The Business of Women's Sport: The Biggest Opportunity in Sports Media Right Now

Women’s sport has crossed the billion-dollar revenue threshold, shattered broadcast records, and spawned an entirely new ecosystem of media voices, platforms, and career pathways. For aspiring sports media professionals, it represents the most significant opportunity of the decade.

The Numbers: A Transformation in Scale

Any serious discussion of women’s sport media has to start with the financial picture, because the scale of recent growth reframes everything else.

Deloitte’s April 2026 report, Game Changers: Unlocking the Potential of Women’s Sports, projects global women’s elite sports revenues to reach at least $3 billion in 2026 — a 340% increase from the $692 million recorded in 2022. That is not a projection built on optimism.

It builds on 2025 revenues of $2.4 billion, which themselves surpassed Deloitte’s original forecast of $2.35 billion. The trajectory has consistently outrun the predictions. Deloitte’s revenue breakdown for 2026 is instructive: commercial revenues (sponsorships, partnerships, and merchandise) are projected at $1.4 billion, representing 45% of total revenue.

Broadcast rights account for $765 million, up from $551 million in 2025. Matchday revenue is forecast at $911 million, representing 30% of the total. In men’s sport, broadcast is the dominant revenue category. In women’s sport, it is still third, which means the upside in rights value as the audience continues to grow remains enormous.

In the US, the audience data is equally striking. Nielsen’s March 2026 report confirmed that American audiences consumed 46 billion minutes of women’s sport content in 2025, spanning women’s basketball, LPGA golf, Grand Slam tennis, softball, volleyball, NWSL, and international women’s soccer.

The 2025 WNBA season delivered the most-watched regular season and postseason on ESPN’s networks in the league’s history, averaging 1.3 million viewers across 25 regular-season games — a 6% increase year on year — and 1.2 million across 24 postseason games.

The WNBA’s new 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal, now active from 2026, is worth more than three times the previous arrangement and outpaced the NBA’s own renewal rate by 2.6 times. Amazon Prime Video alone carries 30 exclusively streamed WNBA regular-season games per season from 2026.

The individual broadcast milestones accumulating across 2025 and into 2026 tell the story in specific terms. The 2025 NWSL Championship final between Gotham FC and the Washington Spirit on CBS became the first in league history to surpass one million viewers, averaging 1.18 million and peaking at 1.55 million — a 22% increase over 2024 and 45% over 2023, with viewership among 18 to 34-year-olds up 70%.

Total 2025 NWSL season viewership across all Nielsen-rated platforms reached 20.16 million, an 18% year-on-year gain. Women’s tennis had its strongest US resurgence in years: the 2025 US Open Women’s Final averaged 2.4 million viewers on ESPN, a 50% increase over 2024, while the 2025 Wimbledon Ladies’ Semifinals were the most-watched in a decade.

And in 2026, the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics women’s hockey gold-medal game averaged 5.3 million US viewers, peaking at 7.7 million — the most-watched women’s hockey game in broadcast history.

The deals underpinning this viewership growth continue to reshape the rights landscape. ESPN’s new deal with NCAA women’s basketball cost 10 times more than the 14-year deal it replaced. Netflix acquired the US rights to the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cups. The WSL in England struck a five-year deal with Sky Sports and the BBC worth £65 million — a 63% uplift. In 2026, for the first time in LPGA history, every Tour event and every round will be broadcast live nationally across the US.

These figures represent an industry that was chronically undervalued catching up to its actual worth, and in many areas still has substantial headroom to grow.

Ampere Analysis research shows that women’s March Madness, valued at $0.67 per game day per engaged fan, remains at less than a seventh of the equivalent men’s metric. The WNBA stands at $0.34 per game day per engaged fan compared to the NBA’s $1.97.

The gap is closing, but it has not closed, which means the trajectory of rights value growth has not reached its ceiling.

The Broadcast Machine: How Television and Streaming Are Covering Women’s Sport

The broadcast evolution of women’s sport is perhaps the most visible dimension of the wider transformation, and it is unfolding across multiple models simultaneously.

In the UK, the Women’s Sport Trust’s February 2026 Visibility Report provides the clearest evidence of sustained growth. In 2025, women’s sport exceeded 10,000 hours of annual linear broadcast coverage for the first time in history, delivering a record 397 million viewing hours, surpassing the previous high of 384 million set in 2023.

Total viewership across the year reached 48 million, up from 45.2 million in 2024. The standout moment was the UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 final, which became the most-watched UK broadcast event of the entire year across all television programming, drawing a peak audience of 16.22 million across BBC and ITV.

