This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: I mean, definitely it's a global trend where we're seeing football players like Messi land in Miami and you see all their social accounts grow because of the behemoth that he is on the digital space. But all the leagues are now driving the players and the players are, like you said, where young fans are drawn to.
We recently had a panel of money in sport, which was the battle for new fans. Other than doing the player focus, what are you doing to seek out new fans because you've got that traditional rugby base of people have grown up with the game and love the game, but how do you, what are some initiatives you're doing to attract your sons or younger kids or the gen, the younger fans that aren't tuning into a TV broadcast, those kinds of things.
What are some of the things you're doing to attract new fans.
Martin: Yeah, you're right. I think you mentioned TV broadcast there. And that's quite an age specific thing we found, right? It skews older, obviously. I think Gen Z and younger are watching sport. I mean, I know my kids love it and they're absolutely obsessed with sport.
Almost to the point where I'm having to get them to try and be involved in other things, because it's so pervasive here. The Premier League in England is very widely followed obviously. But as I say, that word pervasive, it is almost everywhere you look. There is something to do with football.
And so other sports within the UK market in this instance needs to almost work harder to try and get that shelf space to get the attention of those kids earlier and it's everything it's quite counterintuitive sometimes because it's physical. My kids are into cards, trading card games.
Rugby doesn't have a trading card game. We need to be in that space. It's all the way through to the movement of that for a digital collectible, again, rugby is not in that space from the one is. I'll gravitate towards that instead of rugby. But I think actually more broadly, and this is definitely seen within sports generally, it's actually women, women are not talked to in the right way, about sport and that's both women's sport, but also traditional men's sport and rugby, I think is moving.
in a much better direction than most on that. We are seeing more female attendance at games. We're seeing those numbers start to equalize. And we were talking 80 20 before, now it's starting to get more closer to parity. And that's so wide that the approach you need to take to generate a wider base that will come and support your teams, but also attend games, watch content on social, and then ultimately either watch it on linear or subscribe to one of your paid broadcasters, right?
That's a long journey. You've got to take care of your fan base at each stage of that. So what we set up is a women's leadership academy. Because we don't actually have a women's league yet. We want to try and look at that in the future. But we employ some Asian women, and they actually set up an academy to create more roles for women in sport.
And our view is if we keep doing that, and we start to really be influenced by that, then actually we're going to create great content for women from women. And so that's a really interesting process we've embarked on, which we're very proud of, but the women in our business have led that from start to finish and we just completed our first intake.
And yeah, it was really successful. So we'll carry on doing that and offering opportunities to women. In rugby and within the URC, to come in and sort of shake things up a bit.
