Culture
Women’s football chief says WSL YouTube switch will grow the game’s reach
Nikki Doucet, the CEO of the English women’s professional game, says moving the Women’s Super League (WSL) and Championship’s streaming platform to YouTube will grow the game’s reach.
Doucet also confirmed there is a “long-term” timeframe to pay back the £20million ($25.2m) loan provided by the Premier League to Women’s Professional Leagues Limited (WPLL, previously NewCo), and said her job was to find more owners like London City Lionesses’s Michele Kang to invest in clubs and drive revenue.
The WSL and Championship’s YouTube channels have replaced the FA Player as the divisions’s primary streaming service for the 2024-25 season, with all non-televised WSL matches and select Championship games available to view globally on the platform.
The WSL’s broadcast deal was set to expire at the end of last season and in April this was extended for a further year by the BBC and Sky Sports. Doucet said the move to YouTube can help make the case for the value of both leagues when the media rights go out to tender again next year.
“When we are going to market, we are including both the WSL and the Championship (broadcast rights),” Doucet said.
“We had 55,000 people watch the (London City Lionesses vs Newcastle United) game (on YouTube on Sunday). When you think about that vs the FA Player. I think the most on the FA Player last year ever was 4,500.
“So our job right now is to make sure we’re getting as much reach, that we’re bringing up the Championship in the right way, that we’re focused on it. So there is careful consideration from a marketing and commercial perspective, on what we can do for the Championship.
“The more value we can extract there, the better for everybody and the WSL. The more reach we can do with the Championship, bringing them on YouTube, bringing more people in, telling more stories, using our channels in the right way.
“We’re investing in the YouTube channel to make sure we’re getting views and we can point to that in the right way. And over time, we’re building that up to have more data to be able to show these are the views, this is the engagement, this is the audience, this is the reach. And then we have the ability to go back to market and see again where we can maximise value on those points.
“Our media rights are up for 25-26, and we’ll be looking at both properties.”
Doucet was appointed WPLL CEO in November (The Football Association – Women’s Pro Game/Nina Farooqi)
The Football Association’s (FA) outgoing director of women’s football Baroness Sue Campbell said last year the governing body was exploring whether the women’s game could be exempt from the 3pm television blackout to help attract a regular audience.
Under Article 48 of UEFA’s statutes, the FA prevents games from being broadcast between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on Saturdays in the UK to protect stadium attendances. Doucet added while they had explored potential changes to the 3pm blackout, “at the moment it is not an option”.
GO DEEPER
WSL deserves a dedicated TV slot – should it be exempt from the 3pm blackout?
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters told a government committee in January that Premier League clubs had agreed a loan to WPLL. This was for £20million ($25.2m) and was expected to be interest-free and only repayable when it reaches £100m in annual revenue.
“Based on the size of the business, that’s the right amount of capital today,” Doucet explained. “It is a loan. We do have to pay it back at some point.
“It’s a long term loan on favourable terms. It’s interest free, which is super positive, and it comes with that cooperation agreement. So we have to meet either certain revenue thresholds to pay it off, or there’s a time frame, but it’s a longer term time frame to enable us to have space to grow.”
On the topic of raising revenue and attracting investors, Doucet emphasised the importance of long-term vision and highlighted the example of U.S. businesswoman Kang following her takeover of London City Lionesses in December.
The Washington Spirit and Lyon Feminin owner’s investment resulted in a busy summer window for the Championship side, with signings including Sweden international Kosovare Asllani and young forward Isobel Goodwin from Sheffield United. The club has also purchased and is in the process of renovating a new training facility.
“To invest in the women’s game today, based on where we are in the phase of maturity of the business, is a different type of capital and risk profile than investing in the men’s game today,” Doucet added.
“We have to find the investors over here that believe in the concept of community purpose, of a growth story that is built on business metrics going forward but has the ability to invest ahead of revenue. Our biggest challenge is a revenue challenge, not necessarily a cost challenge.
“To be a professional club, to provide the right infrastructure, costs money. That’s someone like a Michelle Kang or some of the bigger clubs right now, their owners are investing, they believe in that future. They’re like: we understand that this is a ten year journey. This isn’t like a two or three year immediate return.
“And our job right now is to maximise value at each point of the growth journey. The market will dictate what we can extract and what we can maximise from a value perspective. And our job is to obsess that every single day.”
GO DEEPER
Kang, London City Lionesses and the promise and pitfalls of an intriguing project
(Tom Dulat/Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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