The Women’s EURO semi-final against Italy drew 9.88 million at its peak. The 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final in London drew a record 82,000 fans inside the stadium, while Netball Super League viewing hours grew more than 300% across the year.

What the data also reveals is that women’s sport is punching significantly above its weight in terms of audience return on broadcast time. Despite accounting for only 8% of prime-time sports coverage in 2025, women’s sport generated 13% of total prime-time sports viewer hours on key channels.

Female viewership hit a record high of 41% of UK broadcast audiences, rising to 44% for the Women’s Euros and 43% for the Rugby World Cup.

Perhaps most significant for the long-term health of the industry: 55% of WSL viewers in 2025/26 also watched the Premier League, up from 43% the previous season. Women’s sport audiences are not a separate demographic. They are mainstream sports fans who are now showing up for both.

In the US, Nielsen’s 2025 data confirms a benchmark year across every major category. The WNBA’s most-watched season ever on ESPN, averaging 1.3 million viewers per game, was sustained even with Caitlin Clark, Napheesa Collier, and Angel Reese all missing significant time through injury, demonstrating that the league’s audience has genuine depth beyond individual star power.

The NWSL Championship crossing one million viewers for the first time, the US Open Women’s Final up 50%, the Wimbledon Ladies’ Semifinals at their most-watched in a decade: the pattern across sports is consistent.

And in 2026, the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics provided the punctuation: the women’s ice hockey gold-medal game, the US defeating Canada 2-1 in overtime, averaged 5.3 million viewers and peaked at 7.7 million — the most-watched women’s hockey game in broadcast history.

The streaming dimension is where the next frontier is being opened. The WNBA’s Amazon Prime Video deal, now live from the 2026 season, places 30 exclusively streamed regular-season games on one of the world’s largest subscription platforms.

Netflix’s entry into women’s sport rights — the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups — signals that the major streamers have moved from treating women’s sport as a reputational gesture to treating it as genuine premium content.

The WSL’s decision to move 70 live matches to YouTube generated 39.6 million views, making its channel the second most-viewed women’s sports league globally.

In 2026, for the first time in LPGA Tour history, every event and every round will be broadcast live nationally — another structural expansion of the coverage footprint that creates production, presenting, and journalism roles that did not previously exist.

The Digital Revolution: Social Media and the New Media Economy

If broadcast is where the mainstream transformation of women’s sport is most visible, social media is where its most interesting and structurally significant disruption is happening, and where the pace of change is fastest.

In 2025, Arsenal Women recorded the highest Instagram video views of any global women’s club, generating 336 million. Chloe Kelly emerged as the top British female athlete on both Instagram and TikTok, with 6.8 million Instagram engagements and 52 million TikTok views across the year.

Red Roses rugby players posted more TikTok content than any other England men’s or women’s team across rugby, cricket, and football between January and April 2025, with 6.7 million collective views — 75% higher than the England men’s rugby team.

BBC Sport’s social media coverage of Women’s EURO 2025 alone generated 231 million total views, with 45% coming from TikTok, where 76% of the audience was under 34.

The WNBA led global women’s sport TikTok views in the first five months of 2025 with 131 million. On Instagram, India’s Women’s Premier League recorded the highest engagement globally with 28 million interactions.

But the numbers only capture part of what is happening. The structural change is more significant: social media has fundamentally decoupled women’s sport coverage from the permissions and economics of traditional broadcast.

Athletes, leagues, and independent creators now build direct audience relationships without needing a broadcaster as distributor. Ilona Maher’s 2024 TikTok views placed her ahead of Taylor Swift, and her signing by Bristol Bears generated a 9.3-fold increase in the club’s Instagram engagement and a 281% rise in broadcast audiences when she featured in the squad.

The audience followed the athlete, not the league, not the broadcaster.

The independent creator ecosystem around women’s sport is particularly important for aspiring sports media professionals to understand.

Coach Jackie J built a TikTok women’s sport analysis community by covering the WNBA, NWSL, and women’s college basketball with the depth and narrative intelligence that most traditional outlets would not commit to. In Q1 2025, Just Women’s Sports and Togethxr drove 359 million and 62 million TikTok views respectively, outpacing major legacy media brands on the same platform.

The WNBA’s New York Liberty formalised this shift by creating “Influencer Row” at the Barclays Center: a designated credentialled area for content creators to cover games courtside. When a major professional league designs its arena infrastructure around independent digital creators, it is no longer a fringe development. It is a structural shift in how women’s sport distributes its story.

