The DAZN group shares a long history with women’s sport. The group has taken one of the important steps by acquiring the broadcast rights to the Women’s Champions League.
All the content has been free aired on YouTube for the last two seasons, which gained more than 50 million view and nearly 650,000 subscribers to the channel. After the two seasons, the global sports streamer has moved for a paywall.
The next significant steps was last month when DAZN acquired Ata football. The acquirement is a free streaming platform and community which is fully dedicated to enhance the reach of professional women’s football.
The US fans will be able to watch the top women’s leagues in France, Germany and Italy on the OTT service and also could see English WSL action on NBC Sports through a partnership with Ata. 777 Panthers had been Ata’s major investor and the investment firm owns stake in seven pro clubs, many of them are women’s team as well.
After the acquisition, DAZN is hiring Ata’s co-founders, Esmeralda Negron and Hannah Brown, as co-CEOs of a new Women’s Sports division.
“The founding vision of Ata was really to build this community, uniting the entire ecosystem,” Negron said. “I think we felt like and saw that there was a disconnect between the women's pro game and general fandom and also this giant player base here in the US specifically.”
“We wanted to create a centralized hub, a community, that we could unite around and build a really dedicated women’s football audience and really drive engagement, media value, support everybody within the ecosystem – key stakeholders, broadcasters, leagues and clubs.”
Negron also added and described “superimpose” with DAZN which has “almost exactly the same vision as us” not only in broadcasting matches but also pursuing deeper integration and engagement towards women’s sport.
Shay Segev, CEO of DAZN group said,”the strength of the game lies in its participants, fans and distinct appeal. By harnessing these characteristics, we believe that DAZN can build on the foundations our investment in the women’s game has delivered so far.”
“With Esmeralda and Hannah joining the team at DAZN to establish a women’s sport business unit,” he continued, “we are confident that DAZN will keep setting the pace in this area of huge potential, as well as establishing even better and greater links with the communities that are driving the was women’s game on to ever-increasing heights.”
Negron was an American football player at Princeton, she was the all-time top goal scorer of the school, later she has played as professional player for a couple of years. Later on, she has moved into college coaching before joining Relevant Sports, the media company and soccer promoter.
On the other hand, Brown has worked as an executive at Sky Sports and FuboTV before joining Formula E as its Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer. Before founding the company in 2019, both of them had a well-cleared vision of the growing women’s football landscape. They started the streaming service in 2020.
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