- Start date
- Duration
- Format
- Language
- 16 sep 2025
- 40 hours
- Online
- Italian
Offer sports organizations know-how, rationales and tools to support and “professionalize” management and managerial activities.
The new competition, inaugurated in the 2021/22 season, aims to give women’s soccer greater visibility, and create economic and social value, promoting policies that foster equality and inclusion.
The challenge
Making the UEFA Women’s Champions League the top competition in the world for women’s soccer clubs by adopting an economically profitable growth model. This is the ambitious goal set by UEFA. With the active support of FIFA, UEFA is striving to generate social, sport and economic value through women’s soccer, promoting policies that advance equality and inclusion at the same time. The central offensive in achieving this goal is a new format for the competition, starting with the 2021/22 season, along with marketing to enhance the tournament’s visibility, and a search for better revenue sources.
Unlike other women’s sports, or even the same UEFA competition in the men’s league, the women’s football movement still pays based on number of fans, broadcasters, and sponsors who are interested in the matches, and the number of organizations for merchandising, ticketing and betting. All areas that UEFA is working on by coming up with an ad hoc canvas model to turn the UEFA Women’s Champions League into a more entertaining competition with huge economic and social potential.
The numbers
Company: UEFA
Industry: sport (football)
Year Founded: 1954
Headquarters: Nyon
Women players currently active in Europe: 1.8 million: three farms for a total of 1,200 hectares
Countries with most women footballers: tSweden (198,000), Germany (197,000), Holland (161,000)
For several years now, both FIFA (the international governing body for football) and UEFA (its European counterpart) have been making every effort to promote women’s soccer, a movement that saw an impressive upsurge thanks to the 2019 World Cup.
In keeping with the movement’s growth targets, UEFA recently stepped up funding at all levels, from youth to pro leagues, and launched a strategic business plan to grow the number of active women footballers in Europe from 1.8 million to 2.5 million. Also with an eye to growth and raising the profile of women’s soccer, UEFA aims to uplift the prestige of the tournament that garners the best media coverage on the continent: the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
With this in mind, UEFA opted for a new format for the competition, a decision approved in Spring of 2021, in an attempt to compensate for the lack of visibility of the past. Getting rid of the knockout model, now the 16 qualifying teams are divided into four different groups, and play home and away matches against one another; the top two teams in each group then move on to the quarter-finals.
With these changes, UEFA set up a competition that looks a lot like the men’s Champions League. This means more teams from the top European national championships qualify for the competition (France, Spain, Italy and England). What’s more, as with many US women’s sport leagues, various organizational and marketing activities are centralized, to include broadcasting rights, sponsorships, and ticketing.
The 2019 World Cup drew in 30% more spectators than the 2015 tournament, and television viewers around the world numbered over one billion. This astounding success has attracted the attention of sponsors, advertisers, and television broadcasters. In fact, Visa signed on as an official UEFA sponsor until 2025. And many more agreements with the likes of Nike, Barclays, Qatar Airways, Avon, Boots, and Arkema are proof positive that women’s soccer has major appeal for big companies who, up till just a few years ago, showed little interest in investing in this sport. With the implementation of this new format, media rights for the competition are centralized, with UEFA producing and distributing every match for national TV stations and online streaming channels.
As with the men’s competition, all the teams sell tickets for their own games directly through traditional channels (physical and digital), and a portion of the tickets for the Champions League final. UEFA only handles a part of the ticketing for the final, but for the women’s competition in the past these tickets were given away for free or sold for next to nothing. Today, seeing the upsurge in the number of spectators and fans, another lucrative source of revenues will come from ticket sales.
Additional revenue streams may also be generated from a proliferation of merchandising, a sector that’s as of yet underdeveloped, and from sport betting partners and eSport distributors.
Takeaways
- Management innovation is an enabler of change management. As the UEFA Women’s Champions League case shows, to exploit the momentum generated by women’s soccer, there’s a need for clear, attractive proposals for all stakeholders (fans, teams, sponsors, broadcasters), and a customer-centric approach.
- The sport business is a highly competitive, extensively branded environment, characterized by an enormous offering of sport experiences and a hyper-segmented, heterogeneous target portfolio. For this reason, to boost income in the medium to long term, target-retention based on customer/user experience and satisfaction is essential.
- There is an ulterior aim in UEFA’s support of the popularity of women’s football: to have a positive educational and social impact. Indeed, a higher profile for the entire movement may inspire policies that foster equality and inclusion.
Related Programs