The independent media outlets built to cover women’s sport before legacy media took it seriously — The GIST, TOGETHXR, and Just Women’s Sports, all founded since 2018 — proved something important: not just that the audience existed, but that treating female athletes as elite competitors rather than curiosities generated loyalty that translates into sustainable media businesses.

Major outlets have taken note. USA Today’s Studio IX vertical, Bleacher Report’s B/R W brand, and Sports Illustrated’s SI Women’s Games event are all institutional responses to an independent sector that demonstrated the market before the mainstream arrived.

Some of the Voices Shaping Women’s Sport Media

The media landscape around women’s sport is being shaped by figures operating across every format; broadcast anchors and analysts at major networks, independent journalists and commentators building their own platforms, athletes using social media to bypass traditional intermediaries, and executives restructuring how the industry works.

Monica McNutt has become one of ESPN’s most prominent analysts, bringing sharp, data-informed WNBA and NBA analysis to studio programming. A former Georgetown standout, McNutt’s value lies in her ability to bridge the analytical and human dimensions of women’s basketball at a moment when the sport is demanding exactly that from its media coverage.

Jemele Hill represents the blueprint for the journalist who builds a platform that survives and thrives beyond the institutions they worked for. The Emmy Award-winning journalist and former SportsCenter anchor is the co-founder of Lodge Freeway Media, where she continues to amplify underrepresented voices and address the intersection of sport, race, and culture. Hill’s career arc — from mainstream anchor to independent platform builder — is one of the defining trajectories in modern sports media.

Maria Taylor was the first full-time female host of NBC Sports’ Football Night in America, and has covered the NFL Draft, the Olympics, and major collegiate events across her career. Her willingness to transition from ESPN to NBC demonstrated that the major network landscape was competitive for top-tier female sports media talent in a way that had no real precedent.

MJ Acosta-Ruiz became the first Afro-Latina to host a show on NFL Network, and expanded her reach to ESPN in 2024 as a SportsCenter anchor and sideline reporter. Her bilingual capability and advocacy for diverse representation in sports media have made her one of the most significant figures in the field.

Renee Montgomery is a former WNBA player who made the transition into media with both speed and substance, becoming the host of the Roku Channel’s Women’s Sports Now alongside comedian Sarah Tiana. Montgomery’s path — from athlete to media personality to advocate — is increasingly common in women’s sport and represents one of the field’s most interesting structural developments: athletes who know the game from the inside becoming the voices that explain it from the outside.

Coach Jackie J is among the most prominent of the independent creator generation. Her TikTok women’s sports analysis channel approaches the WNBA, NWSL, and women’s college basketball with a combination of tactical intelligence and narrative storytelling that has built a community of millions. She operates entirely outside traditional media structures, which makes her success both a validation of the independent model and a signal to aspiring sports media professionals that the gatekeeping of traditional journalism is no longer the only route.

In the UK, the growth of women’s sport has produced its own prominent media figures — from the broadcasters covering the WSL and Women’s Euros across the BBC, Sky, and ITV, to the independent journalists, newsletter writers, and social media commentators who have built dedicated audiences around specific sports and leagues that traditional outlets were slow to cover seriously.

The common thread across all of these figures, regardless of their format or platform, is that they built their credibility on the quality and seriousness of their coverage, treating women’s sport as sport, not as a charitable endeavour or a curiosity.

That foundation of credibility, built during a period when covering women’s sport seriously required genuine conviction rather than commercial incentive, is now an enormous professional asset as the commercial incentives catch up.

The Gaps: Where the Growth Is Uneven

Honest industry analysis requires acknowledging where the growth in women’s sport media is uneven, because the gaps are where many of the most significant opportunities for aspiring professionals lie.

The disparity between peak-event viewership and regular-season viewership is the most persistent structural challenge. The UEFA Women’s EURO final drawing 16.22 million UK viewers is extraordinary. But the domestic WSL season saw a 35% drop in average broadcast audiences in 2024/25, driven primarily by reduced Sky Sports scheduling alongside higher-profile competing content.

The Women’s Sport Trust’s data shows that while domestic women’s sport reached its second-most-watched year ever in 2025 (40 million viewers when excluding global tournaments), sustaining major-tournament energy through a regular domestic season remains the field’s most important unsolved problem.

