Japan’s Chairwoman of the New Pro Women’s Soccer League charts a course for success

On a November day in 2018 a jovial, teeming crowd gathered in downtown Tokyo to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Japan Soccer League—predecessor to the J.League. During the festivities, hands shook, business cards were exchanged—and the origins to the women’s professional league —the Women’s Empowerment League (WE League)—began.

Among the guests was Kikuko Okajima, now Chairwoman of WE League, which debuts in September 2021. Okajima was seated at the same table as former Japanese footballer Nobutoshi Kaneda on that occasion, who found a kinship and asked her to help the J.League create a woman’s team.

That conversation led to many others. Now Okajima has grand plans for revenue growth for WE League, to boost the sport for women and to elevate gender equality in Japan.

Starting from ground zero, Okajima exudes that entrepreneurial spirit in having little to fall back on, save for the organizational help WE League gets from the J.League and only the excitement of looking ahead.

This excitement carries over in various ways. Globally, Okajima sees more of the men’s European clubs perceiving women’s soccer as a viable business. Some of the top teams in England, like Liverpool F.C. and Tottenham Hotspur F.C., are starting to make a deeper investment into it. The hope for Japan is that the J.League will act in a similar fashion in the future, says Okajima. She also brings attention to Spain’s government, which has committed to giving the top flight women’s league, La Liga Femenina, pro status for the 2021-2022 season.

Okajima points to a vastly different landscape in the U.S., where individual investors reign supreme. She highlights Tennis superstar Naomi Osaka becoming the first investor into the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) North Carolina Courage. Then there’s Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager investing into the NWSL’s Washington Spirit. “I don’t think that will happen in Japan anytime soon, but I need to let people know that these are celebrities investing in women’s soccer in the United States,” she says.

Transforming the current base of fans

When it comes to WE League and revenue-generation, she is specific about four goals: in-person attendance, sponsorship, media and gathering collective impact through membership.

Taking learnings from the U.S., WE League seeks to transform Japan’s current base—males 30-60—into families traveling to stadiums to watch game day matches—which is not even novelty in Japan. To achieve that, WE League will host soccer clinics for kids. The hope is that if kids can learn soccer from some of the actual players, that may translate into wanting to see them play on game day in the stadium, says Okajima. That, in turn, may mean that the parents—at least one—will be responsible for bringing their child to the venue. “So we will try to touch one child, and [thereby] hope to multiply the number of people that come to the stadium,” she says.

This means working closely with the Japan Football Association (JFA) at the local level to ensure the viability of a soccer clinic or a pre-game match for children and WE League players. Okajima would also like to see pre-match games between the over 50 mixed (men and women) crowd. Here again is the desired multiplying effect: kids, parents, grandparents, young adults and so on that may find inspiration to become a league fan through their own personal connection to the sport.

Okajima is tasked with significantly increasing the current numbers of in-person stadium attendance, which stands at 1300, while still grappling with COVID-19 and the effects it has had on sports worldwide.

Soccer clinics for woman

The pandemic has, of course, presented other challenges. On the sponsorship front, Okajima has experienced hesitation among potential sponsors who are holding back on supporting new projects.

Then again, it’s COVID-19 that enabled her to take on the remote role of chairwoman after retiring from a decades-long career in finance in 2019. Okajima is a 30-year Baltimore, Md. resident, having married the American Andy Murray. All of the meetings she was a part of concerning the new league went online after COVID-19 hit early in 2020 and Okajima then felt she could comfortably handle duties beyond sponsorship—what she was originally tasked with—outside of Japan.

Several colleagues had been encouraging her to take on a bigger role for some time.

“I loved the idea of helping women’s soccer to prosper in Japan,” she says. “I see how successful it is in the U.S. and I thought I could import ideas and strategies to help women's soccer in Japan—so I took it.”

To date, WE League has signed on four sponsors. Two have publicly been announced: Daihatsu Motor Co. and Plenus Co. Daihatsu is the preferred car manufacturer for women in Japan due to its compact size. It aims to host soccer clinics for women all over the country in support of the league’s growth.

Hope to capture their followers

Plenus, a part of the Grocery Stores and Supermarket Industry, has served as the title sponsor of women’s amateur football, the Nadeshiko League, for the last 13 years. Plenus has a bento box chain at street outposts throughout the country and wants to support women because more than 50% of its employees belong to this demographic, according to Okajima.

It’s very much by design that WE League’s uniform sponsor is not the typical athletic company. Okajima emphasizes that it is a retail brand which makes regular street clothes. “We hope to capture their followers [teens to early 20s]…to use their platforms/networks, like Instagram, to showcase our athletes and bring in a new group of fans,” she says.

