The Professional Women's Hockey League played its first season and started a second, the Northern Super League is about to launch its activities and the WNBA announced its arrival in Canada.
Women's professional sport in Canada reached critical mass in 2024.
“It was hard to believe that in 2023 we didn't have a professional women's sport here,” said Jayna Hefford, LPHF senior vice president of hockey operations and member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
It is difficult to cast a veil over the three women's entities that have made the sports headlines in 2024, because they are completely different.
The LPHF, with three Canadian and three American teams, is a unique entity geographically centralized in central and eastern North America, and backed by American billionaire Mark Walter, a sports mogul.
The arrival of the Toronto Tempo in the WNBA in 2026, the 30th year of this league, is supported by the wealthy Canadian sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum.
The six-team SLN, which begins in April 2025, is a pan-Canadian initiative of club owners investing in a league that builds its business from the ground up. Teams signed players to contracts and introduced club ownership and management in 2024.
She counts sports heavyweights in her camp, including international soccer star Christine Sinclair and former CFL commissioner Mark Cohon.
“There's probably been a confluence of calendars, and our cultural situation is huge,” said SLN co-founder Diana Matheson, a former player on the Canadian women's soccer team.
The fact that women's professional sport was finally recognized as a valuable brand and a growing market was at the heart of its emergence in 2024.
Social justice influences post-pandemic, the disruption caused by social media and streaming versus traditional means of communication between sports and fans, and data refuting the idea that people aren't watching Women's matches have contributed to a new sports ecosystem in Canada.
“It's gone from concept and theory to reality,” noted Cheri Bradish, director of the Future of Sport Lab and sport initiatives at Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Business Management.
“This market is ready and has embraced this global movement of women’s professional sports. Not just as the right thing to do, but through a business case and perspective. It took us a while to get on this train. »
Canadian Women & Sport (CWS) conducted a survey and indicated in a 2023 report that two in three Canadians were fans of women's sports and, just as important for business, that the fan base was diverse, educated and easy.
“It's a popular sport to denigrate women's sports,” said Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, executive director of FSC. The data and research we've done has started to bust these myths. People need to be willing to look again, to look beyond the myths and seize the opportunities that present themselves. »
Powerful and wealthy people were interested.
“Whether it's an individual investor or a team of investors, at the end of the day there's an investment that's made,” said sports agent Brian Levine, whose agency manages sponsorship sales for AFC Toronto, from SLN.
Canadian Tire was ready. The home, automotive and sports retailer committed in 2023 to devoting half of its sponsorship money to women's professional sports by 2026.
“As a sponsor, you can kind of only put your money where there's something to sponsor,” said Kim Saunders, who among her titles at her company is vice president of sponsorships. All of these moments began to emerge as opportunities. »
The company was a founding sponsor of the LPHF and SLN, with multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts. Canadian Tire has a sponsorship relationship with NBA Canada — and by extension, the WNBA — and was involved in hosting an exhibition game in Toronto in 2023. Saunders said the company is in “active discussions » with Tempo.
“It’s not charity,” Saunders insisted. I must account to my executives for every sponsorship dollar we spend, and I must justify the return on investment.
“What we gain is absolutely brand exposure and awareness, brand differentiation and a new story to write. We are able to show how we are improving life in Canada. We are making sport in Canada better by putting our money and our brand behind these new entities, and helping them grow. »
A sponsor's need to advertise fuels a key pillar of the professional sports ecosystem: how people watch sports on screen and the rights revenue that generates.
“It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation,” Levine said. You have to know that the advertisers will be there before you can broadcast the sport, because there is a cost to broadcast it.
“Companies that sign all these pledges and commit to diversity and inclusion are under pressure to do something. But if you want to diversify your advertising base, if you're Sportsnet or TSN or RDS, the argument would be that you'll have more women watching sports if there are women participating in it. So it's about diversifying and increasing the number of people watching sports, which makes perfect sense. »
After a first season in which all games were broadcast on YouTube to increase its fan base, the LPHF entered into exclusivity agreements with Canadian broadcasters in its second season.
“What we've seen in a year with the LPHF has blown us all away,” Saunders said. It's going to continue to be a blast with SLN and Toronto Tempo coming online. »
What the LPHF, SLN and Toronto Tempo have in common is the presence of women in decision-making roles. Hefford and Amy Scheer are the operational leaders of the LPHF, Christina Litz is the president of the SLN and Therese Resch is the president of Tempo.
“The fact that women are at the forefront of a lot of these things has definitely moved the needle,” Matheson said.
“We, Jayna, Therese, everyone behind all these leagues, are convinced that Canada is a world-class place for women's sport and we are just getting started. »
