ISSUE 038: NWSL CMO Julie Haddon

The growth of NWSL's cultural impact and player-led initiatives

Author

Kyle from Pathway ⚽️
March 04, 2025

IN THIS ISSUE

  • 🤝 Introduction: NWSL is (almost) back!

  • 👨‍🎓 Soccer Thought Leader: Julie Haddon, NWSL

  • ⚽️ Soccer Jobs: The latest and greatest

  • 📰 Extra Extra: Oakland A’s inspired kits?

INTRODUCTION

Greetings, Pathwayers! 👋!

Let the good times roll, as they say. It’s hard to believe it’s already March, and we’re in for a bustling month of domestic and international soccer. The 2025 MLS campaign is now underway, and USL Championship, USL League One, and NWSL seasons will quickly follow within the next two weeks.

And let us not forget the first leg of the UEFA Champions League Round of 16 kicks off this week, too!

With all of this soccer on the mind, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a deeper dive into how the NWSL engages and draws in new audiences to put clubs on the front foot heading into the season.

We were thrilled to chat with the league’s Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, Julie Haddon, to learn more about her incredible career journey and how she’s applying her diverse experiences to growing the beautiful game.

And, as always, we’ve included links to the best and most interesting new jobs in soccer and links to this week’s must-read articles. Scroll down to check ‘em out.

-Kyle Sheldon, Co-Founder & CEO

SOCCER THOUGHT LEADER: JULIE HADDON, NWSL

“What I believe strongly is, as a marketer, you're marketing yourself when you're looking for a job.”

Over the last few years, I’ve followed with interest - and admired from afar - the impressive brand transformation taking place at the NWSL.

The League has been an absolute rocket ship of late with attendance, viewership, and sponsorship revenue all skyrocketing - and the NWSL’'s brand and marketing has been keeping pace with high-impact ad spots, beautiful design work, and dynamic social content.

That effort has been led by Julie Haddon, the Leagues’s Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer who has been in her role for nearly three years.

Julie has had a fascinating career working for the likes DreamWorks, eBay, PayPal, Twitter, and the NFL before joining the NWSL - and we were thrilled she gave us some time to talk about her soccer origin story, marketing women’s soccer, and how to break into working in soccer (among other things).

We know you’ll enjoy this one.

-Kyle Sheldon, Co-Founder & CEO

Questions and answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity (and any emphasis below is ours)

PATHWAY: We'd love to hear about your soccer origin story - what was that first connection to the sport and how has that developed over the course of your career?

JULIE: I am a lifelong sports fan. I grew up in Chicago, a diehard sports family. It was baseball for the most part that I grew up with. I went into trading cards where I was product manager early in my career for baseball, football, hockey, and soccer trading cards under the Score-Pinnacle brand. From there, I had a long career in tech, entertainment, and sports, and at the intersection of all those various industries from everywhere from NFL to eBay.

From doing all of that, the origin really started in 2019 when I was in Cannes for the NFL in France and the World Cup was happening. I was invited to go to a game to watch England play Japan - and I was absolutely surprised how few people were in the stands when the best in the world were playing. It was the moment in time that 1.2 billion people were watching on television. It was really perplexing to me why there were so few people in the stands when you have a country like England playing in Europe. It stuck in my head as something I wanted to fix.

I came back from that event a few months later, writing down in one of my notebooks about how I felt really compelled to make the world a better place for women through sports and how we have to bring people together around this game. It really is such an incredibly mesmerizing, fast-paced, exceptional product that's on the pitch and in our league - and why not enough people were going to the games played by women when there are so many soccer fans. That became a bit of an obsession.

PATHWAY: How do you balance promoting and leveraging player brands and identities versus the league or its clubs as the NWSL continues to grow on a global scale? You want fans of all of the above, of course, but how do you and your team approach that balance across the work that you do?

JULIE: We're a very player-first league. At the end of the day, the storytelling that comes from this league, we have a very engaged group of players that do like to have direct connectivity with their fans. You see it at the games, you see how the players stick around and want to spend a lot of time celebrating and thanking their fans for their support. We do things that are player-initiative led at the league. 

The clubs do a lot, and then players do a lot of their own initiatives and we help amplify it. It's this nice virtuous circle where players at the end of the day are just connecting with their fans and we build new fan bases together.

PATHWAY: The NWSL has seen incredible, explosive growth the last few years. From a marketing perspective, fan base growth is a big driver of all business metrics, but what do you look at most closely to assess the impact the work you and your team are doing?

JULIE: We look at a lot of KPIs to give us a sense of how we're performing. There's revenue, which is about how ticketing growth and attendance performs. There are ratings and viewership, which gives us a sense of how we're growing with watchability and engagement. 