The coverage gap between sports is also significant. Football dominates women’s sport media coverage in the UK — accounting for 55% of women’s sports viewing hours in 2024. Cricket rose to 25%, and rugby union to 11%. But athletics, netball, cycling, boxing, swimming, rowing, and numerous other women’s sports receive coverage that remains disproportionately low relative to the quality of competition and the size of their potential audiences.

These gaps are not just equity issues. They are story voids, and story voids are opportunities for journalists, creators, and media professionals who are willing to fill them.

The algorithmic challenge is real and underappreciated. Research published in 2025 found that algorithms trained on historical engagement data reproduce and amplify existing gender bias in content recommendations. Content recommendation engines on YouTube, TikTok, and streaming platforms prioritise what is already popular, which, historically, has meant men’s sport.

The consequence is that even as women’s sport generates genuine engagement, it can remain structurally disadvantaged in the recommendation layers that determine what audiences see.

Understanding this dynamic is important for sports media professionals working in digital: growing a women’s sport audience on social platforms requires active strategies to overcome algorithmic headwinds, not just faith that good content will find its audience.

The New Infrastructure: What the Industry Is Building

The institutional response to the growth of women’s sport media is accelerating, and the new infrastructure being built represents a significant expansion of the professional landscape.

Deloitte’s Game Changers report notes that at least five WNBA organisations have announced new dedicated training facilities in 2026, including a reported $150 million commitment for the Los Angeles Sparks, described as the largest single-team infrastructure investment in the history of women’s sport.

In the UK, London City Lionesses announced a performance campus designed specifically around the physiological requirements of female athletes. Infrastructure investment at this scale drives media investment: bigger facilities, more professional environments, and higher production expectations follow.

USA Today launched Studio IX, a dedicated women’s sport content vertical featuring news, multimedia content, and events coverage spanning the WNBA, WTA, LPGA, college sport, and the Olympics — backed by the publication’s network of 200 local outlets.

Sports Illustrated announced the SI Women’s Games, a biennial event featuring athletes across six sports with prime-time broadcast distribution through Scripps Sports and ION. The All Women’s Sports Network, co-founded by Whoopi Goldberg and JungoTV, launched in December 2024 and now reaches more than 2 billion people across 65 countries across multiple sports.

Bleacher Report created B/R W, a dedicated women’s sport brand active on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. iHeartMedia’s Women’s Sports podcast network, launched in summer 2024, had eight new shows planned for early 2025.

Each of these developments represents not just a media product but a hiring decision, with a commitment to staffing, producing, and distributing content about women’s sport at a professional level.

The pipeline of roles that flows from institutional investment at this scale is one of the clearest arguments for why aspiring sports media professionals should be actively building fluency in women’s sport now rather than waiting for the market to mature further.

The Opportunities: What This Means for Aspiring Sports Media Professionals

The practical implications for someone building a sports media career are significant and multi-dimensional. Here is how the women’s sport media landscape creates specific opportunities across the full spectrum of sports media roles.

For journalists and writers 

The coverage gap is the opportunity. Women’s sport at every level below the elite national team and major league level remains dramatically underserved by traditional media. The women’s football club in your region. The women’s rugby academy producing international players. The female athlete in a non-mainstream sport who has a story that has never been told.

These are the stories that are both genuinely worth telling and that will build your portfolio and your authority in a space where serious journalism is still scarce.

For broadcast professionals

The expansion of rights deals across networks and streaming platforms is creating production roles, researcher positions, and presenting opportunities at a rate that the traditional men’s sport media market cannot match.

The WNBA’s new 11-year deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal is not just a rights agreement. It is a staffing commitment. Production teams will expand. Presenting rosters will grow. Research and analytics roles will be created. The same is true across every major women’s sport rights deal signed in the past two years.

For social media and content creators

The women’s sport space is one of the few areas of the creator economy where producing genuinely high-quality, insightful, community-building content about a specific niche can still build a meaningful audience from a standing start.

The major leagues (WNBA, NWSL, WSL, WTA, etc.) are actively seeking credentialled creators. The WNBA’s Influencer Row model is being replicated. Independent creators covering women’s sport with intelligence and consistency are being picked up by major networks, offered partnerships with leagues and brands, and building businesses around their audiences.

Katie Feeney went from independent TikTok sports creator to hired by ESPN. The pathway from independent women’s sport creator to institutional media role is now a documented, repeatable career trajectory.

For PR and communications professionals

The growth of the women’s sport industry is generating an enormous demand for communications expertise at clubs, leagues, governing bodies, and the brands investing in women’s sport.

