women's sports have become a capitalist boondoggle project to give cover to the darkest shit you can imagine
by Zoë Hayden
Note: This essay draws heavily on ideas that I wrote about and edited pieces about over the years at my now-discontinued women’s sports news website, the Victory Press. Links to the articles that expand on these ideas are included throughout the piece.
Women's sports in North America are, as we all know, having a moment.
Revenue is exploding. Media companies have realized that the demand for women's sports broadcasting and content is there, and that providing visibility and coverage is a no-brainer. There's now a clear blueprint to look to for pro women's sports success: get a unified vision with the best players and staff you can muster, and invest money into it. People will flock to it. Even when it isn't executed perfectly. North American audiences are hungry for pro women's sports, and the upside is enormous. It was always obvious that the only thing standing between women's sports and success was money and resources. The deck has been stacked for over a hundred years.
I've written before that for women's sports to succeed, men's sports would have to start giving up space. Little by little they have – or at least, started sharing space more graciously – but not in the way that I thought. During the height of COVID lockdown, I genuinely believed that we had the potential to fall hard into a global economic depression that would radically re-frame the way that we consumed sports entertainment. In reality, the shifts have not played out that way. The "economic depression" has mostly served to create an even bigger discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy (like sports owners and investors) and regular people (like most pro women's sports athletes and fans). And the women's sports conversation has happened more context of the "culture wars" than actual labor and materialism – despite the fact that the two are, and always have been, intimately related.
If sports during the pandemic taught us anything, it was that nothing – not even mass death – would stop the professional sports industry, or really any industry that can insulate its product from the ravages of late-stage corporate capitalism. The quality of so many things has suffered and waned and fallen in the last few years (furniture, clothing, news media, groceries, search engine results), but good sports competition is something that is very hard to fake. People who love sports and love being sports fans have no qualms about criticizing the product when it's bad. Good sports are always worth paying attention to, when given the visibility required to reach an audience.
And women's sports finally have that visibility, at what feels like a potential flashpoint moment in human history. So: why does it feel so hollow? Why does it feel like something to be deeply cautious of? To keep at arm's length?
There are a lot of clues. I've written about it before, and often, in a more general cultural sense. Women's sports have often positioned themselves alongside men's sports, trying to make themselves as similarly consumable as possible – whether by mimicking the faux-apolitical nationalism of their men's counterparts, or by just generally eliding material clarity of purpose beyond "women's empowerment."
The flattening of the women's sports movement was predictable under the capitalist conditions as they were at the beginning of the 21st century. You can only survive through marketing, and the best way to capture an audience of consumers was always to be as inoffensive and broadly appealing as possible. (Think: until very recently, WNBA prospects were expected to wear business suits to their entry draft, as a gesture towards respectability. Public health became such a controversial issue around sports during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, because public health measures which kept people safe also cut into profits and animated anxiety among the public.)
The perceived fragility of women's sports also played into this – we were always meant to believe that they would be better, if they could, when they could, as soon as they got their foot in the door, as soon as they had proven that they belonged. When conditions were finally created by capital to elevate women's sports to the level of success and visibility that we see now, in 2024, it became apparent that the process of "proving" was an artificially created obstacle course. But it was mutually convenient for both capital and for women's sports ownership who (perhaps rightly) don't see pro women's sports as activism, but as a product.
The rules of engagement have also changed. Capitalism is more entrenched than ever, but it is staring down crises like climate change and the global rise of right-wing nationalism, which it is not prepared to meaningfully address. Appealing to the lowest common denominator doesn't work quite the same anymore. According to capital, consumers demand an endless level of personalization and segmentation. Everything must be as customizable as possible without allowing people to engage with those things closest to their hearts — their values — because including an actual material value system as part of this dialectic would give the whole game away. The illusion that has to be maintained is that we have no choices, except those that are presented to us in the marketplace. This is just how things are. Because if anyone had a choice, who would choose this?
By this, I mean: a world where anything that brings us joy or entertainment or engagement with one another exists only because of the exploitation and subjugation of others. Our pleasure is literally constructed on top of others' death and suffering.
This leads me to perhaps the most obvious clue of them all: a NEOM-sponsored analysis of women's sports market growth, released this July by Sports Business, an industry analysis firm.
NEOM, of course, is a Saudi Arabian project to astroturf a futuristic urban area in the Tabuk province which includes a fully indoor desert city called The Line. The project involves the "relocation" by force of perhaps 20,000 local Howeitat inhabitants, several of whom have been killed.
And NEOM is inspiring ideologically adjacent projects. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu announced that part of his plan for a fully colonized Gaza was to create a similarly astroturfed urban area that is connected to The Line by high-speed rail, giving Saudi Arabia a more direct link with the Mediterranean Sea. And if you know anything about the ongoing situation in Gaza, you know that Netenyahu's plan is a slick marketing campaign unabashedly being promoted atop the mutilated corpses of Palestinian civilians, many of them small children, and brazen land theft. It is something that could only happen after the wholesale genocide of Palestine has been completed in broad daylight, as the entire geopolitical power structure on this planet is aggressively committed to enabling.