And then the third part that we look at a lot as marketers are all the more marketing-specific metrics on things like organic growth through social follower base reach. I think from a commercial standpoint, the growth of our partners, attendance, and sponsorships, that's the macro ecosystem. 

Then, within the micro metrics as a marketing team, we look at everything from sentiment, reach, engagement, social growth, and efficacy of our programs. We have probably over 30 different metrics we monitor at the league and inside my org across marketing, monetization and media.

PATHWAY: Given your experience across tech and entertainment, with stops at DreamWorks, eBay, PayPal, NFL, etc., what continues to motivate you and what do you find the most joy in at this stage of your career?

JULIE: I think the most joy is to be able to see the impact you're making. Early in my career when I would be at a toy store or at a place like Target and see trading cards that I wrote the backs of - or had developed in product - in people's hands later in my career, or going to see people lining up to see the movie Shrek and knowing that I was part of creating that. 

Even when you look at what Twitter was when I was part of the early team at Twitter, we had probably 800,000-900,000 people using it and that was before any celebrities and big brands were on it. Being able to see what it has become and continue to grow as a tool for commerce, communication, news, content, and connectivity, and it's a really exceptional feeling to know that you could have a piece in shaping culture and building things that people love.

I think the part that gives me the most joy right now is being able to put a great product in the world that people can enjoy - and it’s working with incredible colleagues that are all part of this same goal. It’s that the NWSL is the most entertaining, fastest-growing sport league, which is the best sport in the world.

PATHWAY: You talked about the impact on culture, so as you think more broadly about cultural trends like food, fashion, technology, music, travel, etc., is there anything you're keeping your eye on as you think about the next phase of growth for NWSL?

JULIE: It's a really good question. Without giving too much away, a lot of this work is tapping into culture. A lot of what we've seen is that we have a very avid and incredible core fan base. 

As we grow, how do we get beyond the core to bring in new audiences? We have a lot of young fans, we have a lot of male-female split, and we've got a lot of people that are fans globally that are engaging with our overseas streams to be able to watch the league and the players that make their home inside this league from all over the world. 

I think the most important thing is how we really lean into our players, our influencers, and from every niche from fashion and fitness to health and wellness and parenting. There's a lot and many more. Gaming is another area of focus. There are a lot of vertical areas of interest that our players really can bring in a new audience, and we bring new audiences to them.

PATHWAY: If you could offer one tactical piece of advice to someone who wants to build their career in soccer, what would you suggest?

JULIE: I can't give somebody career advice on how to become a midfielder or a defender [laughs]. I'm not a coach, but I do feel like a coach of teams of marketing people because that's my organization and commercial that I look after. 

What I believe strongly is as a marketer, you're marketing yourself when you're looking for a job. If you're looking to get into this, how do you show up and how do you think about presenting and chasing and building an opportunity for your career? It's almost a campaign. 

When I interview people, I say, “Why do you want to work here?” And they’ll say, “Because I love soccer.” That's sort of assumed, right? You imagine people would want to come work inside a league - if they don't like soccer they're not going to be applying for a role inside that sport or inside a league.

I would challenge people to take it a step further and think about your marketing campaign. What's the unique proposition that you would bring? I do X, Y, or Z better than anybody. I develop X, Y, or Z better than anybody. I create and implement X, Y, or Z better than anybody. 

My advice is to chase something you're passionate about. What we don't realize now is that it's so much easier to just click on a link and have your competition be seen on a resume with hundreds to thousands of others because it's so easy to apply. 

You've got to find creative ways to stand out. Is it learning about somebody's career and finding them on social media and finding time to have coffee? Is it going up to somebody at a conference? Is it sending a pitch letter about ideas that you have for their company? 

There are ways to get in, but you really have to control your destiny to make it happen because you have to chase it like it's the last bus of the night. That's how I believe the strongest way is to go and get the most you can and bring things to hiring managers that could help improve their work and their challenges much more than telling them about what you love.

Thanks to Julie for taking the time to chat with us. You can connect with her on LinkedIn - and be sure to catch the opening slate of the NWSL season on Friday, March 14 at 8:00pm ET on NWSL+ and Amazon Prime.

Julie, second from the right, with some of her NWSL colleagues (via x.com/julietweets)

NEW SOCCER JOBS

If you want to work in soccer, you’ve got to keep your eyes open - new jobs are getting posted every week so we like to pull a few of those that caught our attention. Take a look!

ICYMI: MUST-READ ARTICLES

📰 Extra! Extra! 

We’ve got the latest soccer news you need to read to stay up to speed (that rhymed nicely, didn’t it?):

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