After an ice hockey career that ticked off four Olympics (one gold, two silvers and a bronze), 10 World Championships (four gold, six silver), and a spot in the International Hall of Fame, you could forgive Angela Ruggiero for wanting to enjoy some downtime. But the International Olympic Committee and World Rugby executive who masterminded LA’s successful 2028 Olympics bid had other ideas.
“Being a female athlete, I always knew I had to get another job,” says Ruggiero. “I just knew as a young person that it wasn’t going to be my only career. I went to Harvard as an undergrad and was surrounded by super interesting people and ideas. I knew there was a world outside of sport that I wanted to explore when I was done playing.”
Ruggiero joined the IOC at the same time she returned to Harvard Business School post-retirement from hockey, offering her experience to sporting executives who, as it turned out, hadn’t won Olympic gold. After founding the data-driven Sports Innovation Lab, she turned her focus to growing sport’s commercial reach, so it was a natural step to partner with Klarna on a report aimed at tackling the gender gap in sports investment and merchandise, at a time when women’s sport is growing exponentially.
“Fifty-seven per cent of UK and 67 per cent of US respondents [to our research] are already purchasing women’s sports merch,” explains Ruggiero, discussing the outrage over Nike’s initial decision not to sell Mary Earps Euros shirts. “The majority indicated that they’d buy more if available. They want more variety. One of the main barriers in the UK is that they don’t know where to find it.”
When Nike performed a U-turn and brought out an Earps shirt, it swiftly sold out. “You can put those data points in front of a marketer and hopefully we won’t have another Mary Earps situation,” says Ruggiero. “They don’t understand that the market is sitting there waiting to give them their money.”
Ruggiero sees commercialisation as a good thing, as long as it’s done through meaningful partnerships. “Women’s sports is like a startup. We’re dying for every dollar – to pay better salaries, to build the infrastructure,” she says. “It’s switching the expectation that the league’s going to make money in two years. How long have the men had? Decades, and they’re in the red. Big businesses lose money every single day, and it’s seen as an investment.”
Ruggiero knows that it’s still the first half, and there’s all to play for: “Right now is when the smartest investors are getting into [women’s sports]. You get in early, you hold, you play the long game.”
See Angela Ruggiero at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.
Photograph by Billie Weiss