On this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, McKinsey talent experts Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock join Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly for a conversation with Jason Wright, managing partner and head of investments at Project Level and former president of the NFL’s Washington Commanders. Together, they explore how women’s sports is scaling rapidly—and what it takes to build an industry with lasting economic and social impact.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Building a scalable business around women’s sports
Lucia Rahilly: Jason Wright, welcome to McKinsey Talks Talent.
Jason Wright: Thank you so much. It’s always nice to come home.
Lucia Rahilly: Jason, it feels like the blink of an eye, but it’s been several years now. When did you abandon us for the Washington Commanders?
Jason Wright: I jumped ship in 2020. What a wild four and a half years it’s been.
Lucia Rahilly: Well, tell us about it. Since January, you’ve been in this super cool role at Ariel Investments. Talk to us about Project Level and what its mission is.
Jason Wright: Project Level is a private equity fund that is focused on leveling the playing field in women’s sports and taking advantage of the once-in-a-generation economic opportunity that is now behind women’s sports. For a long time, we’ve all known that the performance of women on the pitch, court, and field has been at a high level.
I think we’ve all idolized various female sports stars, whether it be Serena Williams, Billie Jean King—the list goes on and on. The economics of the sports industry have not supported women’s sports in the way they’ve supported men’s sports over time. But there is now a generation of folks who have grown up with more gender parity in participation in youth sports and greater exposure to female athletes in their local environments. There is now a built-in fan base that is willing to spend real money on women’s sports going forward. And we’ve seen the explosion of talent like Caitlin Clark in college basketball. The WNBA has catalyzed that share of wallet toward women’s sports in a way that it always could have and is now the sustainable reality for the next three decades.
We want to take advantage of that. One goal is to have great returns for our investors, but we also want to bring the relational and intellectual capital to the full ecosystem of women’s sports so that this moment lasts. The goal is that these businesses grow faster—not just the ones we’re invested in, but the whole industry, because it’s the right way to support this great talent that’s been on the field for so long.
Brooke Weddle: What encouraged you personally to take on this role?
Jason Wright: Women’s sports were part and parcel of our household growing up. My sister was a really talented athlete. She played softball, basketball, volleyball, and she ran track. She was as active as I was in sports. So we had up-close proximity to girls’ sports and what it could mean to bring a family together and have great leadership development and character molding the same way it does for men’s sports.
At the next step, pro sports tickets and men’s sports were really expensive, and they are even more so now. When I was with the Commanders, we did pricing exercises that showed we could almost perpetually increase pricing every year and still not see demand fall off. You start to price out the everyday family. That’s good for the economics and the P&L [profit and loss] of those franchises, but it changes the value proposition of the gathering place for the everyday family. That still exists in women’s sports today.
For me, there was never any difference between a professional female player and a professional male player because I knew the work ethic and investment was the same, especially as my career progressed. So, it is personal in that regard, especially to make sure the economics afford these women the same opportunities to jump-start their careers and their future the way a much less-decorated NFL career did for me.
Turning momentum into long-term business strategy
Bryan Hancock: How have you seen women’s sports evolve from your time watching the Los Angeles Sparks to now? It feels like there is more coverage, from a media standpoint, for mainstream sports, but it also seems that there are other three-on-three leagues and other opportunities for women’s sports that are popping up.
Jason Wright: You nailed it. What’s happening right now is that there’s both scale and innovation happening within women’s sports. Take, for example, the NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League], where we’ve invested in the new franchise in Denver. Viewership from 2023 to 2024 was up 95 percent year over year. These are the types of numbers that exist across each and every marketplace. At the NCAA tournament this year, the women’s tournament ad sales were up 200 percent.
Brooke Weddle: Incredible.
What’s happening right now is that there’s both scale and innovation happening within women’s sports.
Jason Wright: At the same time, we’re seeing innovation. Unrivaled, a three-on-three women’s basketball league, is a synergistic complement to the WNBA that allows us to see the talent on display in a different way, and creates storylines that will carry into the WNBA season, which draws more attention to the sport.
