When it comes to football, influence is everything and the players are gods, wielding power that reaches far beyond the field. They are part of global culture. They fill our feeds. They are our phone backgrounds, on our walls. They are part of global culture. For the male players that is…

In a world where audience equals revenue, there’s 1 big question: why is FIFA Women's World Cup getting less than 10% of the audience of men’s channels? Since a third of all fans interested in men’s football are also interested in women’s football,* We were tasked to grow the social audience, and create new commercial opportunities for FIFA through world-class social and influencer content, campaigns to win legions of new fans - and engage a fair share of the audience.

We love football because of the high drama and passionate approach to the game. When it comes to the players, society is used to consuming content portraying them as top level athletes, rival kings of the sport leading their 11-strong armies onto the pitch, artists staging high stakes dramatic events that are highly engaging to the crowds.

Timeless hero stories are truly the foundation of FIFA’s portrayal of male players… when women’s football sometimes gets gender stereotypical.

Women’s football lacks drama, rivalry and heroism. The storytelling often suggests a sweet, naive and non-competitive sport, making it harder to elicit passion and excitement of the game.

However, all is not lost. Football’s fandom creation doesn’t need reinventing based on gender. Those heroes exist, they just need a platform and megaphone to tell their stories.

Enter FIFA Women’s World Cup.

We embarked on a cultural change for Womens Football. We wanted to transform the football feeds into a place where future stars of the sport could be inspired by players like them, and give the players the recognition they deserve - not just for the stars but the pioneers that fought to set the ball rolling.

The feed lacked drama and passion. How to change this? Through the lens of the players themselves. We gave the players a voice, giving them a place to tell the stories of effort, rivalries, achievement, and redemption. We didn’t want gender to get in the way, and as a rule of thumb we only publish content that would feel right for any established football feed.

Our social content was peppered with bigger campaigns that highlighted important events in Womens’ World Cup history - told from the perspective of those that created history.

Our goal was to make FIFA’s social channels the number one destination for fan engagement. Focusing on the transformative power of icons, we embarked on a mission to make the female stars even bigger than those in the men’s game. Our audience? Football fans everywhere - lovers of the beautiful game.

We transformed the feeds, creating social content series that showed the sport like never before - highlighting the global players that fans would never usually have access to.

We highlighted important moments in the Women’s World Cup calendar, from IWD to the 30th Anniversary celebrations, as well as keeping fans engaged between moments with content series that focused on countries and players not normally in the limelight.

The social feeds transitioned from stereotypical storytelling and clichéd posts to a feed that any football brand would be proud to own.

We’ve transformed the conversation. We’ve started something, and it's working! With every campaign we have reached millions more fans, and tripled the engagement reach on the FIFA Women's feeds - shattering the stereotypes. Over the course of the year, we reached 206M fans, created 505k new fans, and got 33.2M TY views - an increase of 166%. We grew content reach by 174% on IG. And finally, we doubled the engagement rate of all FIFA Womens’ content at 3.33% vs 1.28%