Earlier this 12 months, we wrote in regards to the surging recognition of girls’s soccer in the US, and the way the game’s progress promised to open thrilling new funding alternatives in markets across the nation. The Ladies’s World Cup, which came about in July and August, did certainly draw file attendance and TV viewership numbers all over the world, together with within the U.S., the place followers tuned in to watch Workforce USA’s matches regardless of kickoff occasions that had been usually in the course of the evening for many U.S. viewers. (And likewise, as we hoped, the NWSL has formally introduced {that a} new enlargement staff might be coming to the San Francisco Bay Space within the 2024 season.)
However soccer isn’t the one ladies’s sport having fun with the highlight this 12 months. A brand new ladies’s hockey league, the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League (PWHL) is ready to begin play in six markets throughout the U.S. and Canada in January 2024. The PWHL will develop into the one ladies’s skilled league in North America. The league intends to collaborate with the NHL to host video games and occasions across the U.S. and Canada, together with neutral-site video games exterior of the league’s six dwelling markets, with the purpose of elevating the profile of the brand new league, its groups and gamers, and the game typically. The league has signed a collective bargaining settlement with the Nationwide Ladies’s Hockey Gamers Affiliation (one thing prior ladies’s hockey leagues had been unable to perform) and has sturdy monetary backing.
Ladies’s basketball is equally on the rise and within the highlight. The 2023 WNBA common season noticed the league’s finest in-person attendance in 13 years, and the most important tv audiences in 21 years. The momentum has continued into the playoffs—the WNBA Finals, that includes the New York Liberty and the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces, are going down this week—the place Recreation 2 between the Connecticut Solar and New York Liberty had the highest common viewers of any WNBA playoff sport (excluding Finals video games) since 2001.
The WNBA will not be hesitating to leverage its rising footprint within the U.S. sports activities panorama. This week, the league introduced {that a} new enlargement franchise might be created the San Francisco Bay Space, and can start enjoying within the 2025 season. Will probably be the primary new staff since 2008. The staff might be a part of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors franchise, and the 2 groups will share a enterprise construction. The brand new WNBA staff will play on the Chase Heart in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, the place the Warriors have performed because the facility opened in 2018, and might be headquartered and maintain practices in Oakland within the facility which housed the Warriors previous to their transfer throughout the Bay. And the league isn’t stopping its quest for enlargement within the Bay Space, as stories have emerged that Portland can also be “below sturdy consideration” for a WNBA enlargement staff of its personal.
As was (and is) the case with soccer, the expansion of girls’s sports activities usually, together with hockey and basketball within the U.S., presents thrilling alternatives to membership house owners, supervisor, buyers, lenders, and advertisers. Simply as the ladies’s soccer world has benefitted from this summer season’s vastly in style Ladies’s World Cup, ladies’s sports activities, together with basketball could be anticipated to obtain a further enhance in consideration from the 2024 Summer season Olympics in Paris subsequent 12 months. Specific, stakeholders in and all over the world of girls’s basketball may have the possibility to seize the eye of recent audiences as the sport grows within the U.S. and all over the world. And because the WNBA provides groups to its ranks, extra alternatives will come up as groups hunt down new or transformed arenas and coaching amenities, gameday and tools distributors, broadcasting and media companies, and each bodily and digital retail areas.
And in one other parallel with the NWSL, the WNBA’s current franchises are seeing their valuations soar. Early this 12 months, the Seattle Storm offered a minority stake within the staff at a valuation of $151 million, which shattered the prior file for a WNBA franchise. With not less than one new staff becoming a member of the league in coming years, and an ever-growing variety of individuals tuning into the league’s video games, valuations for the franchise and the league itself are nearly sure to proceed rising.
In February, we mentioned “there are good causes to pay shut consideration to ladies’s soccer as an space of alternative within the months forward.” It seems like the identical may be very a lot true for girls’s basketball and hockey.
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