Because Heineken, proud sponsor of the Women's Champions League, helped to create the first genderless sports data source where male and female football statistics are combined. Helping to fight biased male driven statistics from search engines throughout the internet.

Search engines take information from thousands of sites featuring player data. But many are separate gendered website windows feeding google. How many rank women and men together? Zero. So we needed to make one to help make these statistics more truthful.

Google, the most important search engine available, takes information from thousands of sites featuring player data. The problem is that these sites are not always reliable, because most of them don’t talk about women football, making the information available biased, always giving men with the top statistics over women and the ones that actually have real info about women, end up having separate gendered website windows feeding Google.

We decided to create the only place on the internet where male and female football statistics are combined. We partnered with the most cited football portal ever, Goal.com to take their separate data for men and women and merge it together, training search engines on a ranking that includes every champion, men or women. So google sees male and female players as one league. Which they are.

After sponsoring the male Champions League for 15 years, Heineken now sponsors the Women’s Champions League too. Heineken is on a mission to correct the gender stereotypes affecting the sport, having inadvertently perpetuated them by only sponsoring the male competition.

Heineken wanted to identify the most pertinent stereotypes that the brand could help solve. Fans judge who the best players are by looking at statistics - but there was a problem. We found that many Champions League statistics are wrong, because they only include men – and that Google had learned these biases.

Our campaign set out to correct them.

So, how do you teach Google new data? First we partnered with the most cited football portal ever, Goal.com to grab the data from their rankings for both men’s and women’s teams and merge it into one combined ranking that only considers the goals scored or trophies won, but never just gender. So Google starts seeing male and female players as they are. One league. And to show it to fans, wrong answers were targeted by Fresher Stats Adwords, and the initiative was launched with the help of a football legend. The player who won the only Champions League title for Arsenal, a woman, of course: Alex Scott.

People spent an average of 5 minutes on the page; Over 570 million PR impressions; 47% of the resulting conversations were generated by gen-z; Engagement of 50/50 between genders - something unprecedented on a Heineken campaign; and campaign sentiment was 99% positive.