The WNBA’s new season is off to a meteoric begin, in simply one signal of the momentum girls’s sports activities at present have.
In the first 5 WNBA video games which have aired on ESPN, common viewership topped 1 million individuals and surpassed final yr’s common by 226 %, experiences the AP’s Doug Feinberg. In-person audiences are up 14 % in comparison with final yr as nicely, Feinberg provides. And the league’s app downloads have equally skyrocketed, rising 146 %.
The WNBA’s success is due in half to a first-year class full of school sports activities phenoms like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink who introduced unprecedented consideration to varsity girls’s basketball throughout this yr’s NCAA match and set new data for scoring and viewership throughout their undergraduate careers. When these athletes have been just lately drafted to the WNBA, their many followers adopted them, boosting ticket and merchandise gross sales in addition to TV scores.
Clark’s debut recreation for the Indiana Fever, as an example, introduced in 2.1 million viewers, the most of any WNBA recreation on ESPN platforms, in response to the community. And the stars are bringing in the subsequent era of followers as nicely: Notably, one of the greatest scores will increase the WNBA has seen is from women between the ages of 12 to 17.
These beneficial properties construct on regular progress the league has made in the previous couple of years. As Sportsnaut experiences, WNBA scores have been rising since 2021, pushed by the increasing fanbases of powerhouse groups like the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty. In 2023, the WNBA additionally noticed the highest variety of whole distinctive viewers it has had in greater than a decade.
The WNBA is working to drive curiosity by making long-term investments in the league as nicely. The league just lately introduced the launch of recent groups in the Bay Area and Toronto, which can carry the variety of lively groups as much as 14. The Golden State Valkyries and Toronto’s yet-to-be-named staff mark the first expansions the WNBA has manufactured from its league since 2008 and sign new alternatives to achieve individuals. They’ll imply extra gamers, new rivalries, and extra storylines to observe in the years to come back.
“Last yr, we had peaks in attendance, peaks in gross sales and tickets, and it simply exhibits that individuals have been devoted to this sport,” Washington Mystics heart Shakira Austin instructed NBC News. “I think we’re just going to continue to elevate and, you know, hopefully our league is able to, you know, back it up and be prepared for the attention we’re about to get.”
Such successes are half of a bigger surge of progress throughout girls’s sports activities, together with main expansions in soccer, volleyball, and hockey. Collectively, this curiosity highlights the massive enterprise of girls’s sports activities and the starvation from followers for these occasions.
There’s rising demand for ladies’s sports activities
As Axios reported, the United Soccer League Super League, a brand new girls’s soccer league that already has eight franchises throughout the nation, will play its inaugural season this yr. Knowledgeable girls’s hockey league has additionally launched in 2024 with six groups, and knowledgeable volleyball federation has launched as nicely with seven groups.
The new leagues mirror rising demand for ladies’s sports activities. According to Nielsen, a scores monitoring firm, curiosity and viewership in girls’s sports activities is up throughout the collegiate, skilled, and worldwide ranges, signaling robust viewers enthusiasm in these competitions.
This progress has been pushed by curiosity from new followers, the rise of stars like Clark and Reese, in addition to prime broadcast placement by tv networks. In 2023, the National Women’s Soccer remaining and the NCAA girls’s basketball remaining have been each broadcast throughout primetime on a serious community for the first time in years. Support and pleasure for ladies’s sports activities have additionally emerged as there’s been a better dedication to gender parity throughout totally different fields, each in pay and in illustration.
Given the successes and expansions that totally different leagues are experiencing, Deloitte estimates that elite girls’s sports activities as an trade will rake in over $1 billion in 2024, representing a 300 % improve in income in comparison with 2021.
Increasingly, as sold-out WNBA stadiums are demonstrating, this rise in enthusiasm towards girls’s sports activities is turning into the norm.