Keith Strudler: Our Global Sports Neighbors

The US may have a new focus on nationalism. But it seems Canada may not. At least not Canadian hockey, which, if you know the country, is essentially one and the same. While Americans look for new and innovative ways to close our borders, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League is extending theirs – all the way to China. Beginning next season, Beijing’s Kunlun Red Star hockey club will join this Canadian sports organization, bringing the total number of teams to five. Three of those teams are in Canada, not surprisingly, and the other is in Boston. So I suppose this isn’t the league’s first foray into global markets, if the US is deemed that.

For the record, the CWHL – while a decade old – is certainly still in something of a formative stage. Most notably, players don’t get paid. Attendance can be painful small. And competitive balance is a problem. So there’s a lot of room for growth, beyond simple geography.

Professional women’s sports leagues have a poor record of success in North America, with the WNBA the assumed leader of the pack. Even with that, WNBA salaries are low – far lower than overseas – and public interest is, for a lack of a better way to put it, not where they’d like it to be. Women’s professional soccer has ebbed and flowed, but has never been able to capitalize on the success of the US Women’s National Team. Everything else is largely non-existent. Essentially, for a woman to earn a living playing sports in North America, or for young girls to find models of that success, they have look at a select number of individual sports – namely tennis. That later construct is probably more important. Let’s face it, only tiny fraction of even successful high school athletes will ever go on to make a living playing sports. And that livelihood will be short-lived and often less lucrative than one might imagine. But that there are so few female role models in pro sports, exemplars of an aspirational society where anybody can do anything, that has repercussions that go beyond the fields and courts potentially to the office and boardroom.

The CWHL clearly aspires to change that narrative. This Asian expansion is another step in their proclaimed slow-growth strategy. Unlike other upstart leagues that wrote checks they largely couldn’t cash, this league aspired not to make promises they couldn’t keep. Which means that, up to this point, it’s got more in common with rec league than the NHL – at least financially speaking.

So, how might China change that narrative? League administrators hope this might attract more sponsors. They also see an untapped fan markets, even if China has been relatively cool to ice hockey – both men’s and women’s. More notably, China has been quite vocal about their interest in building a stronger national team – especially for the 2022 Winter Olympics they will host in Beijing. So, the Red Star is something of training ground towards that end.

Which really brings us to two questions – one specific to women’s athletics and the other less so. First, is globalization an answer to building women’s sports? At the very least, we know that some countries pay some female team sports more. But a lot of that is funded by fabulously rich individuals who simply enjoy owning a team. So it’s like wondering if Jeff Bezos saved journalism when he bought the Washington Post. And in the case of Chinese hockey, the real money will come from the government, which has a very different set of goals than the Calgary Inferno, for example. So the infusion of cash is great. And it may be part of the kick start needed to build a wider audience. But I’d suggest we won’t know that for some time.

Second, more generally speaking, can a global sports league work? I’m not talking about time differences and travel, which will be major headaches, for sure – and could be existential. I’m talking about whether franchises from nations with vastly different political and economic orientations can compete under one league banner. This even presents a slight obstacle in the NBA, where largely American athletes bristle at the tax implications of playing for Toronto. What might it mean when Boston and Beijing have to play by the same rules?

That’s part of the remaining appeal of the Olympic Games. Not that athletes from different places play each other, but that national philosophies are competing. So the medal count is more than a footrace – it’s a justification. This is also the challenge for robust American men’s pro sports leagues like the NFL and NBA, both of whom see global expansion as critical piece of their futures.

So can Canada, the US, and China play well together in the same women’s hockey league? Is this a marriage of convenience that’s going to break up as soon as everyone gets what they want – which sounds like 2022 at the latest? That remains to be seen. As does American sport in the global age of America first.

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