JOHN MCDONNELL / Writer & Creative Director

UEFA WOMEN’S CHAMPIONS LEAGUE
GETTING THE WORLD WATCHING

DAZN partnered with YouTube to take over the broadcast rights to UEFA Women’s Champions League from the 2021/22 season onwards – with one key goal: to get the whole world watching elite women’s football.

The result: in less than a year, the DAZN Women's Football YouTube channel went from zero subscribers to becoming the biggest sports channel on YouTube dedicated to women’s sport – and matches that would usually be played out in front of a few thousand fans were selling out the most historic football stadiums in Europe.

Here’s the story of how I helped achieve this wildly ambitious goal.

STEP ONE:
Finding the story

To help a new audience connect with a ‘new’ sport, we needed to give them a reason to care. So we travelled across Europe, uncovering the best stories from the women’s football scenes in iconic cities – celebrating local legends and future stars of the game. We turned this into a six-part social content series, which we also ran at half-time during matches.

STEP TWO:
BRAND PARTNERSHIPS

We partnered with major brands like adidas and EA Sports, using their access to athletes and marketing budgets to create premium content that heroed the stars of women’s football and promoted UWCL to new audiences across the world.

STEP THREE:
FILLING ICONIC STADIUMS

The increased spotlight we put on women’s football meant that major clubs across Europe – Barcelona, Juventus, Arsenal – started to open up the men’s stadiums for UWCL matches. In March 2022, the attendance record for a women’s football match was smashed as over 90,000 fans crammed in to Camp Nou to watch Barcelona vs. Real Madrid in the UWCL quarter-final. The promo I made ahead of the match centred around the story of Barcelona captain Alexia Putellas, who had been making the pilgrimage to Camp Nou since she was a child to watch her beloved team but had never allowed herself to even dream of one day playing there – she just didn’t think it was possible for a girl.

I later made a documentary about the impact this match had on the women's game, and football in general, across the globe.

To spark more social conversation around key UWCL matches, I created content that tapped into existing sub-cultures such as football shirt culture.

STEP FOUR:
TARGETING THE NEXT GENERATION

We knew there was a massive untapped audience amongst the younger generation for women’s football so we also made specialised child-friendly content for YouTube Kids, creating icons for the young audience to form a connection with.

STEP FIVE:
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

After a very successful first season, in which UWCL became much more established, we wanted to highlight the competition’s place in the mainstream football conversation to appeal to every single football fan. For the 2022/23 season launch film, the aim was to showcase what makes the competition so special: elite players playing for elite teams in elite stadiums.