Emily Tisch Sussman’s quest to make Gotham FC the first global sports brand for women

Women’s soccer is on track to become a top 5 global sport by 2030, with captivating athleticism, expanded access to games and business investment fueling its growth.

Ahead of the sport’s meteoric rise, the Tisch sisters, whose family co-owns the New York Giants, invested in a little-known New Jersey soccer team in 2020. They rebranded the NWSL franchise from Sky Blue FC to New York/New Jersey Gotham FC, brought on star athletes like Kevin Durant, Eli Manning and Carli Lloyd as minority owners, and put players at the center of its marketing strategy.

Emily Tisch Sussman brought her media and constitutional law to the table. Carolyn Tisch Blodgett came with a marketing prowess that forged the Peloton brand. In three years, the team has nearly tripled its valuation — from an estimated $40 million to $110 million — as it heads into the playoffs this weekend.

Tisch Sussman joined The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik for a powerful conversation about the rise of women’s sports viewership, whether brands are paying their athletes enough branding lessons her sister learned from Peloton and how fragmentation is changing fandom.

You made the investment in the team a couple of years ago. Since then, we’ve had this explosion in interest in women’s sports. At the time, did you see that coming? Did you have a crystal ball?

This was a business investment. So part of the reason we are particularly attracted to this team and this league is because what seems crazy three years ago is that yes, the talent was there. Yes, a bit of the structure was there in the league, but women’s sports had really not hit the cultural zeitgeist.

They really weren’t integrated into culture. And so it felt like there was only up to go. And I think we’ve definitely seen that to be true.

What do you think is driving the interest that we’re seeing, both from viewers as well as brands?

From a viewership perspective, I think we’ve always known it to be true is the level of play is very good. The only thing that was holding the viewership back of women’s sports was, quite frankly, access. The NWSL, the National Women’s Soccer League, our league is in our second year of a media deal where every game is televised.

Now think about that. This is only the second year that every game is televised.

So if you went to a game, liked the team, wanted to follow them, you couldn’t necessarily even catch that game. How can you actually follow a team that way? Before this current media deal, if you wanted to watch a game, it was going to be on Lifetime. The place that people naturally love for sports.

That’s where I’m always tuning in for sports!

So the fact that there is accessibility now, and the fact that brands are willing to partner with us to bring more fans into the stadium, to tell our stories in different ways. Also to highlight a lot of the players and their individual stories, because that is really the way that you build up the brand of a league is that people need to feel attached to individual players.

The fact that we have brands coming in to partner with us on that storytelling is really helping to fuel [that growth].

Do you worry about fragmentation, or do you see that as a good thing, that you can watch sports in so many different ways?

Well, I’d like to see a more consolidated media deal for any particular sport moving forward, so there’s predictability for the viewer to be able to know where they can find it. Right now, I actually think that our league is too fractured across different platforms.

So you have to be a really dedicated fan to be able to follow it. I happen to be so I can follow it, but my mother has a harder time.

The thing that’s good is that we can control our own media. And this is true for any creators. We can control our LinkedIn channels, we can control our Instagram, which is particularly good for telling what we consider cleats on and cleats off stories about our players.

Because we can control all these different mediums, we can provide different access points to our fans into the team.

So what is your approach to marketing? How are you building the brand?

Our goal for Gotham, and this is set by my sister who is our team president, is that we will be the first global sports brand for women.

So think about that. There are some global sports brands that everybody recognizes. There is Real Madrid. There’s the New York Yankees. You can go anywhere in the world and you can find someone wearing one of their logos.

They might not even know anything about the team, but they know they identify with it. It exists on the women’s side to a very small degree, only really in tennis or individual sports. There is no women’s sports team that is identifiable all over the world, that is a global brand. We will be that. And so, we make decisions based on that.

On your site, you have digital playing cards. It seems like you are really putting your players front and center and building up that personal relationship.

That’s a deliberate marketing positioning that is led by my sister having built up Peloton. That was one of the things when they were building up the Peloton brand that she found that people were most attached to their individual instructors.

And the first thing she said to the players is, “I know I’m walking in and I know that I don’t know soccer, but I do know how to build a brand around you and I will.”

It’s hard to talk about women’s soccer without talking about the financial aspect of it. And as we see more athletes who are women partnering with brands, do you feel like they’re being valued as they should?

No, I don’t. I think that brands are still coming in too low.

How do we fix it?

I think we ask for more money, and we are. We’ve had the three highest deals in the NWSL this year at Gotham, and it’s because we’ve held very high standards for the last two years.

When we first walked in, brands were coming in trying to ride the wave of women’s sports popularity and trying to check that box. [They were] trying to say we’ll give you essentially what would cost a large brand legal paperwork. And we said no.

We held out for brands that really understand us and want to invest in us and want to grow with us.

So when you say deep partnership, you mean deep partnership.

Yeah, I mean financial partnership. But I also mean truly understanding what we need and what we need to grow and who our audience is. So really deep in every aspect.