Of course women's sports are thriving. What took you so long to realize it?

Of course women’s sports are thriving. What took you so long to realize it? | Opinion

Posted by author January 24, 2025 Sports

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It is hard to resist the temptation to say, “We told you so.”

For years, women athletes and their supporters begged for more opportunities and exposure, only to be dismissed by gatekeepers who said no one cared about women’s sports and they weren’t worth the investment. Now the amount of growth and interest is dizzying.

Unrivaled, a 3×3 basketball league with many of the game’s biggest stars and a star-studded list of financial backers, launched.
The NCAA elevated women’s wrestling to a championship sport.
Yet another professional volleyball league — the fourth, for those keeping track — announced it will begin play next year.
The PWHL drew 14,018 for a game in Denver, setting an attendance record for women’s professional hockey in the United States.
The Indiana Fever became the latest team to commit to giving its players their own facility, unveiling plans for a 180,000-square-foot, three-story complex.
Chelsea is reportedly breaking the bank for U.S. women’s national team defender Naomi Girma, agreeing to a record $1 million transfer fee with the San Diego Wave.

And that’s just within the last two weeks! There’s also the rising valuations of NWSL and WNBA teams; A’ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese all getting their own shoes; and media rights deals that are bringing women’s games to larger and broader audiences.

Don’t forget, too, the fast-developing media ecosystem of websites, content creators and podcasts devoted solely to women’s sports. That includes Good Game with Sarah Spain, a daily podcast that’s part of the iHeart juggernaut and is designed to provide what Spain calls the “connective tissue” of results, news and game analysis that has long been missing from coverage of women’s sports.

“There’s a lot of frustration about what could have been earlier and what should have been. But I also tend not to waste my energy,” Spain told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s not saying, I told you so, as much as, let’s learn from this and recognize, even now, the investment and time being given are not proportionate to the economic opportunity.”

It’s a given that the slowness to get on board cost women athletes. But what’s mind-boggling is the people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe there was a market for women’s sports cost themselves money, too.

Millions of it.

Think about it. Not until last year did FIFA sell media rights to the women’s World Cup separately, previously throwing them in as a freebie with the men’s tournament. Which meant ABC and FOX were able to pull in record numbers of viewers during the U.S. women’s title runs without having to give FIFA a dime for the privilege.

The WNBA averaged 1.5 million-plus households on NBC in each of its first three seasons. But Mark Shapiro, then in charge of programming for ESPN, buried it on ESPN2 after the league’s media rights went to Disney.

“I told (NBA Commissioner David Stern) the WNBA stinks, it doesn’t rate, and I didn’t want it. No one watches it. Men don’t watch it. Women don’t watch it! My goal was to get it off the air,” Shapiro said in Those Guys Have All the Fun, a book about the network.

Predictably, the WNBA’s ratings — and any leverage the league and network had with advertisers and sponsors — plummeted.

The NCAA is still short-changing itself by lumping the women’s basketball tournament in with 39 other championships. The deal with ESPN pays $115 million a year while an outside analysis in 2021 showed the women’s tournament alone was worth $81 million to $112 million.

Sportswear companies, retailers and manufacturers are passing up on as much as $4 billion a year because of the dearth of women’s sports merch, according to an analysis by Klarna and the Sports Innovation Lab last year.

If the goal is to make money, which it is, ignoring women’s sports was bad business.

“Years ago, people didn’t understand the value of women’s sports. Convincing people of this value and convincing people of the opportunity of the female economy … has been the biggest challenge,” said Unrivaled commissioner Micky Lawler, who went to the new league after a long career with the WTA.

“There was a Harvard study … that said the female (economic) opportunity is larger than India and China combined,” Lawler added. “I think that’s what we’re seeing (now) in sports.”

Shapiro, now the president and chief operating officer of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment company, said his opposition to the WNBA was solely ratings-based. He’d been tasked with increasing viewership at ESPN, and wanted no part of anything that could drag them down further.

“The overall quality of play wasn’t ready for the ESPN audience. The sponsor support wasn’t there. If they’d been on ESPN the way David Stern wanted, people would have left and never come back,” Shapiro told USA TODAY Sports.

“It wasn’t that I was not a believer in women’s sports,” Shapiro added. “I knew it would come, but it would be in time. And, candidly, I was on a short leash.”

But the reasons given for not promoting or airing or bankrolling women’s sports are often two sides of the same coin. They don’t get good ratings, but you’re putting them in terrible windows and giving them no promotion. They don’t make money, but they’re making due with facilities they don’t own and there’s little to no merch. They don’t draw fans, but they’re playing in remote suburbs or sub-par venues.

Women’s sports have also been held to the ridiculous standard of being expected to be comparable to their male counterparts now despite the guys having had a half-century or longer head start.

“It’s frustrating because we want this to happen instantaneously, but it takes years and decades for people to change their points of view,” said David Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University and co-author of Slaying the Trolls. Why the Trolls are Very, Very Wrong About Women and Sports.

“People in the moment can’t see it,” Berri said. “They have their prejudices and their biases and they can’t get over it.”

Now that the market for women’s sports is undeniable, everyone wants in like a game of “follow the leader,” Unrivaled president Alex Bazzell said. Unrivaled is backed by multiple big-name sponsors, most of whom aren’t what you would consider “women’s brands.” It also has a TV deal, with Warner Bros. Discovery, that puts games on TNT and TruTV, and ratings for the two opening night games averaged about 312,000 viewers, respectable for a new product.

Each of the three new professional volleyball leagues has a TV deal. Nike president and CEO Elliott Hill said on an earnings call last month that the sportswear giant had “launched a women’s basketball program, which I didn’t think we’d ever do.”

“If women’s sports was a stock, I’d be all in. Times 10,” Shapiro, the former ESPN programming executive, said.

All of which is great. But imagine how much more money these folks could have made if only they hadn’t let fear, ignorance, misogyny or a lack of vision get in the way.

“If you’re reading this, you might already be part of the choir. But if you are someone in a position of power or responsibility, or know someone who is, this is not an, `I told you so’ moment. This is a, ‘Not too late’ moment,” Spain said.

“Ask yourself if you are maximizing your economic opportunities. Ask yourself if you’re looking in enough spaces to find the best products and stories,” she added. “There are a number of places that will give you the black-and-white you need to take into meetings to advocate for better coverage, better investment, better storytelling.

“Use it.”

Or find yourself passed by, just as women’s sports were for far too long.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.