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Today’s guest columnist is Haley Rosen, founder and CEO of Just Women’s Sports.
For those of us who have spent our lives in women’s sports, the current moment of hype and excitement has required us to straddle two realities at once.
On the one hand, things are changing in a real and substantial way. Viewership records are getting smashed across the board, marquee events are outdrawing their men’s counterparts, and brands and investors are diving into the space.
It’s been reported that the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership group will pay $250 million to join the WNBA, beating out eight other bids. NWSL franchise fees, meanwhile, are up 55x since 2021.
Despite losing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese to the WNBA, viewership of this year’s women’s college basketball season was up on ESPN, with a record 15 games drawing over 500,000 viewers, setting us up for what could be another blockbuster March Madness, starting today.
A paradigm shift is clearly underway, as investors start to see the business opportunity women’s sports represent. Instead of being treated like charities, these leagues are being valued like startups. Even Eminem wants in on the action.
And yet, most athletes aren’t feeling this change. They’re seeing the spike in interest, hype and franchise valuations, but their bank accounts aren’t getting any bigger. Angel City FC might have sold for a quarter of a billion dollars last year, but the average NWSL salary is $117,000 (compared to $594,390 for the MLS). Although valuations are soaring, the average WNBA franchise only earned $13.2 million in revenue in 2023, while the average NWSL team brought in $15.4 million in 2024. Almost all of these teams still operate at a loss, and no franchise is close to cracking the world’s 100 most valuable, all of which are worth $2 billion or more.
In the past, you could point to a lack of broadcast deals as hindering the growth of women’s sports, but this accessibility problem has mostly been solved. Yes, you might need a variety of subscriptions to make it happen, but today, for the first time in history, a majority of women’s sports events are just a few clicks away—the same as men’s sports.
So if the investment is there, the games are available and women’s sports have never been more popular—why are athletes still struggling? Why aren’t more franchises profitable? What’s actually stopping us from unlocking this space?
The answer, to me, is media.
Today, women’s sports are still reliant on a media ecosystem built around and for men’s sports. Leagues like the WNBA and the NWSL need these media partners to broadcast their games. The problem is they are never these platforms’ main priority. So even as they’re smashing viewership records, women’s sports are still fighting for scraps when it comes to coverage, promotion and shoulder programming.
Many of these platforms use a sub-brand to cover women’s sports, itself an implicit confession that their flagship IP will always prioritize men’s. These sub-brands are essentially side projects, run by talented people with good intentions, but never given the actual resources to thrive.
This “sub-branding” of women’s sports points to a larger problem when it comes to coverage. People assume that as women’s sports grow, they’ll earn more coverage from legacy outlets—that it’s simply a matter of extending what they’re already doing to include women’s leagues. In theory, these platforms could cover women’s sports. But in practice, doing so would put them in conflict with their core business, which is, and will continue to be, men’s sports.
The hard truth is that it doesn’t matter what viewership records the WNBA or NWSL break. The broadcast platforms they partner with have significantly larger deals with men’s leagues like the NFL and NBA, and so that’s where they’re going to focus their resources, because they need to make the most of those rights.
This content outside the games isn’t just important for driving tune-in. It’s what creates the immersive world of sports, giving fans common touchpoints and conversations to join at any time.
The NFL season has been over for weeks, but the NFL is still the talk of the sports world thanks to the relentless media coverage of free agency and the draft. Compare the sheer number of shows, podcasts, newsletters and social posts dedicated to NFL free agency vs. the NWSL season—which just kicked off—and you’ll start to get an idea of how large the coverage gap is.
This lack of coverage and content outside of the games is what allowed us to launch and grow Just Women’s Sports (JWS) from a single Instagram account to a multi-platform brand reaching 105 million fans a month. Our mission is to make women’s sports huge. And our belief is that in order for that to happen, they need their own media ecosystem. They need platforms, personalities and programs whose No. 1 priority is women’s sports. Not just a few times a year—but every single day.
The WNBA’s media rights deal runs through 2036, the NWSL’s through 2027. Women’s March Madness rights, sold as part of a package deal, run through 2032.
Two things can be true at once: These deals are a significant source of revenue, but leagues can’t rely only on their broadcast partners to provide the comprehensive coverage that will transform women’s sports from a series of isolated events into 24/7, year-round entertainment.
We have to look elsewhere to build an ecosystem where the lights never turn off, where coverage doesn’t stop after the final whistle, where highlights, analysis and storytelling are available every day, and where fans don’t just tune in to the occasional event—they engage and connect in real-time, around-the-clock.
Without such a media ecosystem, women’s sports will stay stuck where they currently are, with only a handful of prominent athletes breaking through, while the rest struggle to pay their bills.
Right now, we have momentum. Investors see the potential. The games are available, and millions of fans are tuning in. But this isn’t the finish line. It’s just the beginning.
We’ve seized the spotlight. Now we have to build the world.
(This article has been corrected in the sixth paragraph to note that the average NWSL salary is $117,000. A previous version reported $56,000, which is the league minimum.)
Haley Rosen is the CEO and Founder of Just Women’s Sports, a multimedia platform founded in 2020 dedicated to covering women’s sports.
