The world cup trilogy: an analysis of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leverage strategies for the women’s cricket, rugby, and football world cups

ABSTRACT

A common trend among hosts of women’s international sporting events is to tout the opportunity to positively impact women’s and girls’ sporting and physical activity practices. Yet, many scholars have shown that such ‘trickle down’ effects from the event to society are seldom realised. Nonetheless, organisers continue in their attempts to ‘leverage’ large-scale sporting events to produce a range of positive impacts. Here, we use the extraordinary context of Aotearoa New Zealand hosting the Women’s Cricket, Rugby, and Football World Cups in 2022 and 2023 to consider the potential prospects, pitfalls, and challenges involved in attempting to leverage such events to improve societal and sporting opportunities for women and girls. More specifically, we explore the proposed leveraging strategies for the tournaments and examine how such initiatives align with the New Zealand Government’s ‘Strategy for Women and Girls in Sport and Active Recreation’ (WGS). Drawing upon strategy, planning and policy documents, press releases, and media coverage, we adopt a critical discourse analysis approach to understand how current strategies of organisers, national sports organisations, and governing bodies align with the three main ‘pillars’ of the WGS (leadership, participation, and visibility). Through our analysis we present empirical and theoretical challenges (and opportunities) faced by the tournament stakeholders. We end with a critical analysis of the challenges and possibilities hosting three world cups can have on enacting meaningful and important change for women and girls’ sport in Aotearoa.

KEYWORDS:

• New zealand
• FIFA world cup
• rugby world cup
• cricket world cup
• sport policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. Throughout this paper, we use the terms New Zealand and Aotearoa interchangeably as is common practice throughout the country.

2. As well as the three sporting tournaments, New Zealand will also host the world’s largest gathering of experts on gender equality in sport and physical activity, the 8th IWG World Conference on Women & Sport, in November 2022. The IWG Conference, cricket, and rugby World Cups were originally scheduled to be held in 2021, but postponed due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

3. As discussed elsewhere (e.g., Whigham and Bairner 2018) sport policy is created within a broader policy and political context. Notably in this regard, the WGS is a biproduct of (and entangled with) wider Sport NZ policy and strategy such as ‘Everybody Active,’ the 2020–24 strategic plan (Sport NZ, 2019a). Where useful, this paper will refer to the broader policy and political context, particularly aspects that influence the WGS and three world cups.

4. Across Sport NZ and WGS documents, titles are often written in both English and Te Reo Māori. Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa while Te Reo Māori is the country’s Indigenous language. It is one of Aotearoa’s three official languages.

5. ‘Wahine’ at its simplest and most common understanding means woman/women, female, and/or wife.

6. A Māori philosophy of well-being which encompasses the physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of health.

7. An informal term for New Zealanders which has been heavily deployed in marketing for all three tournaments.

8. A term originally used to describe non-Māori, but now generally used to describe white New Zealanders of European origin.

9. Pragnell notes, however, that the World Cup legacy plan outlines a number of areas where NZ Football is hoping to address this issue, including forming a closer relationship with Māori Football Aotearoa and putting special programmes in place to help upskill sections of the community which are under-represented.