The Obstacles to a Real Women’s Pro Hockey League
The Players Seem to be Defeating Themselves. More Options Need to be Considered.
The Winter Olympics are over. There has been another contest between those best of enemies, the USA and Canada women’s ice hockey teams. I will continue my custom after every such tournament of commenting on the need for a women’s hockey league in Canada.
I will also touch on the need for improvements to conditions for hockey chicks world wide. I will identify the barriers to these improvements and what needs to be done.
I think I have stated often enough that women are much better athletes. This is exactly because they do not have strength and endurance; they have to develop skill and courage. This is much of what makes them much more interesting to watch.
Obviously this will annoy male athletes. It will annoy male businessmen and administrators who run sports organizations of various types. However, the best of these will understand where public tastes and inclinations are going.
Alas, there is still a lot of reactionary behaviour in the sports world, including in International hockey and the olympics. The idea is still being floated that women’s hockey should be dropped because of the unequal ability of different national teams. This idea is meeting with contemptuous dismissal.
Yes, let us ban bob sledding because the Germans are very good at it. Let us get rid of figure skating because those awful Russians are so good at that. Let us do away with cross country and biathlon because the Norwegians get too many medals there.
One Canadian hockey player, when interviewed on the subject, stated rightly that the real problem here seems to be that many hockey countries simply do not want to put any resources into developing women’s hockey in their own country.
She spoke about the Swedish team, which folded several years ago when the players quit en mass over the way they were being treated. Sweden was “relegated”; dropped from top level international competition. A new Swedish women’s team competed at this Olympics but it is a shadow of the former team, which in 2006 defeated the USA team and took silver.
This opinionated hockey Olympian also discussed the problems of the international tournaments during the pandemic. She was particularly unimpressed by the International Ice Hockey Federation cancelling the under eighteen women’s tournament twice, while going to great effort to keep the junior men’s contest going. The poor excuse was that, due to the extra expenses resulting from covid precautions, there was not enough money to hold both.
More resources put into national teams and amateur leagues will help worldwide. Canada and the USA put more into their teams and that is why they collect most of the jewelry. Yet what is really needed is some real national pro leagues.
That has become a very big issue in North America. Two themes keep coming up when International level women hockey players from Canada or the USA are interviewed. One is that the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) is despised.
They have a point. PHF epitomizes all the worst about exploitation of athletes. The players pay does not cover their expenses and their playing conditions are ridiculous. This league does not even seem to make money, but exists as a plaything for a few people with a ‘startup’ mentality.
The other theme is the need for a single women’s league which brings together the best players from all over the world. This is somewhat different from the hopes of Canadian soccer and basketball women, who seem only to want a national league to play in, so they do not have to leave home to pursue their careers. That is something which should be achievable.
I have opined in previous posts that none of these dreams will be achievable without government catalyzing it. That may be an ideological problem for some of these players. It will also be a very big problem for any league that would operate in multiple countries.
This super league which takes in the best players from all over the world will still have to have a country to operate in. That means the best players will still have to leave their home countries to play. Many do that now.
What about the ‘woho’ fans in these countries other than that in which this super league has decided to establish itself? They will not have much chance to see these ‘world’s best’ players perform live. A truly International league is unlikely, and will get even more unlikely as costs and problems with international travel continue to rise.
It is likely that this league would be based in a North American country. The NHL, the organization which presently dominates hockey on this continent and is centred in the USA, would not be a good model or parent organization for a women’s league. Right now it is in a serious internal crisis and likely will not continue as it has.
This contradicts the ideas many player activists in the PWHPA have, that their league will come out of the NHL. Yet their strategy of building relationships with particular NHL teams seems to be working for them. Of course they would have much more understanding of internal NHL politics than I.
One of these ladies has said that without the covid pandemic, they would have had their own league by now. What I fear is that it is because of the covid epidemic that they will not be getting the kind of league they imagine. I am one who has flowed plenty of electrons seeking to persuade that it is very foolish to expect covid to be ‘over’ anytime soon, or that we are ever going to go back to ‘normal’ or will ‘learn to live with’.
It is not just The Virus that complicates things; we are now living in the turbulent twenties and will experience serious economic and geopolitical disruption. This will change the way sports leagues will be able to operate in future, and in unpredictable ways. The NHL is the exemplar of what has been wrong with professional sports and it will likely have to reinvent itself to stay in existence.
This may incentivize hockey managers toward a women’s league as a way of increasing revenue, or away from it as something they have no time or capital to put into. The top management of NHL is highly risk averse and very committed to a particular business model. This is probably the biggest obstacle to a women’s branch of NHL.
There are many problems with the NHL way of doing things which women players may not want to get tied into. There is a disregard for the health of the players, who often play too many games or play injured. Officiating is often biased, in line with some agenda of not letting any one team win too much.
A WNHL could be a problem for fans as well. An advantage of the old Canadiian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) was that the games were affordable. NHL is focused on ticket sales and drives the price out of reach of most people. Games are blacked out in local markets.
If there is one thing which is predictable about sports leagues, it is that this is not the way it will go in future. People want to watch live sports in smaller, more intimate venues. They want televised sports to be free or on demand. They want it all to be affordable.
I have blogged a bit in the past about how a government sponsored national women’s league might be a better goal for the present PWHPL. Much is being made of the subsidies being given to, or asked by, professional sports leagues in Canada to keep them from going under because of our favourite microorganism. Many are dinosaurs which need to go extinct.
There is also the issue of the numerous sports stadiums built with public money which are then turned over to sports franchises. A lot of public money goes into various cultural activities; opera, ballet, theatre, art galleries, and so on, which interest a limited number of people and could not be self supporting. A women’s league would not be too expensive to start up and could be at a breakeven point within a few years.
Such a league would meet the bare minimum of what PWHPL players say they want. It could allow Canadians of moderate income to patronize one of Canada’s cultural icons. It would not have to make large amounts of money for a few investors to be considered viable.
But here is the big problem; the politics of it. There is a widespread ideological gripe about government providing needed public goods which private business cannot or will not. Never mind that this is what governments are supposed to do.
This is largely driven by private businesses who want monopoly control over a particular product, but will only carry on with those aspects of it which they have full control over and which get them the most money. Even if a monopolistic entity like NHL does not want to do something like women’s hockey, they do not want anyone else doing anything about it which they do not have full control over. It might lead to some serious competition.
We must also consider the problem of a government funded entity operating across national boundaries. This would be the biggest obstacle to getting all the best players into one league. It would be problematic for an American based or even a Chinese team to operate within a Canadian national league.
I see a possible way around this. An international federation could be created which would avoid stepping on International Ice Hockey Federation’s (IIHF) toes. It could operate a rota of games leading to a championship cup game.
It could operate under the aegis of the Canadian government but be run separately from the support system for Canadian women’s teams. However, foreign based teams, including privately owned ones, could enter the league. Each team would be expected to solve its logistical problems in getting to ‘road’ games. This could be problematic if teams from places like China or Russia were included in the league.
Another solution would be a Canada only league which invites players from all over the world. Up to half the players on each team could be ‘imports’. This would amount to Canada subsidizing other countries player development but us generous Canadians would not mind doing that.
To conclude, engaging with the NHL may not be the best route to forming a women’s hockey league. However, top level women hockey players seem to have trouble conceiving other possibilities. I am starting to think I will be watching them by way of the IIHF/Olympics organizations, the PWHPA, and increasingly USPORT, for a long time.