We’re seeing new leagues emerge. We invested in League One volleyball, which is a new professional women’s volleyball league. They had their first season this year, and they’re situated in cities that have a history of NCAA championships in volleyball. So, they have a built-in fan base, and it has been rad to see them have sellouts in their first season because of that smart strategic decision. They’ve got a youth business involving 20,000 or so people built underneath this league. That creates fans and advocates of the game. So you’re seeing things in this space that not only are good, solid business ideas but also draw more people in, making the tagline even more true that everybody watches women’s sports.
Lucia Rahilly: Is that true? When you’re talking about growth and opportunities to scale, we have seen this surge in popularity. Who are women’s sports fans?
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Jason Wright: This is maybe the biggest evolution in women’s sports to date. It used to be almost a mission-driven and activist viewership group that wanted to invest in women’s sports. It is now a much broader swath of folks. It skews toward Gen Z and Gen Alpha, whose attention some of the more mature leagues have struggled to capture.
Applying a playbook for operational growth
Brooke Weddle: What are you taking away from leading the Commanders into Project Level and trying to really strengthen that pipeline of talent for women’s sports?
Jason Wright: We believe that the relationships, frameworks, and approaches that we had to break down and rebuild the Commanders will also have an outsize value in women’s sports because they haven’t had the intellectual and relational connections that the major men’s sports have. At the Commanders, the business side is where the learnings are even more relevant. We had to completely overhaul the organization. We turned over 85 percent of the workforce, set a new business strategy, and we increased local revenue by over 50 percent. Then we worked on margin expansion, and we grew EBITDA ninefold. Then we sold the team to the new ownership group, stayed on to oversee the transition, and got an important stadium deal done. All of those components are really important in women’s sports that are at a more nascent stage as organizations. They often don’t have access to the tools that are common on men’s teams.
The historical narrative of these women’s franchises and leagues is that they can’t run profitably, that they’re going to be money losers that have to be subsidized, and then you get a nice valuation exit. That does not have to be the case. We see a very clear ramp to profitability in Denver, and just by deploying our relationships, we’re seeing impact on the P&L.
Bryan Hancock: What is the ownership model when you all go in to own a team, and how do you communicate that?
Jason Wright: It varies from league to league. The NWSL and WNBA have caps on how much of a team a private equity firm can own and how many teams you can be a part of. Our goal is to invest up to the cap in each one. We really want to be able to lean in as operators, link with principal owners who want that expertise and that help to run the franchise in the black, and have the kind of growth trajectory I just described.
Then we want to be multiple team owners across the mature women’s leagues over time, which to us is the NWSL, the WNBA, and the Women’s Super League in Europe. We’re looking at youth sports, which also has the impact of standardizing the approach, making it more safe for kids, and having better outcomes for the type of families that are in it. Then we want to invest in supporting businesses and the infrastructure of sports that support all these franchises, like professional services firms, talent firms, data analytics firms, real estate investments, and supporting businesses.
Around 70 percent of all female CEOs were college athletes.
Brooke Weddle: You talked about the business opportunity in name, image, and likeness, but also what I would call the broader impact opportunity. At McKinsey we serve big companies, and yet about 10 percent of the CEOs on the Fortune 500 list are women. When you think about what you’re trying to do and just the scale of impact, so creating these icons and role models in sports, what do you get excited about in terms of the broader reach of what you’re doing?
Jason Wright: Obviously, we’re excited about the economics behind it, but women’s sports for decades, participation in girls’ sports, from amateur all the way through college, has been an indicator of the life trajectory of the women who participate in those leagues and teams. Around 70 percent of all female CEOs were college athletes. There’s a very strong correlation.
So, there are knock-on effects that have real trajectory on the earning power and quality of life for women and girls that we think is really important. We’re doing it at a time when it can make money, and that means it’s going to be more sustainable. At McKinsey we always talked about how, if you can build social good into the business model in a way that generates profit, then you know it’s going to last. This is that moment in women’s sports, and we want to lead that charge.
