NWSL Is Reaching New Heights With Help From Ally (Exclusive)

The National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) is on the rise. This year's championship game between NY/NJ Gotham FC and OL Reign drew over 800,000 viewers on CBS, the second-largest audience in league history. One of the biggest reasons for the growth of the NWSL is sponsorship support, specifically from Ally Financial, a bank holding company that has made a commitment to supporting the NWSL and women's sports over the last four years. PopCulture.com attended the NWSL Championship game and events in San Diego last week and spoke to notable figures about how the NWSL is getting bigger with the help of Ally. 

"I think the moment that I think we had this epiphany of, 'We have to be a significant part of the solution of ensuring that the NWSL is the most valuable women's league in the world,' is a couple of years ago when all the abuse scandals broke, and we wanted to make sure, 'Okay, we've got to make sure that this league doesn't go anywhere,' and that we come with a philosophy of anything that we sponsor, that we need to help make it better than we found it," Andrea Brimmer, Ally Chief Marketing Officer, told PopCulture.com.

"Our deal with NASCAR was we want to be the official/unofficial league diversity sponsor, because we want to make sure that everybody feels welcome at NASCAR races, and so we've been working, we thought that was the way we could help make NASCAR better. It's the same philosophy with NWSL. How can we make NWSL better? For us, that's been things like giving great fan experiences, putting more content out into the world, helping invest in the media, so that they can monetize and get these kinds of big broadcast deals that fans can have access to more games, helping get the championship game into prime time, where it belongs, which all of that just means the players are going to get paid more, and the teams are going to have better valuations, and you're going to have this really sustainable model."

As a sponsor, Ally is making sure the players are supported. Gotham FC star Yazmeen Ryan participated in Players Allies, a program created by Ally that covers games, tickets, flights and hotel accommodations for family members for guests of each player from the two teams playing in the championship contest. 

"I chose my mom and nephew, my two biggest supporters," Ryan told PopCulture. "They're actually coming tomorrow to watch the game, which is super special and Ally has helped with that, providing hotels and tickets to the game and stuff like that, so it's actually really special for them to be here and for Ally to help out."

Meghann Burke, the NWSLPA executive director and former NWSL player, understands that Ally played a big part in the championship game getting moved to primetime. "It's massive," she said. "I feel like Ally is becoming inextricably linked to the story of NWSL over the last few years. Getting the game moved to primetime on CBS last year was I think a critical moment, because once you go primetime, you don't go back, right? And so then we can start building on that momentum. So Ally has been instrumental in making that happen, giving these incredible athletes the platform they deserve for the wider world to get to know them."

As far as the future goes, Brimmer is looking to help the NWSL grow on the media side. "I think we will continue to go heavy into investing in the broadcast so that we make sure that the league knows that there are media commitments," she said. "I think that we'll really work with the league to try and get a lot more content out there, so people have more opportunity to see these players in their natural habitat, and understand the stories of the players and create fandom, which is really important, bring a lot of the casual fans off the sidelines, people that are curious, that don't know a lot about soccer, like how do we create fandom around that? And help continue the growth of the league."