Sometimes, competitive surfing feels wide off the mark and irrelevant to what we love about surfing. Sometimes it’s jaw-dropping and you spend 10 minutes trying to process an impossible barrel. In both instances, the World Surf League is pulling the strings behind the sport’s competitive facade. As in other sports, the WSL’s mission is to make furious passion and healthy business correlate. How do you think that has been going?
Before 2012…
The tour was a lot more chaotic & scrappy than today. The business model behind pro surfing consisted in the Association of Surfing Professionals (the ASP was rebranded to WSL in 2015) selling 10-year licenses to brands for the rights to organise pro surfing events.
In order to lure brands into buying its licenses, the ASP primarily set the events in big cities and made them coincide with peak tourism season. Then it was basically just a governing body to whom brands reported event winners. As each brand painfully tried to make its own event financially viable, contests had looks of urban festivals with heavy rock music and skaters running the show for a bunch of beach bums. Meanwhile, the best surfers in the world scratched for the crowds attention in shitty urban close out waves… before partying like maniacs at night too.
All events were not broadcasted by the same TV channels, making surfing virtually impossible to follow.
More importantly, the licenses to run the events also included the TV rights, which meant all events were not broadcasted by the same TV channels. This is where the model fucked up big time. Surfing was on the rise for decades, with more and more people giving it a try worldwide (including me 🤓), yet it was impossible to follow.
For that reason, the 1990s & 2000s were a waste of fan engagement, which made the sport look financially stupid. Lots of money spent, too little surfing seen.
The dream tour
Pre-2012 also includes what any surfing-boomer would consider to be professional surfing’s heyday: The dream tour.
“The world’s best surfers in the world’s best waves. And that’s a formula to see some pretty good shit.” Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, ASP CEO & President.
The dream tour refers to a period, where the love of surfing overruled the brand’s return on investment as a criteria to set the tour locations. Surfers were (understandably) sick of surfing 2 foot, blown-off closeouts in cities, and so were the people organising the tour. Too long had the trade off between big city crowds and long hauling waves benefitted the kooks! Indonesia, Fidji, Tahiti, South Africa, Mexico… this was where the ASP was gonna shine with the dream tour, regardless of who was there to see it.
Question to you, knowledgeable reader: Did many other sports take such a direction, following their die-hard outcast’s instincts, raging to live their passion to the fullest, and breaking free from their capitalist obligations? Fascinating talk here.
How professional surfing got… professional !
In 2012 (when the brands licenses ended), a tsunami-kind-of news shook professional surfing. Note that the sub-knee boardshorts culture, which bizarrely drove surf brands revenues for decades, was becoming obsolete around this time too.
In 2012 ZoSea Media bought the ASP from the brands for 0$ (brands really didn’t want it anymore), and injected $50M from Dirk Ziff’s fortune. On the surface, the athletes, event locations and sport remained the exact same, but in the background, the sport was undergoing a massive paradigm shift : some guy wanted to have a go at its rotten business model.
Other than taking control of its events the ASP did 2 things:
They gave themselves a fresh new name in 2015 : World Surf League.
They enhanced their broadcasting experience. Most importantly, all surf contests are available for free via facebook live, youtube and the WSL website. Other than that, a shit ton of content is produced in anticipation and retrospective of all contests. Podcasts with athletes, data-driven tour ranking updates, videos about a spot’s history or anatomy, past tour rivalries… you name it!
Events are still heavily branded, but the fact that following the tour is free and a lot more heterogeneous changes everything for viewers. It seems, in surfing just as with anything in the 2nd millenium, business is all about gathering an audience before you can milk it 💦. Good read there.
And how it almost went tits up
So in 2012, the future of the sport was as uncertain as the ride-ability of your first self-shaped surfboard. Not even a decade later, Covid joined the party. Rumors that Ziff had had enough fun owning this financially-draining institution for 10 years started to echo in the surfing world 🥶. If Ziff had decided to pull out from this crazy business, the WSL would have burst like a bubble.
Fortunately, surfing made its way to the olympic games that same year, certainly not by coincidence. This restored the hope for competitive surfing to gather a massive audience, and kept the money plugged in. Without that, the sport would (probably) have taken a nasty blow.
Song of the week
Slow-down September officially started, here’s one to help you with it 🫶
IG of the week
A mad swell hit the shores of Playa Zicatela, and so did mad men who can surf. We love it, and thought you’d too.