The NWSL had 13 league-level sponsors for 2025; each of those sponsors has an activation to manage, a story to tell, and an audience to reach. Women’s sport organisations, having operated for years without the resources of their men’s equivalents, are professionalising their communications infrastructure rapidly, and looking for people who understand both sports media and the specific dynamics of women’s sport audiences.

For data journalists and analysts

The quantification of women’s sport (viewership metrics, engagement data, sponsorship ROI, rights valuations) is itself a beat that barely existed a decade ago and is now generating significant specialist demand.

The McKinsey, Deloitte, Ampere, and Women’s Sport Trust reports cited in this article all required researchers, analysts, and communicators to produce them. Sports business journalists who can read, interrogate, and contextualise this kind of data are among the most valuable hires in the current market.

For photographers and videographers

The expansion of broadcast and digital coverage — particularly the move of content to YouTube and social platforms — is generating significant demand for visual content production around women’s sport at every level.

Budget constraints have historically meant that women’s sport at the domestic level has often gone photographed and filmed by one person where men’s equivalent events might have a full production team.

The gap is closing, and the professionals who have been covering women’s sport during its growth phase — building relationships, understanding the stories, having the access that comes from showing up before the spotlight arrived — will be the ones who are best positioned as the investment in production quality follows the investment in rights.

What Women’s Sport Teaches Sports Media Professionals

Beyond the practical opportunities, the women’s sport media landscape contains some of the most instructive lessons available about how sports media is evolving and what the future of the industry might look like.

Audience ownership beats platform dependency

The independent creators and niche outlets that built dedicated women’s sport audiences (through newsletters, podcasts, and social channels) are dramatically more resilient than the traditional media outlets whose women’s sport coverage depended on editorial decisions and broadcast schedules controlled by others.

When NBC Sports or Sky Sports decided women’s football was worth prime-time coverage, everything changed for the audiences those broadcasters reached. But the audiences that Coach Jackie J, Just Women’s Sports, and The GIST had built through consistent, quality, audience-first journalism were never dependent on those decisions. Own your audience and you own your career.

The early-mover advantage is significant

Every sports journalist who started covering women’s sport seriously when it was commercially marginal — when there were no resources, no press allocation, no broadcast deals worth mentioning — now has a decade of relationships, access, and institutional knowledge that no amount of money can replicate instantly.

The lesson for aspiring professionals is direct: find the underserved story, the undervalued sport, the uncovered community, and cover it with the seriousness it deserves before the commercial interest arrives. When it does, your position will be unassailable.

Authenticity builds more durable audiences than production values

The most-watched clip from the 2025 Women’s Euros — Lucy Bronze strapping her thigh during a match, playing through a fractured tibia that she had kept secret — generated 12.5 million views across BBC Sport’s social channels.

It was not a produced media moment. It was a human story captured in the moment and shared. The sports media professionals who understand how to identify, frame, and amplify those human moments — regardless of the format or platform — are the ones building the most durable audience relationships.

Speed of growth creates space for new voices

When an industry grows at 25% year-on-year, the institutional structures cannot keep pace. The talent pipelines that exist for established sports media beats are not sufficient to cover the expanded footprint of women’s sport media. That structural gap is opportunity.

The journalist who covers the WSL with genuine depth and consistency. The podcaster who produces intelligent women’s cricket analysis. The social creator who covers Premiership Women’s Rugby with the kind of insider knowledge that TV cannot provide.

These are not just passion projects. They are positioning decisions in a market where the demand for quality coverage is running ahead of the supply.

The Road Ahead

The trajectory of women’s sport media is not difficult to read. The rights deals are in place. The viewership is growing. The advertising investment is accelerating. The independent creator ecosystem is maturing. The institutional infrastructure (new networks, new verticals, new platforms) is being built.

What remains uncertain is the distribution of who benefits. The professionals and organisations that have positioned themselves deliberately and early will have structural advantages as the industry continues to scale. Those who wait for the market to be fully developed before entering it will find a more competitive landscape, higher barriers to entry, and fewer of the early-mover advantages that are currently available.

For aspiring sports media professionals, the question is not whether women’s sport media is worth taking seriously. The numbers settled that question. The question is how quickly and how deliberately you are moving to build your position within it.

The biggest sports media story of the decade is unfolding in real time. It needs people to cover it, produce it, analyse it, communicate it, photograph it, broadcast it, and build audiences around it.

The infrastructure for doing all of that is being constructed right now. The most strategic move available to an aspiring sports media professional in 2026 is to be part of building it.

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