“If you build it, they will come.” The line has become such a mainstream part of popular culture in this country, it’s almost cliché.
In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella hears a voice that utters those words, and it leads him to build a baseball field in an Iowa cornfield.
It is the line I think of as I watch major networks and other media outlets commit resources, talent, promotion, airtime, words, audio, video to their presentation of women’s sports.
Occasionally the resources and the resulting audience kind of sneak up on you. Such is the case with the UEFA 2025 Women’s Euros on Fox. The network committed a considerable amount of airtime on its linear over-the-air channel, which aired the final and all games from the quarterfinals forward plus a dozen group games. The rest aired on FS1.
Last week’s semifinals, England’s come-from-behind shootout win over Italy and Spain’s overtime win over Germany, drew a total of about 1.5 million viewers — almost triple the number of people who watched the women’s Euro 2022 semifinals, which aired on ESPN2.
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