Netball Jamaica and President-designate Karen Rosen Baugh, consider this an open letter of hard truths about building a professional netball league. You believe Jamaica’s top “Elite League” can be turned into a showcase rivaling Australia’s Suncorp Super Netball or England’s Netball Super League. You insist that if you “put on a good show,” sponsors will flock and the league could even rival those global standards.
The ambition is admirable, as Jamaica’s Sunshine Girls are world-beaters on the court, but passion alone won’t transform a small domestic competition into a thriving professional product. The harsh reality is that even the UK and Australian leagues you look up to are propped up by support systems and financial lifelines that simply don’t exist elsewhere in the Commonwealth, certainly not in the Caribbean.
It’s important to understand that netball’s success in the UK and Australia is not driven by pure commercial profitability. Both countries have complex networks of non-commercial support that keep their elite leagues afloat. In England, the government pours millions of pounds into netball every year through Sport England grants and occasional rescue packages. For instance, during the pandemic, the UK government allocated emergency funding to keep netball alive. Even with consistent public investment, British netball has struggled—the Vitality Netball Superleague has seen clubs in financial peril.
In fact, two of its franchises were effectively bankrupt recently, prompting a major restructure of the league. (One storied club, Wasps Netball, actually folded in 2022 when their parent organization went into administration.) As of 2024, the league is contracting from ten teams to eight to concentrate talent and resources, an acknowledgment that sustainability is an issue. If a wealthy country like England—with government funding, a large player base, and corporate sponsors—cannot sustain ten semi-pro teams without drastic changes, imagine the challenge for a much smaller economy like Jamaica’s.
Australia’s celebrated Suncorp Super Netball league presents a similar cautionary tale. Yes, on the court it’s the world’s premier competition. But off the court, Netball Australia has been mired in debt and losses in recent years. By 2022 the organization was reportedly millions of dollars in the red, to the point of needing bailouts—an investment fund even stepped in with a plan to absorb debt and keep the league running. (It’s telling that Netball Australia at one point entertained private equity offers of around A\$6–7 million to buy out league debt.) It should come as no surprise that Suncorp Super Netball only survives today thanks to substantial financial intervention and restructuring. Crucially, both the Australian and UK leagues benefit from robust broadcast deals and a large, established fan culture—yet still struggle to break even. Their “success” is heavily subsidized by public money, investor confidence, or larger sports institutions. These are safety nets and scale advantages that Jamaica does not have.
Given that context, the idea of turning Jamaica’s essentially senior elite amateur league into a world-class professional showcase is, to put it bluntly, highly ambitious and somewhat confusing. Where is the money going to come from to finance operations at that level? Who is footing the bill to get games televised with professional production quality? And who, beyond a niche local fan base, is watching the same handful of four to five teams play each other over a short season of fairly predictable outcomes? These are uncomfortable questions, but any would-be professional league must answer them. What is the product we are selling? If it’s just “good netball,” that alone is not enough.
Quality on the court is essential, yes—Jamaica has that in spades—but professional sport is a business of entertainment and scale. The product has to entice significant spectator interest, sponsorship investment, and media coverage. A small domestic league, however passionate, with dwindling team numbers and top local players sitting out due to low pay, is not yet a product that sponsors or broadcasters will line up to buy. Frankly, if purely high-quality play were sufficient to guarantee a profitable pro league, we’d see far more international stars and dozens of foreign players filling rosters in England and Australia.
But in reality, those leagues have a limited number of import players (only a few dozen combined from across the netball world), and many talented Jamaicans themselves still head overseas for better opportunities. Even in the top leagues, budgets are tight and roster spots limited. This underscores that market demand, not just talent supply, caps growth. Simply having “good netball” isn’t a unique selling point when the market for women’s sport—and netball in particular—requires cultivation. It requires investment in marketing, grassroots audience building, competitive balance, and storylines that keep fans hooked. Without significant outside funding or a larger audience, a standalone Jamaican pro league would struggle to pay athletes full-time, attract international talent, or produce the week-in, week-out spectacle that marquee sponsors and TV deals expect.
A Regional Vision and Sport-as-Business Approach
So what’s the way forward? The uncomfortable truth is that in 2025 and beyond, we in the Caribbean must step out of our comfort zones and build genuine sport-as-business solutions to what are essentially elite athlete development issues. Jamaica cannot do this alone—no matter how deep the Sunshine Girls’ bench is or how passionate the local fans are. If you truly want a sustainable professional framework, you need to work with the rest of the Americas to raise netball’s profile and pool resources. Look at how our football is organized: through Concacaf and the Caribbean Football Union, even the smallest nations benefit from regional tournaments, shared revenues, and collective marketing that create a bigger footprint than any one country could alone.
Netball should take a page from that book. Perhaps the vision should be a regional league or tour—a circuit that involves Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and other netball-playing nations in the Americas (including Canada and the USA, where there is a growing netball community). By combining forces, you create a larger market, a more attractive product for sponsors, and a higher level of competition to keep players engaged. Jamaica could be the driving force, but the initiative has to extend beyond your borders to achieve critical mass. Moreover, there must be a high-level payoff for the athletes if you expect them to stay in the sport and commit as professionals.
Right now, even calling the local Elite League “semi-professional” is generous when many players can only afford to participate part-time for a modest stipend. Elite athletes cannot be part-timers who “take a run out” for a couple of months and a couple of dollars—not if you want them to perform at their peak and inspire the next generation to pursue netball as a career. It’s neither viable nor sustainable for the athletes, and, more importantly, it’s not a compelling product to sell to the public. A pro league needs full-time stars that fans can follow and identify with, storylines that span a lengthy season, and clubs with professional management and marketing.
That requires significant investment and a business-minded approach to league structure, sponsorship, and fan engagement. It might mean rethinking everything from how teams are owned (for example, partnering with corporate backers or existing sports franchises, as seen with the new Nottingham Forest Netball in England) to how games are presented (bigger venues, better streaming deals, fan events, etc.).
Ms. Baugh, you yourself noted the success of Jamaica’s Premier League football after a change in structure and infusion of cash—netball will need a similar transformation, but on a broader scale. Unconventional collaborations may be needed, such as partnering with universities, regional bodies, or even aligning seasons with overseas leagues to loan players. The bottom line is that you’ll need creativity and cooperation to grow the pie.
Jamaica has the on-court talent and the pride of a nation behind it. What it lacks are the financial ecosystem and market size of an Australia or England—those must be built, not wished into existence. Your vision of a thriving professional netball league can become reality, but only if grounded in economic realism and bolstered by alliances that amplify what Jamaica alone cannot provide. In the Caribbean, we love our netball, but to truly professionalise it, we must treat it as a business venture as much as a sport. That means hard decisions, regional thinking, and securing resources well beyond what our small domestic market can supply.
In closing, my advice is to temper your optimism with realism. Good netball is a joy to watch, but turning it into a profitable league will take more than Jamaica going it alone with a brave face. Embrace a broader vision—one that involves partnering across the Americas and fundamentally reinventing how we fund and market the game. Do that, and you might just create a product that can sell, one that showcases our Caribbean talent on the world stage without collapsing under its own financial weight. That is my free advice—the rest is up to you.