In August 2023, the Women’s World Cup final aired for free on Fox, and it drew the biggest U.S. television audience a Women’s World Cup final has ever pulled in. Four years from now, watching the next one will cost you a Netflix subscription.
FIFA and Netflix just made it official. Netflix is now the exclusive U.S. home for the Women’s World Cup in 2027, hosted in Brazil from June 24 to July 25, and again in 2031, plus a new behind-the-scenes documentary series thrown in. The reported price, per Bloomberg, is around $200 million for the 2027 tournament alone. It’s the first time any World Cup, men’s or women’s, has skipped free broadcast television entirely in this country and gone straight behind a subscription wall. Read that again.
Here’s why that should bother you even if you don’t follow soccer. Women’s sports spent most of a decade clawing into the mainstream, with growing crowds and growing TV numbers every cycle to prove it. The 2023 tournament wasn’t a modest bright spot. Its final set the actual U.S. ratings record, and the USWNT’s group-stage games drew record numbers too, because anyone with a TV and an antenna could stumble onto it. Kids who’d never seen a professional women’s soccer game in their life found one by accident, flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon.
That accident stops happening in 2027. You need an active Netflix account now, and Netflix isn’t the cheap afterthought it used to be. Ad-supported runs $8.99 a month, ad-free is $19.99, and the top plan is $26.99, after another price hike back in March. Families who already cut Netflix to save money just got quietly uninvited from the biggest stage the sport has ever had.
I don’t think FIFA did anything sinister by taking the money, and I don’t think Netflix is wrong to want live sports badly enough to pay for them. Two hundred million dollars is real money, and every streamer alive wants appointment viewing that keeps subscribers from canceling. Fine. What bugs me is the timing. This deal cashes out the audience at the exact moment that audience was still growing.
Put simply: soccer just decided to gatekeep its biggest event on its biggest stage. You don’t grow a fanbase by making the sport harder to find. Every kid who stumbles onto a game by accident is a future ticket buyer or a fan for life — and the sport just spent $200 million making that accident a lot less likely.
Two cents: women’s sports earned this audience one free broadcast at a time, and trading it for a licensing check the same year the numbers finally proved the reach was real isn’t a smart business move. It’s cashing out right before the payoff hits.
Photo: “2023FWWC Final (stadium)” by Storm machine, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.