New York Giants and Gotham FC co-owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett is betting on AI to transform women’s sports into a major moneymaker.
“If AI can make you more efficient, that totally changes where women’s sports can go,” Tisch Blodgett said at Business Insider’s The Long Play event on Thursday afternoon.
Tisch Blodgett, who’s the lead owner of Gotham FC in the National Women’s Soccer League, sees AI as a way to reduce the costs of running a sports business without cutting corners.
“There’s a lot of parts of a sports team that are just expensive to operate. It’s expensive to operate a stadium, it’s expensive to operate a ticketing team, expensive to operate a marketing team,” Tisch Blodgett said.
Those struggles are heightened for women’s sports, which historically haven’t gotten the same level of investment as men’s sports.
Carl Timpone / BFA
“The revenue was not high enough to really justify building out an entire business team, and the business model just didn’t really work,” Tisch Blodgett said of women’s sports.
Tisch Blodgett made a name for herself by starting sports-focused venture capital firm Next 3, which has invested in Gotham FC, the Los Angeles Golf Club in golf league TGL, Premier Lacrosse League, and lottery ticket site Jackpot.com.
The Gotham FC owner has had a front-row seat to running sports since she was a kid: Her family bought half of the NFL’s New York Giants in 1991. The Tisch family runs Loews Corporation, a hotel and insurance conglomerate worth about $22.9 billion.
Under the Tisch’s ownership, the Giants have won two Super Bowls. Tisch Blodgett has already matched that title count in the three years she’s owned Gotham FC — though building a winner hasn’t been easy.
Building a champion by gathering feedback
Tisch Blodgett felt firsthand the challenges that women’s sports teams face after taking over Gotham FC in 2023. The New York-based team had talent, as it went on to bring home its first title months later.
But success on the pitch hadn’t translated to a winning business. Gotham FC didn’t have its own business office when Tisch Blodgett took over, and players shared a practice field with a club team of 16-year-old boys.
While Gotham FC had “a great product on the field,” Tisch Blodgett said, “attendance was really low” due to a lack of awareness.
“It was clear that the people that came really liked it, but it was very small,” Tisch Blodgett said of Gotham FC’s fanbase in 2023.
Tisch Blodgett has since flipped the script. This July, Gotham FC sold out Citi Field in Queens, drawing over 42,000 fans in what she said was the biggest women’s sports event ever in New York City.
Gotham FC announced in July that it would call Queens home starting in 2028 — a major upgrade from its current stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, which is difficult to reach from New York City by public transit.
One key to Gotham FC’s success has been gathering feedback. Tisch Blodgett, who led marketing for fitness giant Peloton before starting Next 3, said learning from fans “makes the whole business smarter” and has been crucial to the soccer club’s growth.
“Feedback is incredibly important to me — it’s how we run our organization,” Tisch Blodgett said. “After every game, we send out a survey to every person that attended, essentially saying, ‘Did you like it? Would you recommend it to a friend?'”
Gotham FC’s Net Promoter Score — which measures how likely customers are to recommend the brand to a friend — rivals Apple, Tisch Blodgett said.
“It makes every person in the organization understand what we’re building towards in a much more efficient way,” Tisch Blodgett said.
