Chances are, most people can now name several superstar women athletes. Celebrities such as Caitlin Clark, Coco Gauff, and Simone Biles have millions of fans, and women’s basketball and soccer teams routinely fill sold-out stadiums. Without a doubt, women’s sports are finally hitting the mainstream, capitalizing on years of outsize growth. Our analysis finds that between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women’s sports grew 4.5 times faster than that of men’s sports. Yet the sector is far from reaching its full potential, leaving many billions of dollars on the table for stakeholders across the value chain.
We conducted extensive research and spoke with dozens of industry leaders to present a clear picture of where the women’s sports sector is headed next. As part of our research, we conducted two comprehensive surveys—one of about 3,000 US sports fans and another of dozens of large companies that invest in sports marketing—to better understand the current state of women’s sports and to quantify the future monetization opportunity (see sidebar “Methodology”).
We find that women’s sports could generate at least $2.5 billion in value for rights holders in the United States by 2030—a 250 percent increase from the $1 billion generated in 2024 (Exhibit 1).
Of this total revenue, brand sponsorships of leagues, teams, and athletes could provide the largest revenue share; ticketing to live sporting events could generate the second-highest share of value as capacity and attendance surge; broadcast media rights could bring in approximately 20 percent of the revenue; and merchandise sales could generate the remainder of the pie.1 Broadcast rights have the most room for growth. Rights for women’s sports are currently priced much lower than they are for men’s sports, in terms of revenue per viewer hour, and this gap presents an opportunity for rights holders to increase revenue.
Propelling growth in the women’s sports market are four key stakeholder groups (see sidebar “Four women’s sports stakeholders”). These are marketers and sponsors that both spend ad dollars during sporting events and sponsor teams and individual athletes; media, such as TV and streaming companies that purchase broadcast rights from rights holders and sell ads during games; investors, such as private equity companies that invest directly in teams and leagues; and the rights holders themselves, including teams, leagues, and some high-profile athletes.
Our analysis estimates that the total US sports market (both men’s and women’s) was $75 billion in 2024,2 meaning that the revenues generated by women’s sports today represent less than 2 percent of the total US sports market—this despite the rapid ascendence of women athletes as top brands themselves and a large and growing fan base. The next frontier of growth for women’s sports will be closing this monetization gap and realizing the sector’s full potential as a high-revenue market.
Realizing the full value of women’s sports will take a concerted effort from rights holders to clearly communicate the value of the opportunity to marketers, media companies, and investors, and from other key stakeholders to make bold bets on a market that is not yet fully mature. An acceleration in monetization will drive further growth in the sector, creating a flywheel for deeper fan engagement, further monetization, and more growth. In a well-developed women’s sports sector, everyone wins: stakeholders, fans, and athletes.
Building on hypergrowth
We find that women’s sports are experiencing hypergrowth due to several key factors. Most importantly, fandom is taking off. The number of fans is growing, and these fans are watching more games, which is boosting broadcast viewership and game attendance at stadiums. With fan interest rising, media companies are spending more to purchase rights to televise games. In turn, marketers are investing more in their sponsorship of teams and athletes to better position their brands in front of a growing demographic of engaged fans. As more money flows through the women’s sports sector, leagues are expanding, with existing leagues adding teams and new leagues forming, such as the three-on-three women’s professional basketball league Unrivaled and League One Volleyball (LOVB). We will examine each of these growth mechanisms below.
Fandom
Our research finds that sports fans who follow only women’s sports make up just 1 percent of the total sports fan population. That means that most of the audience for women’s sports is not new to sports; it is comprised of existing men’s sports fans who have an increasing appetite for women’s sports (see sidebar “Who are women’s sports fans?”).
Our fan survey shows that four out of five total US sports fans follow women’s sports (Exhibit 2), and more than half of them became fans in only the past five years (Exhibit 3). This underscores how mainstream women’s sports have become, which in turn has created a large, addressable audience for marketers. Many new women’s sports fans are first drawn to individual stars, tuning in to watch teams with top athletes such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) powerhouse JuJu Watkins or Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) player A’ja Wilson. However, global megaevents also drive new fandom, with the 2024 Summer Olympics and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup introducing new fans to star athletes such as Gabby Thomas, Mallory Swanson, Simone Biles, Sophia Smith, and Trinity Rodman.
