Women’s sport in Italian media: why visibility is commercial infrastructure

Major events often create the impression that women’s sport has finally entered the mainstream. During the Olympic Games, female athletes receive more airtime, stronger storytelling and broader public attention. But the more important question is what happens when the event ends.

Research promoted by Fondazione Bracco together with the International Olympic Committee and carried out by Osservatorio di Pavia offers a valuable evidence base for this question. The study moves the debate beyond perception and looks at the representation of women’s sport in Italian prime-time television news during both the Olympic moment and the ordinary sports calendar.

During the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Italian prime-time television news came close to parity. According to the research, 51% of stories focused on women’s events, 59% of interviewees were female athletes and the overwhelming majority of coverage avoided stereotypes or sexist framing.

This matters because it proves that fairer representation is possible when institutions, guidelines and editorial attention align.

Then the Games ended.

The monitoring continued across a full year of ordinary sports news, from October 2024 to September 2025. Out of 2,706 prime-time sports news items, 75% concerned men and only 13% concerned women. The gap was not marginal. It was structural.

At the centre of this imbalance sits the dominant force in the Italian media system: football. Football accounted for 40% of all sports coverage. Within that space, women represented only 2%.

That number is especially important for anyone working in sponsorship, media rights, investment or sports strategy. It shows that performance alone does not automatically rebalance attention. Results, role models and compelling stories are not enough if the media environment continues to reproduce old cultural hierarchies.

Italy is a particularly revealing case. Football is not only a sport. It is identity, tradition, family ritual and cultural belonging. It has also historically carried a strongly masculine code. That makes the visibility of women’s football harder to build, but also more meaningful when it changes.

The commercial consequences are immediate. Visibility affects perceived value. It influences how sponsors evaluate risk, how investors assess potential, how broadcasters imagine demand and how young athletes see their own future. In women’s sport, visibility is not a soft communications issue. It is commercial infrastructure.

Without consistent visibility, growth remains event-driven and intermittent. Attention rises during the Olympics, World Cups or European Championships, then falls back into silence. That pattern makes it harder to build habit, data, fan relationships, sponsor confidence and media value.

This is why the conversation should not be limited to fairness in representation, although fairness matters. The economic development of women’s sport depends on the normalisation of coverage. Audiences cannot become fans of products they cannot easily find. Sponsors cannot confidently invest in properties that remain invisible. Media rights cannot mature if the calendar is not consistently surfaced.

The responsibility is therefore shared. Editors, journalists, broadcasters, influencers, clubs, leagues, federations and sponsors all shape the visibility system. Every editorial decision either reinforces scarcity or helps build a more modern sports market.

For Italy, the challenge is significant. But so is the opportunity. If a country where football is so deeply coded as male can change the way women’s football is represented, the meaning will extend beyond sport. It will show that cultural models can evolve when institutions and media ecosystems make deliberate choices.

The question after the Olympic applause is therefore not whether women’s sport can capture attention. It can. The question is whether the industry is willing to build the structures that make attention continuous.

Visibility is not the final outcome of women’s sport growth. It is one of the foundations that makes growth possible.