to find this?” I think that’s the biggest benefit: making these sports readily and easily available to consume.

As we enter 2025, what can we expect from DAZN in the women’s-sports space? What are goals do you hope to achieve in the new year, either as a brand or for fans of women’s sports in general?
The goal is to keep expanding our audience and increasing monetization. By owning our platform’s first-party fan database, we can better understand and engage with women’s-sports fans as our audience grows. This allows us to serve as a key entry point for sponsors and advertisers who want to connect with and engage women’s sports fans.

Our goal is continued growth in live-match viewership and in registrations on the DAZN platform. I think, more broadly across women’s sports, it’s continued improvement in the product on the field and in the match-day experience. It’s obvious that the broadcast looks so much better when the stadiums are filled, right? How can we work with the clubs or the teams within the leagues to support them in the best way we can to achieve that? Those are the goals that we are trying to achieve this year.

Are there any specific projects slated for 2025 that you are particularly looking forward to?
With the announcement of the FIFA Club World Cup being available globally on DAZN, it’s an exciting time, given our portfolio of women’s-soccer rights to bring more global soccer fans to the DAZN platform. Our women’s-soccer viewership has been strong in markets where we have men’s domestic rights, and this gives us an opportunity to engage more soccer fans around the world. In Germany, we have Bundesliga rights, and, in Italy, we have Serie A on the men’s side; in Spain, we have La Liga. Those are some of our strongest viewership markets for women’s soccer. I think, with the addition of the FIFA Club World Cup globally, we’re going to be able to tap into more and more fans of the game of soccer, and that will allow us to cross-promote our women’s content to an engaged audience.