Pursuing legitimacy from within: examining the communication strategies of Australian women’s professional leagues

As women’s professional sport leagues continue to establish and advance, securing legitimacy within historically masculinised sport fields remains a central challenge. Strategic communication practices constitute a primary organisational locus of legitimacy pursuit, particularly for women’s leagues operating within media systems historically structured around men’s competitions. This study examines how four distinctively positioned Australian women’s sport leagues (AFLW, Super Netball, WNBL, and Super W) deploy league-authored news content as legitimacy work. A content analysis of 6,313 news articles published between 2019 and 2023 within owned media channels classified communication across framing, thematic focus, and actor representation, which were synthesised to operationalise pragmatic, moral, and cognitive appeals. Logistic regression models assessed whether variation in appeal composition and temporal change differed systematically across leagues. Findings reveal significant cross-league differences in communicative emphasis. The AFLW, an emergent competition within a men-centred code, maintained a more pluralistic portfolio of pragmatic and moral appeals relative to established or women-centred league peers. However, longitudinal shifts were modest, with no consistent evidence that emergent leagues moved toward greater cognitive appeal over time. The study positions owned media as a constitutive site of legitimacy work and demonstrates how field-level configurations may influence communicative strategy. In doing so, it advances understanding of how women’s professional leagues navigate institutional environments through communication practices as part of ongoing legitimacy work.