Canada soccer star hits out at ‘myths, biases and double standards’ that held women’s sport back for too long

Women’s soccer in Canada is having a moment – or rather, it’s about to.

That’s according to Diana Matheson, a former Canadian soccer international and co-founder and CEO of the country’s first professional women’s soccer league, launching next year.

The ‘Northern Super League’ will feature six teams initially, with Diana (pictured above) hoping that this is just the first step in capturing, and capitalizing on, the public’s interest in the franchise.

“Women’s sport as an industry, as a true professional business, has really only been around… for five years, truly,” said Diana.

“Before that, so many myths and biases in women’s sport really prevented any true investment. It wasn’t treated as a business, and that hampered the whole thing. But now it’s being treated like a business, and it’s the fastest growing area of sports.”

Diana believes that until now, “the culture wasn’t quite ready” and that people weren’t willing to take a chance on investing in something untested.

“There was no way to disprove the folks in a lot of the boardrooms saying, ‘Ah, but it’s women’s sport. No one watches women’s sport. Women’s sport doesn’t make money.’ But in the last two, three years, there was finally enough of a presence in the professional game, professional soccer, and other sports, that the data was there.”

The former soccer international was peaking on the Sports Track stage at Collision in Toronto, where she used the platform to hit out at the disparity between investment in men’s sports, compared to women’s:

“We saw the guy who wrote the book Soccernomics once, and he told us the stat that 70 percent of men’s professional soccer clubs around the world lose money year over year [… ]Toronto FC has lost money every year it’s operated. Does that mean it’s not a business that should exist? No. But on the women’s side, oh, women, women’s sport loses money year over year. We can’t put money into this. So just a complete double standard there.”

Diane cited recently signed broadcast and sponsorship deals, as well as public interest, as the main driving forces for the surge in growth and interest in women’s sport:

“Two out of every three Canadians are interested in women’s pro sport. So we have to get in front of the 20 million Canadians that we think might be fans and see who we can get on board […] And for us that meant CBC.”

“The huge plus there, it’s free to air. It’s across the country, French and English and TSN, obviously, with one of the biggest followings of sport in Canada, we go to where the people are and build the audience over the first three to five years.” 

Diane’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on women’s soccer at Collision, which is in Toronto for its sixth, and final year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

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Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com