Sports Business Journal reported this month that the Cleveland Sirens, two years from playing their first WNBA game, have already locked three of Northeast Ohio’s biggest brands, KeyBank, Progressive, and Cleveland Clinic, into partnership deals.
The story is ostensibly about an expansion team having signed agreements with marquee brands years prior to playing a game. It’s actually a story about how a new sports property leans into data and audience analysis to sell partnerships that help these brands achieve their idiosyncratic business objectives, in large part by reaching target audiences unique to the team.
The Fan Doesn’t Look Like The Assumption
Sirens president Allison Howard has been explicit that the team is not chasing Cavaliers fans in a different jersey. “We don’t want to be the Lady Cavaliers, and we don’t want to be wine and gold,” she said, adding that the Sirens audience will “eat different food, they drink different drinks, they get here earlier, they purchase merchandise differently, and they come from all over the state and even outside of the state.”
Howard points out a feature common to women’s sports teams that share the same or similar ownership group with their male counterparts. Sharing an arena, an owner in Rock Entertainment Group, and even a training facility with the Cavaliers does not mean sharing a fan base. Brands buying into the Sirens need to know how small that overlap actually is, because a deal pitch with the women’s sports team of the same ownership group is reaching a new audience.
Another mistake would be assuming the difference between the Cavaliers and Sirens’ audience is simply female. As I’ve written before, men are frequently the majority of a women’s sports audience, not a rounding error inside it. Nielsen data cited by Bank of America found that 53% of women’s sports fans are men, and WNBA audiences run close to an even gender split.
That means a Sirens partnership pitch built only around female shoppers undersells half the addressable audience, while a deck that ignores the buying power of women overlooks the fact that women already drive 70% to 80% of household purchases and are projected to control $32 trillion in global discretionary spending by 2028. Selling this team well requires holding both facts at once, not picking the more convenient one.
Where First Party Data Runs Out
The Sirens appeared to have leaned into first party data that the team has already collected about its fans as the primary driver to sign these partnerships. Ticket deposits and a strong merchandise weekend are genuine signals, but they are first party data, meaning they only describe people who already raised their hand.
That is exactly the gap platforms like ROAR Intelligence are built to close, by pairing that first party data with independent behavioral sources: anonymized foot traffic and mobile location data matched against defined geofences, aggregated credit card transaction data that isolates spend with direct revenue attribution, millions of clickstream interactions that surface brand affinity and content engagement, social behavioral data from platforms for fan affinity scoring and influencer identification, and survey data focused on brand awareness, consideration, and purchase intent.
Layered together and run through a partnership valuation model, that combination tells a brand not just that 11,000 deposits exist, but who those depositors are, what else they spend money on, how much their spending overlaps with a bank’s or a hospital system’s own customer base, and how confident that estimate actually is. That is a fundamentally different sales conversation than pointing to a strong ticket count and is particularly valuable for new teams where partners have access to relatively limited fan data.
Bottom Line
The Sirens are proving that an expansion franchise can sell partnerships before it plays a single possession, but not because of good branding alone. The team leverages data-driven analysis to show the unique value of Sirens’ fans to potential partners. The teams that get funded years before opening night will be the ones that can help prove who fans are before playing a game.