The Business of Sport - Hannah Brown

Hannah Brown is the co-CEO of Women’s Sport for DAZN. With over 20 years of experience in finance, sports media, pay TV, corporate venture and business transformation, Hannah now has the task of developing DAZN’s investment in women’s football rights globally, into a significant business opportunity.

Together with Esmeralda Negron, she founded ata football, a streaming platform and community for women’s football fans. ata football was acquired by DAZN in 2023 and the pair now share joint CEO status of Women’s Sport at DAZN.

Hannah on DAZN: 

“DAZN is a really interesting platform because it has grown, solely in a digital environment. So when we think about how DAZN has got it’s products to market, it has done that through really one delivery system, it’s not had to worry about legacy technology or distribution platforms. 

It is wholly a digital business, which allows us to do a number of things. It allows us to turn up in all markets around the world simultaneously. There are big streaming challenges in order to do that, which DAZN has tested and met as an 8 year-old business. 

What “digital solely” platforms allow you to do, is, yes, turn up in lots of markets at the same time, but it also gives you lots of flexibility when you think about the business models. We want to be the global home of sport. We are doing that vertical by vertical. If you ask football fans outside the UK, we are already the home of football for them.”

 

Hannah on the DAZN FanZone:

“We run Fan Zone on a multitude of our properties, not just women's football and we are getting pretty decent engagement rates, around 20 to 30% of fans on premium sports events. But when we put it on women's football, that average goes up to 40% and when Barcelona played at Manchester City in the UWCL recently, that FanZone engagement went up to 60%. It was really encouraging to see big match-ups, big story-telling moments. A similar thing happened when Arsenal played Juventus and when big team take part, fans have got a lot to say.

The fans are very positive about that experience too because they are coming into an environment which is not aggressive, they are allowed to say what they want and negative chat in those groups is basically non-existent.

There’s a lot of fun in the FanZone with quizzes and polls, but we integrated that into the broadcast environment in a really serious way, with commentators talking about what the fans are saying, getting their feedback, voting for Player of the Match. So its really nice to be able to say you can get involved and have fun, but we are also going to take your views and perspectives seriously from a broadcast perspective. We have seen a lot of success with FanZone and I think we have only just got started.”

 

Hannah on the future of Women’s Sport:

I think from a sponsorship perspective, the uniqueness of women’s sport is definitely valuable. How do you get to an audience with a unique message and positioning.
I was a biologist back in the day at University and my analogy is that when men's football put it’s head out of the ecological pond from a commercial perspective in the 90’s, the content landscape was not cluttered and it was coming out as a big and strong fish. It had a big fandom and lots of people cared deeply about it and came out with a strategy to grow and prosper in the environment it found.

Women’s football put it’s head out of the ecological pond into a concrete landscape of content and competition, and that’s not just from men’s football, its from everything that people want to do with their weekends. The ease with which content is made available is so different now. So how does women’s football lean into what makes it unique and allows it to go and compete at the product level? Because I think the challenge you have is that if you are a music artist, you are either good or you’re not. People don’t buy a ticket for Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift, thinking they will be good in three years time….they buy because they are good now. So, Women’s Football can’t ask for forgiveness on fandom for a long time, it’s got to create a unique position in the market which then becomes valuable to a sponsor, with kit apparel or broadcast rights. For football, scale is critical. Running teams and rosters isn’t a cheap business and therefore everyone pushing that bar as high is possible is critical, because mediocrity is not going to win.”