Document Type

Article

Abstract

Research Question: This study explores how professional women soccer players in the U.S. perceived the role of institutional actors in value co-creation during a pivotal period in the sport’s development. It examines the marketing responsibilities players were expected to undertake and how this labor shaped their experiences and self-perceptions. Research Methods: Guided by value co-creation and value realization frameworks, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with 22 current and former professional women soccer players. Data were analyzed in two stages: first cycle coding, followed by pattern coding to consolidate labor themes into constructs reflecting athletes’ experiences of institutional support, promotional labor, and recognition. Results and Findings: Players frequently undertook promotional labor alongside their athletic responsibilities to offset institutional under-marketing – a concept introduced in the study to describe organizational failures in marketing women’s sport. This was typically informal, uncompensated, and unrecognized within institutional value realization processes. Implications: This study advances the value co-creation literature in sport management by introducing the concept of under- marketing and demonstrating that value is not only collaboratively produced among multiple stakeholders, but also socially constructed through gendered norms and mechanisms such as institutional underinvestment and uncompensated labor.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2025.2567859

Rights

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

APA Citation

Chahardovali, T. & Newman, J. I. (2026) Under-marketing women’s sport: the gendered labor of value co-creation in U.S. women’s soccer. European Sport Management Quarterly, 26(3). 489-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2025.2567859

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