Lucia Rahilly: You alluded a little bit to using analytics to spot talent that would fit within the culture of specific teams. Do you continue to use data to inform the science of teams and evaluate the health of those teams other than in a win or lose kind of way?
Jason Wright: Yeah. For me, at the Commanders, it was critical that we quantified culture in the same way we quantified everything else. It’s critically important that you do that in general for culture—and that you get detailed about the aspects that you think drive your culture forward and the recipe that you want to be—and make sure that those metrics are growing and that you’re hiring people who will push those things forward.
This flows into communications to the workforce about what’s important. It needs to be part and parcel of your values. I don’t know that it’s necessarily an analytic approach, but it is a strategic approach to how you build out your staff in a start-up environment. We’re not fielding a team until 2026. We will not be getting revenue until then. So the leader of the organization needs to be judicious in how we’re bringing on staff and understanding the ramp toward revenue coming in-house and what we can do to manage cash in the meantime. You have to be a little bit wily here.
Brooke Weddle: Jason, thinking out to three, five, and ten years from now, what will it take to really grow women’s sports? What do you think will be the key milestones of how to get there?
Jason Wright: I think it’s already happened and we are past the inflection point. I think it will move faster and everybody will see the long-term sustainability sooner if we get in the women’s leagues the capabilities that are already in men’s franchises and leagues.
For example, there’s a data analytics company we’re evaluating that has a proprietary approach for looking at media rights viewership—the way that customers engage with the game across different platforms. They help the major men’s leagues do their scheduling based on the injury history of the players, the robustness of the fan base, when that fan base likes to watch games, the history of the rivalries, and the matchups that are going to create the largest viewership for you. This is important when those leads go back to their media partners and say, “We outperformed our viewership KPIs. You owe us money. And for the next negotiation, we’re going to ask for a bunch more money because there’s way more viewers here on your platforms than previously.”
That has been a very effective tool for these major leagues. For a company that doesn’t do a ton of outbound marketing, bringing them to women’s leagues that would not normally get them can have a huge impact. This is especially true as some of these smart commissioners or these women’s leagues have negotiated milestones that they’re blowing away in viewership; they will have renegotiation opportunities much sooner.
If we can provide through our portfolio the capability for these leagues to have better scheduling and better metrics heading into those negotiations, then everybody will make more money, including our franchises. In the meantime, that data analytics company gets more clients and it grows as well. It shouldn’t have to go through the same long learning cycle of professionalization. It can be there tomorrow.
Brooke Weddle: How do you see the US relative to other countries in terms of that growth of the market?
Jason Wright: The shift is happening everywhere domestically. For example, the NWSL: attendance in 2023 was up 26 percent. WNBA attendance from 2023 to 2024 was up 48 percent year over year.
Global football has embraced the women’s game because it ties to their communities. It’s a pinnacle for their female athletes and the girls in their communities. It’s one of the few places that creates visible role models, because women’s sports has not had the same broadcast reach as before.
Bryan Hancock: Jason, where do you see the growth taking place—in team sports, individual sports, or the Olympic sports? We’ve traditionally had a lot of women Olympic athletes and they’re household names. So I’m wondering, how are you thinking about it across the field?
We will see a billion-dollar women’s franchise within the next ten-year time frame.
Jason Wright: I think it will be across all on the team side, for the leagues that are already in that state of maturity. Their valuations are roughly where NBA valuations were in the early 2000s and where NFL valuations were in the early 1990s. We think they will have a similar growth trajectory for the next decade or so. We will see a billion-dollar women’s franchise within the next ten-year time frame. They will follow a hockey stick trajectory.
We would be foolish to say it will be the same as, for example, the Dallas Cowboys being worth $11 billion now. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could be half that and it could be a quarter of that and would still be excellent returns for the industry and great growth for women’s sports. I think that’s what will happen on the teams.