In whatever way fans first encounter women’s sports, they value authentic connections to women athletes. Our fan survey shows that half of self-described “avid” women’s sports fans—those who passionately follow their favorite teams—are loyal to their favorite athletes, and these avid fans are also 27 percent more likely to purchase from a brand that endorses a popular woman athlete. These engaged fans, hungry for more women’s sports, present a unique opportunity for stakeholders such as brands and media companies to capture their attention through targeted campaigns that feature star athletes. Some 70 percent of avid women’s sports fans plan to spend more to attend sporting events, and a third plan to watch more games, in the next 12 months—the main motivating factor being a chance to watch their favorite athletes compete.
Viewership
Growing fandom is translating into record viewership numbers, pointing to continued growth in the women’s sports sector. For example, the WNBA Finals averaged 1.6 million viewers, doubling the audience from the 2023 edition, and the 2024 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) championship game became the highest-viewed championship game in the league’s history, according to Nielsen data. College basketball, driven by star power players such as Caitlin Clark, is also on a tear. The 2024 NCAA championship game averaged 18.9 million viewers, marking the first time that the women’s title game was watched more than the men’s version, which averaged 14.8 million viewers.3
Broadcasters have taken note of the record number of fans tuning in to women’s sports and have committed more prime-time windows to women’s games in recent years. The surge in fandom, combined with more prime-time viewing opportunities, has led to higher viewership overall. Together, televised games from the WNBA, NCAA women’s basketball, and the NWSL reached approximately 370 million viewer hours in 2024, up 430 percent from 2021. The NWSL garnered more viewing hours in the first half of its 2024 season (15.5 million hours) than its prior four full seasons combined, according to Nielsen data. The 2025 NCAA women’s basketball championship game, which took place in April, highlights this upward momentum. The game drew 8.6 million viewers, a decrease from the championship games in 2023 and 2024 that featured superstar Caitlin Clark, but still almost double the viewership of the 2022 championship game (in which Clark did not play). Our fan survey suggests strong continued growth for the WNBA. Almost half of avid WNBA fans plan to watch more live WNBA games in the next year, compared with only 27 percent of avid National Basketball Association (NBA) fans who plan to watch more (Exhibit 4).
Media rights
One of the main indicators that women’s sports have gained traction is the value that rights holders have attained in the past few years for their media rights. Viewership growth in women’s sports has attracted higher bids for media rights from major US media companies. In the most high-profile example, the NWSL saw an average annual value (AAV) increase of 40 times take effect in 2024 after striking new deals with CBS, ESPN, Prime, and Scripps Sports, showing how the popularity of women’s soccer has multiplied the value of the NWSL’s broadcast rights. The WNBA’s new $200 million AAV deal, which will take effect in 2026, is more than triple its current $60 million AAV deal from 2023 to 2025, outpacing the NBA’s renewal rate by 2.6 times. And ESPN’s new deal with NCAA women’s basketball was ten times more costly than its previous 14-year deal, which expired in 2024.4
These contracted deals will ensure an injection of revenue for rights holders, with our analysis projecting that US women’s sports media rights will reach $520 million by 2030 across all rights holders. Despite this dramatic increase in media rights revenue, women’s sports continue to be undervalued on a revenue-per-viewing-hour basis when compared with men’s sports. This suggests that, with maintained viewership, there is still substantial headroom for rights holders to increase the cost of media rights for televised women’s sports (Exhibit 5).
Sponsorship
The uptick in female viewers of women’s sports has marketers eager to strike partnerships with leagues and teams to build brand equity with this valuable audience. According to our marketer survey, marketers cite two top reasons why they are increasing sponsorship spend: to capitalize on growing viewership and fandom and a desire to champion inclusion and gender equality in their brand messaging.
Sponsorship is clearly on the rise. The NWSL has an all-time high of 13 league level sponsors for 2025, of which eight began partnering with them after 2023. The WNBA started off the 2025 season with a record 45 sponsors, including 14 added in 2024 and 2025 alone.5
The increase in sponsorship traction added more than $250 million to the women’s sports market in 2024. The NWSL quadrupled sponsorship revenue over the past five years to reach approximately $60 million in 2024, with the WNBA reaching $55 million in the same year, more than double what it generated in sponsorship in 2020.6 With eyeballs being a top metric for sponsors, more sponsorship dollars are poised to funnel into the women’s sports ecosystem as viewership and media attention increase and as individual stars boost their fanbases.
