Chicago Red Stars target attendance record with Wrigley Field game, and lead fight for public funding

The Chicago Red Stars and Bay FC will meet at Wrigley Field on Saturday in a historic clash. It is the first women’s soccer event to be held at the historic major league baseball stadium and could be a stepping stone for future unique events in the NWSL.

Ticket sales have been positive and record attendance is expected for the event. The NWSL recently set an attendance record of 34,130 during the 2023 season, when Seattle Reign FC held a commemorative game for Megan Rapinoe. Wrigley Field seats around 41,000 people, creating a can’t-miss event to kick off the summer.

Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming match:

Viewing information

• Date: Saturday, June 7 Time: 7:30 p.m. ET
• Location: Wrigley Field – Chicago, IL.
• TELEVISION: ion

How an idea became reality

The Chicago Red Stars are navigating their first season under new ownership, a mostly female investment collective led by Chicago Cubs co-owner and minority investor Laura Ricketts.

Ricketts, who is also a minority investor in the Chicago Sky, immediately set out to implement changes ahead of the Red Stars’ 2024 season, the first was to ensure it was introduced to the players to build trust, the next was to make signings to support the club moving forward. Club president Karen Leetzow, head coach Lorne Donaldson and general manager Rick Feuz have been added to lead the Red Stars in 2024 and beyond.

The connection between the Red Stars and Cubs is now on, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a Wrigley Field game would happen in the first year of new ownership. The effort to change the date and location of the match was made with club, league and NWSL Players Association cooperation, and the response since the announcement has been met with enthusiasm.

“We hope it’s a realization for this team that we can in fact, and do have, tens of thousands of fans in the city who simply can’t get out. [to Bridgeview] regularly to see us,” Leetzow said.

“It’s a testament to the league that when we’re not selling tickets, it’s in part because of how difficult our location is for our young urban fans who work and it’s a $30 Uber ride and a $30 Uber ride. 30 back and that seems unaffordable on top of the ticket prices.”

The Red Stars currently play at SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview, IL – a facility they have never been the primary tenant of – and the new ownership group is looking for unique ways to show that the attendance metric for Chicago women’s soccer exists. Previous partner events have taken place alongside Chicago Fire FC in doubleheaders where attendance is measured across two games.

This time, when thousands of people are in the stands at Wrigley, it will undeniably be for women’s soccer.

“And it’s proof to the players that they have a lot of support in the city. It’s also a brand-building exercise… there’s a whole population of people who haven’t been exposed to our sport. It’s much more than a game. It really is proof that we deserve to be here. We deserve to invest. We really, really want people to come out, not just to have fun, but to show their support for women. sports. And if we can do that, it will be a successful day.”

A new frontier for women’s sports in Chicago

Red Stars are no strangers to managing facilities they don’t own. There is only one club, the Kansas City Current, which has its own stadium and training fields. It’s the NWSL-specific real estate markets and lands that are the league’s next frontier. It has become a unifier for the clubs, a collaborative perspective that Leetzow says is not often found in men’s professional sports.

“In other leagues, it seems very competitive with each other. In this sport. It’s very collaborative. So people talk all the time about ‘what’s the right way to sell the sport?’ and they answer your call saying ‘what are you thinking about this?’ and a lot of relationships between us and other people, and they’ve been super helpful, super kind, really patient – ​​and we try to give back, obviously, whenever we can.

But this is something that I think is unique in women’s sports: this idea. It’s a little bit of us against the world. Because we are building something, on an infrastructure that exists, a kind of sport in America, but we are definitely the underdogs. People say we are a challenging sport and we know it. And helping each other get all the opportunities we deserve is sometimes really about collaboration and there’s a lot of that in this league, which I love.”

Include women’s sport in discussions about funding

Chicago is obviously home to several professional sports teams and leagues in men’s and women’s sports, so there is no single fight for the Red Stars at this time. They see themselves fighting in many arenas for equality in women’s sports, for the visibility of their team and for sport in the city.

Men’s professional sports have dominated the city and local media for generations. Even though the Chicago Sky is feeling a surge in brand recognition and fan engagement, it’s been an uphill climb since its inception as a franchise in 2006. Women’s sports teams often have to prove themselves before receiving any kind of support. recognition or investment, in a sports-saturated city like Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, can seem ten times greater.

Many iconic brands like the Chicago Bears and Chicago White Sox have no problem catching the eyes and ears of public officials when it comes to new state-of-the-art facilities that may require the use of public funding. So it should come as no surprise that when these organizations made recent headlines about possible future projects, women’s sports in Chicago were an afterthought.

Although the Red Stars initially disappeared from these headlines, they are now part of the ongoing discussions.

“I would like to say we were invited,” Leetzow said of whether or not public officials and political representatives contacted the Chicago Red Stars in meetings about public stadium financing.

“When we heard this was happening…I’m originally not from Chicago. So literally [asked] What does this mean and why is this happening? And why aren’t we being discussed? At that moment Laura [Ricketts] said, we need to make some noise here, which we did. So now we speak really, politely, firmly and calmly to anyone who will listen to us in the legislature and to anyone who will listen. This shouldn’t happen without women sitting at the table and we aren’t even, in our conversations

“We’re not even just talking about the Red Stars. When you have a bucket of public funding, taxpayer funding. 50% of the taxpayers are women. Women are generally the purveyors of the family. They decide the majority of consumer spending and decisions are being made about men’s sports franchises in a way that doesn’t include women’s sports.”

It’s just one more item that Red Stars leadership and ownership have taken on in the first year, and something that will likely be a longer struggle than other ongoing issues in women’s professional sports.

“We’ve talked to everyone who will listen and we will continue to do so around this topic in order to make our case – which is that you can’t, you just can’t share public money if you want to do that. And a lot of states have decided not to do that, but if you’re going to do that, then women should have a seat at the table and a piece of the pie.”

In the history of men’s professional sports, nearly 89% of the “Big Four” men’s leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL) have received some level of public funding for stadiums that have surpassed the $30 billion mark. The statistics for women’s sports franchises that have received any level of public funding are easy. It’s zero. It’s a statistic that the Red Stars included as part of a presentation they give when they meet in discussions about public funding.

“It’s blatant, shocking, infuriating, but it’s also a chance for us to teach and educate how we think people should think about sports. I mean, if you’re a sports fan, more sports is awesome. we have all these incredible women’s leagues that are now ready, willing and able to produce incredible athletes to showcase these incredible events and there is no place to play,” Leetzow reiterated.

“We have the ninth title that gave us equality in amateur football, when you reach the professional world, and all the subsidy goes to the men’s teams? my life, you know, towards the end of my career, I can say what I think usually politely, but I can say what I think and I think it’s wrong, I just think it’s wrong and it’s loud. time.”