OOH and women’s football: a perfect match

As England’s Lionesses prepare to defend their crown in the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025, there is little doubt the sport is on a roll.

I’ve witnessed the momentum for myself at Stanford Bridge watching Chelsea, current Women’s Super League champions. News stories tell the story too:

• Last month Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian purchased a £20m stake in Chelsea Women. “I’ve bet big on women’s sports before – and I’m doing it again,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
• Arsenal Women broke the WSL Super League attendance record last year drawing in over 60,000 fans for their 3-1 victory over Manchester Utd at the Emirates Stadium. Through the 2023-2024 season, Arsenal’s average attendance at almost 35k was higher than that of 10 Premier League teams, and they finished this season by winning the Women's Champions League.
• Everton Women are set to make the iconic 133-year-old Goodison Park their new home as Everton’s men vacate the first major football venue ever built in England.

With its commercial value projected to grow sixfold by 2033, what role can OOH play in the advertising opportunities around the game in the UK? With England and Wales competing in the Women's Euro, there’s surely a compelling case for OOH to play a strategic role.

What makes this audience unique is their mindset when it comes to brands. Unlike traditional sports fans, women’s football supporters actively expect sponsors to drive the sport’s growth and step up. Recent research shows that 70% of women’s football fans believe sponsors help boost visibility (vs 63% for men’s football) and 68% think they help reach new audiences (vs 61% for men’s). They expect active collaboration from brands.

That means that your OOH campaigns aren’t just advertising to an audience, but they’re also fulfilling a strategic role they literally want you to play. OOH as always delivers strongly on reach. Football fan audiences collectively seeing OOH ads over 3 billion times weekly across GB through fixed inventory (not including buses, taxis, and carriage interiors), which is nearly 40% of total GB adult exposure according to Q1 2025 Route data… with a twist.

OOH planning using Route data has become even more precise with new profiling variables thanks to our new data fusion with Kantar’s TGI consumer survey. This fusion now enables planners to target over 350 unique audiences, including football fans.

Looking through a regional lens, in Wales, 4,697 OOH frames deliver a total of 38 million weekly impacts for football fans. Almost half of those impacts are from roadside inventory. Narrowing it down to the great DOOH, 411 digital screens in Wales deliver 2.4 million weekly impacts, 530k coming from roadside, and 485k coming from inside shopping centres. Cardiff St Davids Shopping Centre (which I visited last year) is a prime spot for DOOH advertising.                                

In London, alongside roadside, it’s the Underground station environments that dominate. A quarter of all weekly impacts among football fans come from London Underground inventory. And in Yorkshire, the home of all-time WSL assists legend Beth Mead, OOH frames generate over 115 million impacts, with around 10% of them digital.

Check out the dashboard below to explore regional impacts for football fans yourself.

Here is where multi-source intelligence in OOH planning can really pay off. IPA’s Touchpoints data points out that OOH and TV deliver audiences in perfectly complementary ways, with OOH delivering constantly through the day, acting as a primer ahead of commercial TV’s evening peak.

After 3:30pm, as people move from desks to doorsteps, OOH peaks. At around 5pm, it converges with commercial TV reach, as viewership starts to peak. This can create a primer effect, where OOH catches this broad audience during their mental transition from work to home. This will particularly be relevant in GB when England Women’s and Wales Women’s face each other on 13 July at 8pm local time, right as TV reach hits over 20% of women, audiences will have been ready for it and primed by their OOH journey home or to the pub.

OOH and TV reach through the day

Whether planners are targeting National Lottery players or rock music listeners, the Route-TGI fusion, coupled with IPA Touchpoints data, lets planners target OOH with a new kind of precision. With women’s football, you’re not just buying reach, but you are also showcasing your brand to an increasingly engaged audience that wants you there.

Women's football offers something rare in today's saturated sports market: established infrastructure with a large potential for growth, and fans who want brand collaboration and commercial and financial growth for the sport. The WSL’s growing popularity, along with an audience that expects brands to be growth partners, those that step up now, using OOH’s strong reach, can make a lasting impression. With the Women’s Euros just around the corner, brands wouldn’t be just reaching an audience, they would be backing a movement that fans will remember. 

Thanks to Simon Frazier for his support and provision of Touchpoints data used in this piece. Check out the latest Touchpoints data in more detail. Route data is from R54, a week in July, with a 10 second spot and 50 second break schedule.

Eda Incekara is Marketing and Insight Manager at Route Research.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.