Ted Lasso has switched to women's football, which tells you where the story now sits. Insight TV started building flagship series around it in 2020. Here is what that programming taught us.
This season Ted coaches a second-division side scrapping for facilities and funding long before it can scrap for promotion. The resource gap is the plot. That is a scripted drama about the exact problem the industry spent years not filming.
We filmed it. And that points at the real question for anyone programming a channel: not whether the audience is there, but what you can put in front of it when March comes round.
Every year, International Women's Day and Women's History Month create a genuine promotional moment. Every year, the honest answer across much of the industry has been a thin one. A single documentary. An archive match. Something adjacent, repositioned. Not a body of work that could carry a campaign, or still be worth watching in August.
When we put real production values, real access and real talent behind women's sport, the audience arrived, partners promoted it, and the shows travelled into territories with no local connection to the teams involved.
Ultimate Goal (two seasons, 2020 and 2021) was a competition format co-produced with BT Sport and produced by Zig Zag Productions, filmed at St George's Park, with Eni Aluko as director of football, Rachel Brown-Finnis as head coach and masterclasses from Vivianne Miedema, Jill Scott and Fara Williams. The squad was cut to a final 16 for a trial match played in front of scouts from professional clubs. Not a themed episode. A returning, format-led series with a full talent roster behind it.
Squad Goals: Dorking 'Til I Die took the observational route. Insight TV came to the series for its third season, co-produced with BBC Three and produced by Curious Films, following Dorking Wanderers FC Ladies through a full season under new chairman Calum Best. A real club dealing with the resource problem as it actually happens, rather than as a writers' room imagines it.
Breakthrough: Women Changing the Game, an Insight TV original produced by NEO Studios, followed four athletes competing in sports dominated by men: Natalie Decker in NASCAR, Hollie Doyle in horse racing, Emily Linscott in Formula 4 and Leilani Caamal in American football. It launched on 6 March for Women's History Month, and has stayed in the catalogue since.
Winter Gold, made with China Media Group and produced by Grain Media, was not a women's sport series, which is rather the point. It followed seven winter-sport athletes into the Beijing Games, among them Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu. Women's stories carried an ensemble series aimed at a general sports audience, with no special framing.
Resilience: The Els Visser Story, produced by Red Bull and Scenery, is the single-athlete film. Visser, a Dutch triathlete and Red Bull athlete, survived a shipwreck in Indonesia in 2014 and swam for eight hours to reach land. She went on to become European Long Distance Champion and an IRONMAN winner.
Five formats, one audience. Sport is only part of it: our International Women's Day campaigns have run across the channel group, including INTRAVEL titles such as Travels with Darley and Paradise Kitchen Bali.
Depth beats a title. One documentary cannot sustain a month of promotion. Several hours across more than one format, ideally in more than one sport, is a commissioning decision made two or three years earlier, not a licensing decision made in February.
The stories work outside the result. Audiences who do not follow the Women's football league watched Squad Goals. Audiences with no interest in triathlon watched Resilience. Access and character travel across borders in a way that fixtures do not.
Launch timing helps, and is not the strategy. Breakthrough benefited from Women's History Month. It has also stayed in the catalogue since. Programming built only for a date behaves like a date.
For platforms and brands, the lesson mirrors the commissioning one: women's sport rewards a slate, not a single slot. A campaign needs enough depth to run for a month and enough range to travel across markets.
That catalogue already exists, and it is available across 150+ platforms worldwide. Whether you are programming a channel, planning an International Women's Day campaign, or building a brand partnership with real story behind it, we can help you put the right slate in front of your audience.
Talk to us about carrying or partnering on the slate via our Channel Partners and Brands & Sponsors pages.
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