Media is another channel that WE League hopes to utilize to ensnare fans. Okajima points to the women soccer players in the U.S. that have reached icon status, like Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe. The non-existence of icons in Japan can be attributed to a lack of opportunity for players to speak up, she says. “[Soccer players] don’t share their opinions or emotions—they can talk about the sport but they don’t share their own stories,” she says.

To raise player profiles, the plan will likely be to host a 15-minute off-the-pitch interview with a member from each club. In addition to that, WE League is in the process of selling TV sponsorship and hopes to land a broadcast contract in the near-term, and build proprietary media online through a dedicated YouTube channel.

The league has also created WE Action, a consortium grounded in collective impact. As a revenue strategy, it exists to expand WE League’s horizons through non-traditional exposure as well as to create a support group.

Here, a diverse range of organizations—the United Nations, universities, research houses - will participate through paid membership and convene to discuss solutions for gender equality in Japan. Okajima says Japan landed at number 120 out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for 2020. Added to that, earlier this year, Tokyo 2020 Olympics president Yoshiro Mori and former prime minster made sexist remarks about female directors in sports (he subsequently resigned from his post), “so this is a good year to bring this topic to the public,” says Okajima.

Importing foreign players

Okajima has other ambitions to grow revenue via the import of foreign players. At present, she is visiting several colleges and teams across the U.S. with the aim of enticing women players to WE League. She is also prospecting through Europe, as well as Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), sourcing talent from such countries as Vietnam and Thailand for the 2021 opening. She references Thailand’s participation in the 2019 FIFA World Cup. While they lost 13-0 to the U.S., it’s the quality of play that saw them reach the international stage.

Thailand’s involvement in WE League would also be a strategic move: Okajima hopes that if some of its prime players join, perhaps the opportunity for local Thai TV to broadcast their matches would be created.

And with players of different nationalities on the WE League roster, Okajima also sees the opportunity for skill level to significantly increase for domestic players.

Passion and personal history with the sport

It’s easy to understand Okajima’s passion for women’s soccer. She has a long history with it. Around the mid-seventies, women’s soccer began to take off in Asia. Then a young college student, Okajima was playing for FC Jinnan—Japan’s first women’s soccer club—and while the JFA didn’t take women’s soccer too seriously at the time, the team was allowed to participate in an international tournament in Taiwan.

Okajima witnessed other Asian countries, like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, sending their national teams, while Japan simply sent the club team that had won the championship in the previous season. The Japanese flag they bore wasn’t even on the front of the shirt, but the sleeve, she recalls.

Now it’s going to be managed and run as a professional league - it’s not an amateur league anymore.

That event fueled a desire within Okajima to form a national team. To do so, she had to create a women’s federation. Okajima acknowledges that she didn’t have a lot of power, but she did have moxy, which helped her to gain the assistance she needed. She scored a lending hand from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries , which already owned a woman’s soccer team.

Within two years of that international tournament in Taiwan, the Japan Football Association allowed women soccer players to register with it for the first time and by 1979, more than 900 women players and 53 teams were officially registered across Japan.

Creating a sustainable business

Now fully in charge, the WE League currently houses 11 teams, which include Mynavi Sendai Ladies, Nippon TV Tokyo Verdy Bellaser and INAC Kobe Leonessa.

The first-year goal is to have 5000 people on average attending live games, says Okajima. In two to three years, she wants clubs to turn a profit through such means as ticket sales, uniform sponsorship and products sold at the stadiums, like replica uniforms, team scarves, wristbands, mugs and guidebooks. “We hope to create a sustainable business for each individual team,” she adds.

And staying true to its mission, eventually there will be a requirement that women must comprise 50 percent of each club’s personnel. This will include decision-makers and coaching staff. Each club will have in place at least one woman on their board of directors, she also emphasizes.

Takehiko Nakamura, President, CEO and Founder of the sports marketing firm Blue United, sees one of the league’s greatest strengths as just how differently it is getting set up from other professional sports in Japan—that includes having a remote chair residing in the U.S. who has had a successful business career outside of Japan.

Override the perception

“It’s also the first time Japan will have a female leader in place managing a new sports league,” he says. “There’s so many indications that they will do things differently.”

WE League’s greatest challenge, Nakamura adds, is the perception that it’s harder to succeed with women’s sports. “That’s the biggest hurdle they are going to be facing,” he says. As long as they are able to find their fan base in and outside of Japan, Nakamura sees success within WE League’s grasp. “Now it’s going to be managed and run as a professional league - it’s not an amateur league anymore,” he says.

“They have a strong leader who holds a wide vision. I think it's about having your own confidence that will override this perception that has existed for a long time.”

Okajima speaks to the sport as a universal language. She recalls the success of women’s soccer in 2011 when Japan won against the U.S. in the FIFA World Cup final. The win came the same year as the devastation brought by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the massive tsunami that followed.

“[Our win] was very unlikely—a small odd, but a big success,” she says.“Soccer has the power to get people energized.”