The WNBA’s new season is off to a meteoric begin, in only one signal of the momentum girls’s sports activities at present have.
Within the first 5 WNBA video games which have aired on ESPN, common viewership topped 1 million folks and surpassed final yr’s common by 226 p.c, experiences the AP’s Doug Feinberg. In-person audiences are up 14 p.c in comparison with final yr as nicely, Feinberg provides. And the league’s app downloads have equally skyrocketed, rising 146 p.c.
The WNBA’s success is due partially to a first-year class full of school sports activities phenoms like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink who introduced unprecedented consideration to school girls’s basketball throughout this yr’s NCAA match and set new data for scoring and viewership throughout their undergraduate careers. When these athletes had been not too long ago drafted to the WNBA, their many followers adopted them, boosting ticket and merchandise gross sales in addition to TV rankings.
Clark’s debut recreation for the Indiana Fever, as an illustration, introduced in 2.1 million viewers, essentially the most of any WNBA recreation on ESPN platforms, in line with the community. And the celebs are bringing within the subsequent technology of followers as nicely: Notably, one of many greatest rankings will increase the WNBA has seen is from ladies between the ages of 12 to 17.
These positive aspects construct on regular progress the league has made in the previous couple of years. As Sportsnaut experiences, WNBA rankings have been growing since 2021, pushed by the increasing fanbases of powerhouse groups just like the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty. In 2023, the WNBA additionally noticed the very best variety of whole distinctive viewers it has had in additional than a decade.
The WNBA is working to drive curiosity by making long-term investments within the league as nicely. The league not too long ago introduced the launch of recent groups within the Bay Space and Toronto, which can deliver the variety of lively groups as much as 14. The Golden State Valkyries and Toronto’s yet-to-be-named staff mark the primary expansions the WNBA has fabricated from its league since 2008 and sign new alternatives to succeed in folks. They’ll imply extra gamers, new rivalries, and extra storylines to observe within the years to come back.
“Final yr, we had peaks in attendance, peaks in gross sales and tickets, and it simply reveals that folks have been devoted to this sport,” Washington Mystics middle Shakira Austin instructed NBC Information. “I feel we’re simply going to proceed to raise and, you already know, hopefully our league is ready to, you already know, again it up and be ready for the eye 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 large enterprise of ladies’s sports activities and the starvation from followers for these occasions.
There’s rising demand for girls’s sports activities
As Axios reported, the United Soccer League Tremendous League, a brand new girls’s soccer league that already has eight franchises throughout the nation, will play its inaugural season this yr. A skilled girls’s hockey league has additionally launched in 2024 with six groups, and a skilled volleyball federation has launched as nicely with seven groups.
The brand new leagues mirror growing demand for girls’s sports activities. In accordance with Nielsen, a rankings monitoring firm, curiosity and viewership in girls’s sports activities is up throughout the collegiate, skilled, and worldwide ranges, signaling sturdy 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 Nationwide Girls’s Soccer closing and the NCAA girls’s basketball closing had been each broadcast throughout primetime on a significant community for the primary time in years. Help and pleasure for girls’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 business will rake in over $1 billion in 2024, representing a 300 p.c enhance in income in comparison with 2021.
More and more, as sold-out WNBA stadiums are demonstrating, this rise in enthusiasm towards girls’s sports activities is turning into the norm.