The NWSL didn’t sit on the sidelines during the men’s World Cup, deploying a nationwide Summer of Soccer bus tour and digital content campaign to draft off the excitement around the sport. The league has seen a lift this summer, including a nearly 300% year-over-year increase in Instagram engagement and 100% growth on YouTube.
The past few months also offered the league’s new CMO, Rachel Epstein, an opportunity to study the marketing landscape around the global competition ahead of next summer’s Women’s World Cup in Brazil. For obvious reasons, she views 2027 as the main event.
“There is no higher relevance moment and no greater opportunity to bring new fans into our league in a really sustainable way,” said Epstein, who joined the NWSL in April after two decades of experience at ESPN. “The Women’s World Cup is our players returning to the best, most competitive league in the world. We have to use that window to show up in a way that says, ‘Welcome home. This is the place for the players that you just fell in love with. And this is the place for you as new fans.’”
That sentiment may sound familiar to those who observed MLS’s marketing effort coming out of the men’s World Cup. Working in conjunction with Ogilvy, the league rolled out a campaign in the final week of the tournament featuring the tagline, “Thanks World. We’ll Take It From Here,” that has continued in the ensuing weeks. The main TV spot featured high-profile MLS players, including Lionel Messi, Son Heung-Min and Tim Ream, returning from the World Cup in their MLS club uniforms.
Epstein said she was impressed with MLS’s approach and that it will inform how the NWSL looks to capitalize on next summer’s competition.
“What I loved about what I saw from MLS is they’re clearly using those windows and those moments the right way,” Epstein said. “They were showing up in paid and in all of the important places at the right times. So, there’s a framework there that I appreciated and somewhat mirrors how I’m thinking about the beats.”
The blueprint
The NWSL CMO said she expects to take a three-phase approach: using the run-up to connect NWSL players’ club and national-team identities, nurturing new soccer fans during the tournament and converting them into NWSL followers after the World Cup. Epstein cited research suggesting brands have roughly a 90-day window to convert newfound interest into fandom.
A unique element shaping the 2027 Women’s World Cup will be the involvement of Netflix, which for the first time has exclusive rights to carry the competition in the U.S. While Epstein said the league will likely lean more on social and digital marketing than paid ad buys during matches on Netflix, she expects NWSL players to feature prominently in Netflix’s storytelling around the tournament.
“They’re fantastic storytellers,” Epstein said of Netflix. “I know they’re going to do a great job and that our players will be in the mix in the run-up and during. They’re so good at that across everything they do.”
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