You may have heard other rumblings recently about how part of the Saudi project is sportswashing, particularly with regards to women, who have fewer legal rights in Saudi Arabia than most other places on Earth. The WWE recently held an event in Saudi Arabia which involved their women wrestlers, who were photographed on social media drinking cocktails poolside at a resort, an activity that most Saudi women cannot enjoy.
The WWE entered into a strategic partnership with the Saudi Ministry of Sport in 2014 — meaning that the government of Saudi Arabia literally invests in World Wrestling Entertainment, LLC. While in recent years, restrictions have relaxed for women in terms of what they are allowed to do without permission from a male family member, the cultural reality is still not so permissive and it is likely that Saudi women would face repercussions for similar activities. The WWE's relationship with Saudi Arabia is specifically designed to deflect concerns about this sort of thing, and by proxy, many other concerns that regular people might have about Saudi Arabia. Such as: their absolute monarchy, or the government's ownership of oil behemoth Saudi Aramco, the company which has contributed the most to global carbon emissions since 1965.
So, when NEOM sponsors a glossy sports business "report" which extols the benefits of an "active society" that includes girls and women among its sportspeople, what's most interesting is what it does not explain about itself. The generic feminism in its introduction tells you pretty much all you need to know not just about the goals of this document, but the goals of women's sports business writ large. We are meant to see "equal opportunity for women and girls" as a net positive, even when presented as a rhetorical shield in front of mass ethnic cleansing and human rights violations:
For NEOM Sport, we are thrilled to be a part of this journey. Our vision is to become an innovative hub for sport, a tool for a new liveability and a dynamic contributor to the economy. Aligned with the industry as a whole, our aim is to create a more inclusive and empowering environment for women in sport, regardless of their background or circumstance, and both on and off the field of play. We are committed to building a future where women have equal opportunities to compete, succeed, and inspire generations to come. We aim to break down barriers and push boundaries by using women’s voices to inspire others.
This is an extreme example, but it's instructive. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Women's sports wouldn't be an acceptable cover for horrors such as this if they weren't already structurally primed for it. Could they have succeeded in the first place if they posed any threat to the natural flow of capital? The "culture wars" folks might posit that they have very cleverly evaded detection, that “woke capitalism” is trying to indoctrinate children into being trans or teaching critical race theory, or whatever Nazi bullshit they're hammering on any given day. (The fascists who have awareness of their materialist goals of course see this as a harbinger of socialism or communism or anarchism or really any human sociopolitical state that isn't based wholly on hierarchical subjugation, though it isn't necessary to know this to further their goals — the "culture war" gets the job done in the streets.)
Nevertheless, extremism that focuses on identity politics will always have its limits. By nature, it cannot encompass or engender broader political or economic philosophies, because it requires an obfuscation or even elimination of materialist concepts in order to make sense. The way we see identity in our society is rooted in historical materialism, despite any insistence to the contrary. Our race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class identity all stem from what we have historically had and needed, and what those who share our identities have had and needed. The resources we have, the rights we have and expect to have, and our social or political status all coalesce around our bodies and our wants and needs and feelings about ourselves to form our identities. They are in constant dialogue with each other, and the more you listen, the more you realize that everyone has the same basic right to dignity.
Or you ought to. Or you would, if we were not pitted against each other in a race to the bottom, animated by the illusion that in order to live, we need to make sure someone else dies. Extremist identity politics are rooted in this concept, and they require us to make aesthetic determinations about how to divide people. By aesthetic, I mean non-material — I mean rooted in appearance rather than substantive quality.
The women's sports business project has, to me, always felt like a purely aesthetic movement, and thus was never really in a position to execute true material change. There are elements of it and participants in it who are fighting for a better future and for those with marginalized identities to have more agency and visibility and dignity. But the movement itself, as we currently understand it, is not founded on those principles, because it is asserting itself as an agent of capital. Capital has subsumed all expressions of power and capital controls the vast majority of material resources in our society, so this is not necessarily a mistake. The shortsightedness of the project is exposed by how its aesthetics are so easily co-opted into cover for human suffering. Would it be so easy to use women's sports as a cover for war crimes if they weren't already being used, in some cases quite willingly, as cover for organizations that call for the extermination of trans people under the guise of "protecting spaces for women and girls"? Would it be so easy to conduct sportswashing in general if sports business hadn't been built on a historical foundation of race science, misogyny, and arbitrary segregation?
By operating primarily as an agent of capital, the aesthetic trappings of the women's sports movement become wholly secondary and in fact incidental to its material effect. We talk a lot about the gains we might be making in terms of representation: "if she can see it, she can be it"; racial and ethnic diversity; LGBTQIA acceptance. And they are inherently risky. Women's sports does engage these things at their peril, because the other side of the "culture war" has a vested interest in stopping them. The unfortunate reality is that the right wing is more attuned to the needs of capital, because capital requires winners and losers, and they need women and queer people and people of color to be the losers. Or, if they can't be the losers, to be complacent and functional so that resources can be extracted from them.