The opportunity for rights holders to improve sponsorship revenue is growing. After initial forays proved effective, marketers are increasing their sponsorship investments in hopes of attracting highly engaged women’s sports fans to their brands. For example, Ally Financial, a longtime WNBA sponsor, recently announced a multiyear deal to become the official banking partner of the league. Building on its sponsorship of the Las Vegas Aces, Ally also recently signed a new endorsement deal with WNBA rookie Paige Bueckers, who joins Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty and Sydney Colson of the Indiana Fever on Ally’s WNBA sponsorship roster.
“Partnering with the WNBA is more than just a sponsorship; it’s a statement Ally has been intent on making for quite some time,” says Andrea Brimmer, Ally’s chief marketing and PR officer.7 “Deepening our connection with the league gives Ally incredible new opportunities to grow our businesses.”
Attendance
Fans are not only tuning in to telecasts, they are also filling seats for live women’s sports events. The rise of superstar women athletes has led to a surge in fans attending live games, with many teams moving to larger stadiums to accommodate the 55 percent increase in average annual attendance between 2021 and 2024.8 For example, the reigning WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces moved a June matchup with the Indiana Fever this year to T-Mobile Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights, to increase seat capacity by one-third. Now, the team has announced that four of their 22 home games in 2025 will be played at T-Mobile Arena. And with about 15 percent of the 2025 WNBA season complete as of August 1, 2025 the league is on pace to increase total attendance by 25 percent this year compared with 2024.
For rights holders, increased stadium attendance is growing in parallel with increased ticket prices. Our analysis suggests that the NWSL and the WNBA combined increased ticketing revenue by approximately 60 percent from 2023 to reach $225 million in 2024, with continued revenue momentum expected. One of the latest NWSL expansion teams, the Denver Summit, received over 5,000 season ticket deposits in just the first weekend after announcing the franchise in late January of this year. The Golden State Valkyries, a WNBA expansion team that joined the league for the 2025 season, became the first WNBA team to sell more than 10,000 season tickets.
Expansion
Amid all this growth, it’s no surprise that leagues across women’s sports are expanding, adding teams in multiple new cities (Exhibit 6). In 2022, the NWSL entered key markets with Los Angeles’ Angel City FC and San Diego Wave FC joining the league, and two years later, the San Francisco Bay Area team Bay FC and the Salt Lake City team Utah Royals FC were added. Today, the NWSL counts 14 teams, with another two planned for 2026 (in Boston and Denver). Meanwhile, the WNBA is set to reach 18 expansion teams by 2030. The Golden State Valkyries debuted in 2025, the Toronto Tempo and the Portland Fire will debut in 2026, and new teams will follow in Cleveland in 2028, Detroit in 2029, and Philadelphia in 2030.9
Beyond the NWSL and the WNBA, a host of new women’s sports leagues in the United States recently launched or are scheduled to debut in the next year. The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) dropped the puck for the first time in January 2025 and already has plans to expand from six to eight teams by 2026. The volleyball league LOVB, Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL), and the three-on-three basketball league Unrivaled also debuted in early 2025, and there are plans for women’s lacrosse and rugby leagues to launch before the end of 2026.
The barriers holding back full monetization
Despite this impressive growth, revenue per fan for women’s sports still lags behind that of men’s. We see four main challenges stakeholders will need to overcome to reduce this gap in the near future.
Fragmented fan attention
Women’s sports teams face a pressing challenge that legacy men’s sports never had to contend with: They are competing for fans’ attention in an already crowded sports marketplace. Our survey shows that most women’s sports fans are men’s sports fans who are simply adding (rather than substituting) women’s teams to the portfolio of sports they already follow, stretching their available attention even thinner. According to our fan survey, avid women’s sports fans follow ten sports on average, both men’s and women’s, while avid men’s sports fans follow an average of eight sports. Even when fans would prefer to watch a women’s team over a men’s team, they sometimes default to a men’s match since it is more likely to run in a prime-time slot or on a top streaming network.
Fragmenting fan attention shows no signs of abating. But rights holders can maximize their competitive position by ensuring that stadium games are as accessible as possible, marketing their star players, helping league players build their social media engagement, and partnering with media outlets and sponsors to raise the profile of the property.
Fewer avid fans
Our fan survey finds that 39 percent of women’s sports fans consider themselves to be avid, which is a stark difference compared with the 69 percent of men’s sports fans who say the same (Exhibit 7). Most women’s sports fans are casual; they tune in to watch matches from time to time but do not seek out opportunities to do so on a regular basis. However, women’s sports fans who are avid are highly engaged. They spend 2.5 times more than women’s casual fans on tickets, team merchandise, and products from brands that sponsor their favorite teams and athletes.