There will be another set of leagues that are major leagues in high-participation girls’ sports, and we’re interested in sports like volleyball, softball, lacrosse, track and field, and flag football. All of these are high-participation girls and women’s sports that have potential to be major leagues, alongside soccer and basketball, which are the two that exist today. And some of those are Olympic sports.
Certainly the Olympic athletes themselves have more monetization opportunities that are untapped: think about Mary Lou Retton in the ’80s and Simone Biles today. Now the reach that these Olympic athletes have commercially—to be supported by brands, to monetize through name, image, and likeness, to tell stories around them, for them to be brand ambassadors that support the broader women’s game—even if there’s no professional league, is massive. I do think the growth for businesses that exist in the sports infrastructure overall is going to be tied to new fan growth.
Lucia Rahilly: So this is a growth trajectory for people in sports overall?
Jason Wright: It is going to be the core driver of those ancillary businesses as well.
Leading change with clarity and conviction
Brooke Weddle: Jason, you don’t shy away from challenge, right? You’ve taken on some big roles where significant transformation was required. A lot of executives are coming to us these days saying, “The amount of change is increasing. How do we lead through it?” What advice do you have for executives who are leading through massive amounts of change right now?
It’s facts over feelings. Because when you’re going through massive change, you can get distracted by a shiny object or an alarmist opinion if you don’t have a fact base that you believe is core.
Jason Wright: You’re right on my career choices. Whether it’s flipping from the NFL to McKinsey—the biggest context switch ever—to the roles I’ve taken since, when it comes to leading through massive change, first, you need a core motivator that is sustainable through tough moments. That’s just a personal thing that I can’t say for anybody else. For me, it’s impact on the world and the ability to see resources and people that don’t normally flow to certain communities, and my ability to marshal that through the work I do directly or indirectly.
But I think very tactically. I have a few principles that have helped me along the way. The first is to be fact-based. It’s facts over feelings. Because when you’re going through massive change, you can get distracted by a shiny object or an alarmist opinion if you don’t have a fact base that you believe is core. You listen to all these opinions. You don’t tune out the emotional side or the pontificators, but if you filter it through the lens of facts as you can interpret them and as you can track them, it helps you to stay grounded.
The second thing is, based on those facts, you have to set really clear priorities for what is going to move things forward. Get the right people in the organization and get your workflows correct.
The third thing is to make sure that both within the workforce and in your circle of counselors you have a diverse set of perspectives. That certainly means diverse in demographics, but also diverse in work experience, diverse in language and culture, diverse in political ideology. I knew that if we were going to make momentous change, we needed to avoid the big potholes. We had very little margin for error at the Commanders, and certainly in this industry there’s a little more margin for error, as women’s sports has so many tailwinds behind it, but you don’t want to make missteps.
You have to be willing to have the productive debate that creates sharper insight. Be a little uncomfortable as you’re making the decision so you can be really comfortable after you’ve made it because you’ve thought through every outcome along the way.
The fourth and final thing is I, for right or wrong, just do not quit. Absolutely. Do not quit. I may not have slept for a month, but I’m just not going to stop. I think it’s important to build a culture that encourages us to take care of ourselves and we need to be OK mentally, physically, and spiritually.
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But you also do need to “burn the bridge,” because if you mentally give yourself an out while you’re trying to make change, there will be a tough moment when it doesn’t add up, when the cost does not seem worth it at all. And if you count the cost in that moment but you didn’t count it at the beginning and say, “I’m not quitting, no matter what,” you could leave right before it gets good.
For example, at the Commanders right before the tide turned, it was kind of the worst that it had been. There was some great talent that left the organization because they couldn’t quite bear it, and within months of them leaving, we turned the corner and had this rapid growth, revenue trajectory, in fan sentiment, and performance on the field that was such a joy to be around for my last year and a half there. You’ll miss out if you give yourself the chance to say quitting is an option.