The identity politics of the women's sports movement positions itself in an untenable middle ground because it cannot be a radical change-maker without backing itself against a similarly radical material philosophy. And that's the rub. That's the limit. These two things will be in tension, and there are very few ways out. Either women's sports willingly adopts a revolutionary framework — which is unlikely, since its existence in its current form depends on its status as an agent of capital — or the identities that women's sports might seek to include and elevate must be likewise flattened into agents of capital.
This is why Caitlin Clark's face, through no fault of her own, is on the cover of the Sports Business Insights report and next to NEOM’s logo. The report contains language and stories that are specifically designed to appeal to the investor class: talk of Olympic gold medals, "inspiring future generations", increasing prize money due to new sponsorships, and how to leverage social media to attract new and younger audiences.
But the industry, even with its focus on aesthetic inclusiveness and posturing, still has issues in that sphere to grapple with. Sports writ large has been consistently willing to throw transgender people under the bus, much like they were willing to throw queer people and women more broadly under the bus, until cisgender women and cis queer people were somewhat successfully integrated into the broader consumer class. (The path to trans rights in this framework is not robust protections for their freedom and personhood, but their absorption into a class that has purchasing power.) Racism continues to hold an extraordinary amount of purchase in sports-centric spaces, since our modern sociopolitical economy is only removed from expansionist colonialism and chattel slavery by a few thin layers of bureaucratic subterfuge.
Our rights in this space are solely determined by our status as consumers, and our consumer purchasing power, as inadequate as it is to give us a satisfactory and dignified existence, was not surrendered to us lightly. I think that's the darkest aspect of the whole equation: that somewhere along the line, not only did capitalism replace our notion of humanity with consumer purchasing power and proceed to carve out as many vectors of extraction as possible from us, but that the difference has not been brought to the fore or meaningfully challenged by our mass media or our cultural institutions.
The bargain was struck before we were born and our descent into this madness has been widely unremarked upon in any explicit sense. Capital excels at manufacturing consent with its products, whether with convenience, pleasure, or security — the convenience of a plastic bottle, the pleasure of watching live Olympic women's sports in high definition from the comfort of our own homes, the security of knowing that no one is about to walk into your home and take these things from you because you have an alarm and surveillance system on your front door.
Arguably, though, we have reached "peak product" and this frontier has ended. The product demands more from its users. Capitalism is desperately trying to figure out ways to give us further convenience, further personalization, further specialization, to drive us towards further purchasing and further extraction. The endgame isn't that we have a kinder, more inclusive sporting culture that inspires people of multiple identities to take up a soccer ball or hockey stick or cricket bat, to try powerlifting or skiing. As sports lovers, that's what we want, of course. But the industry, the project, is being conducted globally and at a macro level with the ultimate goal of integrating women's sports successfully into capitalism and the power structures that enable it. This is not being done to uplift marginalized people in sport or in society. It's being done to diversify a sports entertainment product portfolio, as the current conditions demand, and really, at a basic level, to manufacture further consent.
So as women's sports grows in profile without meaningfully altering its political economy, the less I am impressed with what the movement can offer. Before the exponential growth in popularity and before the investor class recognized the capital opportunities, it wouldn't have been trivial to insulate the movement against the baser instincts of this death machine. But it might have been possible. There was (and may still be) a distant and possible future, where sports can be vectors for social reproduction and togetherness without constantly feeding the death machine and manufacturing consent for the same. But it does require a material clarity of purpose that focuses on our shared humanity, and doesn't trade the facsimile of that humanity in aesthetic representation for the manufactured consent to displacement and subjugation of others.
I don't want to think of women's sports this way, as a boondoggle project for corporate capitalism which is quite successfully distracting many of us from what the investor class is doing to the planet and to marginalized populations. I do not think they were always on this trajectory. My mistake was thinking that they would or could intentionally place themselves on a separate and revolutionary path that would mitigate their complacency and culpability. That they could back up the idea of diverse representation with material conditions and efforts that nod even vaguely at the reality of our shared humanity before figuring out how to package and reduce the most beautiful parts of it into a marketing pitch.
The complicity will continue until the women's sports movement develops a will to work against the current functions of capital, and I honestly don't know if that's going to happen. I bring this up not to condemn the women's sports movement in general, but to try to illustrate the inadequacy of diversity and representation to meet this moment. The macro effects are that nation states are using women's sports and their associated identity politics to manufacture consent for destructive and genocidal projects. On a smaller scale, this lack of material attention is, to name one example, why the NWSL can't go any significant period of time without a workplace abuse scandal. It’s dangerous to all of us, at every level. It is not what we want it to be.
The edifice isn't constructed based on a desire to foster dignity for its component parts — its workers, its fans, its communities. It's built to plug into a hole at the bottom of the massive Jenga structure that is capital — to turn more of us into consumers, in the hopes that we will accept that status in exchange for complicity in what capital is doing to us all. I think it's necessary to look at women's sports through that lens in order to understand its limitations, as well as what it could become if it stopped being willing to fill that role.