Women's Sports Are Booming. Ted Lasso Is Onto Something

It's Tuesday, August eleventh. I watched the first episode of Ted Lasso season four last night, and if you haven't seen the show, the quick version is: an American football coach goes to London to coach a men's soccer team with zero experience in the sport, and the team becomes successful over three seasons. At the end of season three, the coach goes back to the United States. Season four picks up with him returning to London to coach the women's team at the same club. The show is fictional but it got me curious about something real: are women's sports actually a business now, or are they still being treated like a cause? Because I keep hearing both versions depending on who's talking. Some people say nobody watches women's sports. Other people say it's the fastest-growing segment of the entire sports industry. I wanted to see what the numbers actually say, and the numbers are a lot more interesting than either side of that argument usually acknowledges. The growth numbers in women's sports over the past three years are unlike anything that's happened in American professional sports in decades, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

WNBA (Women's National Basketball Association) team valuations went up 52 percent in a single year, from an average of $272 million to $414 million per franchise. The 13 existing teams are collectively worth $5.4 billion. In the 29 years that Forbes has been valuing professional sports teams, only one published ranking has ever had better year-over-year growth: the NBA's 74 percent jump after Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion for the LA Clippers in 2014. The WNBA didn't have one inflection point like that. The growth has been building steadily and accelerating.

WNBA viewership in 2025 averaged 969,000 per nationally televised game, which is the league's best mark since 1998 and higher than the NHL's (National Hockey League's) average for nationally televised games. Attendance was up 34 percent to 3.15 million total. The NWSL (National Women's Soccer League) saw viewership increase fivefold between 2023 and 2024. In 2024, the NCAA women's basketball championship drew more viewers than the men's championship for the first time in tournament history. And across WNBA, NCAA women's basketball, and NWSL combined, fans consumed roughly 370 million viewer-hours in 2024, up 430 percent from 2021.

People watch women's sports. The data on this is not ambiguous. New WNBA expansion franchises are selling for $250 million each. Angel City FC, an NWSL team that didn't exist four years ago, is valued at $340 million. 86 percent of sponsors surveyed said their women's sports partnerships met or exceeded expectations. The "nobody watches" argument doesn't survive contact with the numbers. The audience numbers are clear, but the money flowing to the players tells a different story, and this is the part that I think matters most.

The average NBA salary is about $10.8 million. The average WNBA salary is about $120,000. That's roughly a 90x difference. And the instinct most people have is to explain that gap by pointing to the revenue difference: the NBA generates about $13 billion in annual revenue while the WNBA generates about $180 to $200 million, which is roughly a 50x difference. So the revenue gap is 50x but the salary gap is 90x, which means WNBA players are actually getting a smaller share of their league's revenue than NBA players get of theirs.

Caitlin Clark is the clearest example. Her arrival in the WNBA is credited with generating an estimated $1.6 billion in increased league and franchise valuation. Her rookie salary was under $80,000. The disconnect between what she generates for the league and what the league pays her is so large that it's become its own talking point, but it reflects a structural issue that goes beyond any one player. The WNBA's new collective bargaining agreement, which starts in 2026, includes the first comprehensive revenue-sharing model in women's professional sports history, and it's modeled after the NBA's structure where roughly 50 percent of basketball-related income goes to the players. If the WNBA moves from its current revenue share, which has been estimated at around 20 percent, to 50 percent, average salaries would more than double. But doubling $120,000 is still $240,000, which is still less than a third of what the average MLS player makes and a fraction of what NBA players earn.

The NWSL has a similar dynamic. The average salary is about $117,000 compared to $660,000 in MLS. The league just announced plans to commit $115 million in additional player compensation under its current CBA, which is a real and meaningful step, but the gap between the growth in attention and the growth in player pay remains wide. The question investors are asking right now isn't whether women's sports are popular, because the viewership data settles that, but whether the economics will eventually look like men's sports or whether there's a ceiling that keeps them permanently smaller.

The case for continued growth is strong. The WNBA just signed an 11-year media deal worth $2.2 billion, which is roughly three times the value of its previous deal. Five new expansion franchises are planned by 2030, each paying $250 million for the right to join, which is revenue the league gets before selling a single ticket. Sponsorship money is flowing in at rates that are growing faster than men's sports sponsorship, partly because brands see women's sports as an underpriced market where their dollars go further and the audience is highly engaged.

The case for a ceiling is that the revenue base is still tiny relative to men's leagues, and media rights, which are the single largest revenue driver in professional sports, are still orders of magnitude smaller for women's leagues. The WNBA's $2.2 billion over 11 years works out to about $200 million per year. The NBA's current media deal is worth about $7.6 billion per year. Television money is what funds player salaries in every major sport, and until women's media deals get significantly larger, the salary gap will persist even as the audience grows.

The honest assessment is that women's sports are in the early innings of a business that looks a lot like men's sports did 30 or 40 years ago. The NBA was not always a $13 billion league. In the early 1980s, the NBA Finals aired on tape delay because the networks didn't think enough people would watch live. The growth trajectory for women's sports is steeper than what men's leagues experienced at the same stage, which means the question isn't whether the business gets bigger but how fast, and whether the athletes playing right now will benefit from the growth they're creating or whether, like Caitlin Clark making $80,000 while generating $1.6 billion in value, the economics will catch up only after this generation of players has moved on. Ted Lasso season four is about a coach building a women's team at the same club where the men's team already succeeded, and the show is probably going to explore a lot of the dynamics we covered today. The audience for women's sports is there and growing faster than any segment of the industry. The business is following, with billion-dollar media deals and $250 million expansion fees. The piece that hasn't caught up is player compensation, and the math on why is straightforward: the revenue base is still small relative to men's leagues, even though it's growing faster. Whether that gap closes in five years or twenty is the question that everyone from investors to athletes to fans is watching right now.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.