1,297 people who are not a “potential audience”.
Women's rugby is still routinely described as a “potential audience” by people who have never met it. In August 2026 we stopped guessing and asked. 1,297 people answered, anonymously, at some length.
Three findings do most of the work, and they are summarised below. The full report – six findings, seven charts, the cross-tabulations and the method annex in full – is free, and we'll send it to you.
This is the assumption plenty of sport has been sold against for a decade: audiences that show up for a final and disappear by Tuesday. The people who actually watch reject it nine to one.
We expected to find the rejection concentrated somewhere, either among women, or among younger fans. But it's close to uniform. Women reject it at 78.4% and men at 75.0%, and there is no gradient by age in either direction. The full report has the segmentation.
We asked which brands people remembered from the show and seeded the list with four that were never on it: two rugby sponsors, and two large advertisers with no women's rugby connection at all. The non-rugby pair give a noise floor of 3.2% – the rate at which people tick a familiar brand they have not actually heard.
It runs in the positive direction too: 60.4% have already done something because a brand supported women's sport, and 43.3% took a hard commercial action – bought, switched, chose over a cheaper option, or opened an account.
Only 12.8% said a withdrawal would make no difference to them.
Six findings, eight charts and the complete method annex. Why the women's game is where new rugby fans come from, what this audience decides for its household, how long sponsorship recall actually survives, what it would pay for a ticket, and where the gender split really sits.
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1,297 responses, fielded 13 August to 2 September 2026. Respondents were recruited through GSR's own channels and the presenters' personal accounts, so this is a self-selected sample. It is a robust description of an engaged women's rugby podcast audience. No more, no less.
The survey was anonymous by design – no name, no email address, no IP. Bases vary by question and are stated on every chart. Subgroups under n=30 are not reported as percentages.
The full limitations section is in the report itself, not buried at the back of a PDF.