According to the report ‘The visibility of women’s sport in the media’ by Apple Tree
Alexia Putellas enters the Top 10 of the most influential athletes in the world
MADRID, 1 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The gap in media coverage of women’s sports competitions compared to men’s has been reduced during 2022 in Spain to reach 22%, which represents an increase of 8 percentage points compared to last year (14%), according to the second edition of the study ‘The visibility of women’s sport in the media’.
The strategic communication agency Apple Tree, in collaboration with Rebold, analyzed 18,650 news from digital and print media and the audience of male and female sports competitions for this research.
“Although we are still far from reaching an equitable level, this considerable improvement in the percentage of news that is published in the media about women’s sports is a symptom of the greater interest it generates among audiences, especially the youngest ones. and the greater support of brands and companies, which is leading to a greater professionalization of sports such as women’s football”, said Carme Miró, CEO and founder of the strategic communication agency, during the presentation.
In addition, this report has analyzed the television audiences of some of the most representative sports competitions (soccer, basketball and tennis) in 2022. This analysis shows the difficulties that women’s soccer still has to attract the attention of the public. television audience. However, in other sports such as basketball, this gap between men’s and women’s competitions is much smaller.
“We see how as the competitions have been professionalized for longer, there is less gap both in news coverage and in television monitoring. This trend makes us predict a very promising future for La Liga F, which was born last year and is already beginning to establish itself in the media landscape,'” said Alfredo Orte, Rebold’s Media Intelligence Manager.
At the national level, in Spain the figure of Alexia Putellas stands out, double winner of the Ballon d’Or and also recently recognized with her second The Best, who has become the most influential Spanish athlete worldwide. According to this research, the FC Barcelona player is ranked number 10 among the athletes with the most followers on social networks (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram).
However, and despite her achievements, the soccer player is a clear example of the inequality of women’s sport in the media, something that was evident during the Ballon d’Or ceremony in which the soccer player Karim Benzema was also awarded. The Catalan only obtained 17% news coverage compared to Benzema’s 65%, the rest (18%) included both equally.
The same differences are replicated in social networks as in the media. Thus, the female athlete with the most followers on social networks worldwide is the tennis player Sania Mirza with 36.3 million followers, a figure that is far behind the 816.3 million of Cristiano Ronaldo, the athlete with the most followers on everyone.