Q: To what extent has DAZN's women's football rights strategy changed over time, and why has the company lifted the paywall now?

DAZN has dubbed itself the ‘home of women’s football’, becoming a keen investor in the sport in recent years. In 2021, it obtained the global rights to the UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL), and this has been followed by signing up leading domestic competitions - such as Liga F, the Frauen Bundesliga, D1 Arkema and Serie A Femminile in several core markets, and the Women’s Super League (WSL) in Italy, Japan and Spain. 

Free-to-view has been a major part of DAZN’s strategy for women’s football. For the first two seasons of the UWCL deal, all matches were made available for free via the broadcaster’s YouTube channel, while coverage of other women’s football competitions has been part of a hybrid model, where fixtures have varied between being made available for free and being put behind a paywall. Initially, from the start of the 2023-24 season, DAZN had planned to put some UWCL games behind a paywall, before reversing the decision in November last year, deciding to prioritise maximising visibility instead, followed by yesterday’s announcement to make all remaining UWCL games – as well as much of the rest of its women’s football coverage – free to air in the UK.

This decision coincides with DAZN’s recent launch of a ‘freemium’ tier – initially in Germany, and globally from early 2024 – where registered users can watch some DAZN content without paying to subscribe. It is likely that fixtures from women’s football competitions will more widely become a key part of DAZN’s free tier offering, a proposition which DAZN hopes will continue to diversify its revenue streams away from solely streaming subscriptions. 

Q: What are the driving forces behind DAZN adopting this strategy?

There are noble reasons and pragmatic reasons behind this decision. In its announcement, DAZN calls for a “new deal for women’s football”, inviting all stakeholders to do their part to promote the growth of the sport. By putting its women’s football coverage in front of the paywall, DAZN hopes to boost exposure and viewership, which is so important at this stage of women’s football development.

At the same time, market forces made this choice more palatable to DAZN. Across the EU big 5 markets, the proportion of sports fans willing to pay to watch the UWCL ranges from 0.9% to 2.9% according to Ampere’s latest Sports – Consumer data - a relatively low proportion compared to leading sports properties within these territories, such as the UEFA Champion’s League (UCL), which ranges from 12% to 27%. These figures indicate that DAZN is unlikely to drive subscription growth by placing women’s football behind its paid tier – especially in markets such as Germany, Italy and Spain where DAZN already owns the rights to the UCL, which has a 73% overlap with those willing to pay for the UWCL. In territories such as the UK, too, where DAZN does not yet have a major tentpole sports property to offer fans, the low overall willingness to pay for women’s football makes it unlikely that these competitions will drive significant subscription growth.

Instead, the move fits into DAZN’s wider strategy of diversifying its revenue streams beyond income from subscriptions. Not only is DAZN bringing women’s football onto its own platform – rather than offering fixtures to fans via a YouTube channel as it has historically done – it is also maximising the visibility of a continuously growing sport by offering it for free. By pivoting to this strategy, DAZN will be able to more directly seek advertising revenue growth, drive more consumer viewing on its own platform, and provide a platform to build up the overall audience for women’s football, to potentially monetise in the future. There are risks though – in markets, such as the UK, YouTube has a large established reach, whereas DAZN, as a lesser known brand, will have to invest in a robust marketing campaign to ensure new and current fans of women’s football know where to find the live matches. 

Q: What happens next? Will this decision impact upon other sports or rights deals?

For women’s football as a whole, little changes. The fanbase for women’s football continues to grow, and engagement with the sport is higher than ever. We’ve seen the first significant broadcast deals in the game across the last few years, such as Sky and the BBC acquiring the rights to the WSL in the UK for £8m per season from 2021 – the first time that a broadcaster has paid for the rights to the competition. With the WSL rights in the UK due to go out to tender soon, DAZN's decision go free in the UK could provide support to bidders looking to limit potential uplift in rights valuations. The counter to this, of course, is that the WSL and UWCL are two completely different tournaments, with the latter having limited UK clubs in the later stages, which will inevitably have an impact on interest levels in the UK.

More generally, DAZN’s strategic shift highlights an underlying tension for sports with smaller fanbases – with rights buyers torn between directly monetising a small but committed existing audience, or growing the fanbase through maximising reach. With women’s football, and women’s sport in general, increasingly in the spotlight, DAZN’s strategy to maximise visibility – and therefore engagement – will therefore hope to bring new fans to the game before seeing significant commercial opportunities further down the line. Regardless of whether DAZN’s campaign will influence other rights deals in women’s football, it remains the case that free-to-air viewing will be key to growing a sport which has a very real possibility of monetising a wider fanbase in the future.