However, our survey reveals another critical nuance: the two-thirds of women’s sports fans who identify as casual are more disengaged than casual men’s sports fans. A quarter of casual women’s sports fans cannot name a single player outside of their favorite team, and two-thirds plan to watch less women’s sports—not more—in the year to come.
These casual fans present a huge opportunity for rights holders, media companies, and sponsors: Converting them into avid fans could create significant long-term value. Women’s sports stakeholders can deepen their engagement and move fans further along the fan avidity spectrum by investing in fan data and digital engagement, narrative storytelling that elevates the social presence of players, and building relevant and authentic fan communities.
Lack of access
One of the biggest barriers to developing fandom for women’s sports is the difficulty that viewers face when trying to see their favorite athletes play. Unlike men’s sports, which are covered widely on large broadcasters such as ESPN, many women’s sports still lack a broadcast home and are available only on streaming or cable channels. In our fan survey, 77 percent of casual women’s sports fans plan to watch less sports in the next year, with one of the main constraints being that they no longer have access to the streaming or cable services that televise the games.
Some leagues have secured prime-time slots, such as the NCAA women’s tournament and the FIFA Women’s World Cup, but even highly prominent leagues such as the NWSL and the WNBA receive less airtime than men’s sports. For example, the NBA received 2.2 times more TV airtime than the WNBA in 2023 on a per-game basis. Despite these access issues, our fan survey finds that WNBA fans are eager for more engagement with their favorite athletes, even more so than NBA fans (see sidebar “WNBA fans versus NBA fans”).
To address this viewership opportunity, rights holders will need to carefully consider trade-offs between reach and revenue—as well as potential direct-to-consumer distribution opportunities.
Lack of maturity
Men’s sports at the league level have been around for decades and have a proven track record for delivering value to stakeholders. Women’s sports are enjoying a significant uptick in engagement, but long-term revenue growth will depend on building sustained viewership over time.
The women’s sports sector is on track to continue growing in viewership. However, investors, marketers, and media companies still apply a discount to women’s sports, which is partly explained by the sector’s shorter track record of performance and smaller scale compared with men’s sports. We see this reticence reflected in our sports marketer survey. Respondents name several areas where they need more visibility before accelerating their investments in women’s sports. For example, most respondents say their marketing efforts still yield better results in men’s sports, mostly due to the perception that women’s sports still have less demographic and geographic reach.
Lack of maturity in women’s sports presents a challenge that is difficult to address with interventions, as it mostly requires time. Rights holders for women’s sports may benefit from tailwinds as the high costs of men’s sports create budget pressures for broadcasters, many of which may look for less expensive alternatives for their sports portfolios. In the next five years, we expect more women’s teams to prove their ability to sustain and increase fan engagement and performance for commercial partners. In the meantime, stakeholders can focus on demonstrating measurable outcomes to build confidence in their property.
The time is now
Overcoming the main challenges to monetizing women’s sports at scale will not be easy. However, if stakeholders can successfully overcome these roadblocks, our forecast of $2.5 billion in value creation by 2030 could well be an underestimate.
Women’s sports have crossed an inflection point and enjoy a significant latent fan base and commercial potential. While women’s sports today represent less than 2 percent of the sports market in the United States, the sector is projected to grow 250 percent to generate $2.5 billion in value for rights holders by 2030. To capture this potential, stakeholders will need to overcome core challenges such as finding ways to connect with fans whose attention is fragmented or who lack access to televised and live games.
Each of the core stakeholder groups involved in women’s sports—investors, marketers, media, and rights holders—has a part to play in increasing the value of the sector. Investors can allocate capital to emerging women’s sports leagues and teams, recognizing the potential for continued revenue growth as the market matures. Marketers can develop targeted campaigns that highlight the unique personalities and achievements of women athletes to build emotional connections with fans, thereby boosting brand affinity among an engaged group of consumers. Media companies can increase the visibility of women’s sports by dedicating more airtime, digital content, and storytelling to the category, and in turn increase the value of advertising opportunities, while also potentially lowering their content budgets via higher growth and lower-cost intellectual property. Rights holders can offer premium experiences such as exclusive tournaments or behind-the-scenes access, which in turn could attract more sponsors and broadcasters.
These stakeholders stand to gain increased returns over the next five years from the efforts they start making now. But the rewards will be more than just monetary. Early movers in women’s sports have a chance to support the exciting new athletes of today while helping ensure their brands are deeply connected to the superstars tomorrow.
