Girls’s sports activities have been having fun with greater than a little bit of a renaissance as of late — and with the entire upcoming money-making offers, it is clear that this renaissance consists of sufficient of a monetary warfare chest for individuals to lastly take the feminine division of all skilled sports activities simply as significantly as their male counterparts.
The so-called “Girls’s Sports activities Renaissance” first kicked off again in June, when the brand new media deal for the WNBA was introduced. As has been beforehand reported, the league will get a median of $200M yearly from the agreements, which have been negotiated in tandem with negotiations for its new 11-year TV rights offers value an estimated $76B.
The league could obtain much more cash from different media companions. In its twenty eighth season, the WNBA has set new milestones for attendance, recognition, League Cross subscriptions, app downloads, product gross sales, and social media interplay.
And that is not all.
Based on Yahoo! Sports activities, the Girls’s Tremendous League — the feminine division {of professional} males’s soccer, or soccer because it’s recognized overseas — negotiated what it is calling “probably the most important broadcast partnership ever for ladies’s soccer,” value about $84M, as of Oct. 30, based on sources near the matter. The earlier broadcast settlement, which was negotiated again in 2021, was solely value about $9M a yr.
To not be outdone, Sports activities Illustrated is reporting that the roster measurement of Unmatched, a six-team 3-on-3 summer season girls’s basketball league that was co-founded by Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty and Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx, goes up from 5 to 6 gamers per squad. Play on the Miami-based circuit is predicted to begin in 2025.
Collier credited the league’s surge in profitability for the growth.
“We’re in a position to do that as a result of we outperformed our monetary projections,” she stated to The Athletic. “So now we get to do one thing that we wished to do sooner or later which is give extra individuals spots in Unmatched.”
Compared to the WNBA’s earlier minimal of $64K per yr, Unmatched is now in a position to supply a beginning wage to its gamers of $100K per yr. Whereas that is nonetheless far lower than what the typical NBA participant earns in a given yr (excluding, after all, the marquee superstars), it is nonetheless an indication that the profitability of girls’s sports activities is on the rise.
ESPN, too, is taking discover of the uptick in curiosity in girls’s sports activities and is speaking about enhancing the protection and time slots they supply for broadcasts within the first place and is lastly fascinated by launching a present devoted solely to girls’s sports activities.
Briefly, girls’s sports activities are critical contenders for each fan and promoting {dollars}, and it could not be a greater time than ever to make it occur.
