From soaring valuations to record audiences, women’s sports in the United States are having a moment. But the most interesting part of the story might not be the sheer growth, but the experimentation happening behind the scenes.
Every major women’s sports league in the U.S. is less than 30 years old. That blank canvas has allowed the people building them to move quickly and try things no one has before.
Take the National Women’s Soccer League. Commissioner Jessica Berman made the NWSL the first professional sports league in the U.S. to eliminate the draft entirely, giving players full free agency from the start. The league’s media rights deal reached $240 million in 2023 — a 40× increase from the previous agreement — and the league announced a mid-season expansion last fall.
Team valuations have followed. Angel City FC paid $2 million to join the league in 2022 and is now valued at $335 million, according to Sportico. The average NWSL team valuation has jumped 77% since 2024.
“The takeaway from the decisions we’ve made is actually less about the specific changes and more about approaching leadership from the perspective of ‘we don’t need to do things the same just because they’ve always been done that way,’” Jessica said on Rapid Response.
That mindset shows up clearly in Angel City’s founding story. A year and a half before signing a single player, co-founders Julie Uhrman and Kara Nortman asked fans what mattered to them — letting supporters vote on team colors, help design the crest, and even join Zoom calls with the marketing team. They also committed contractually to giving 10 percent of every sponsorship dollar back to the community.
"We've never built a sports team before," Julie said on Masters of Scale, "so we could build it the way we wanted to."
This spirit of experimentation comes up again and again among builders in the space. Micky Lawler, commissioner of Unrivaled — the new three-on-three professional women’s basketball league — described the freedom of starting fresh simply: “This leopard has no spots yet.”
Unrivaled has leaned into that flexibility. Instead of the traditional city-based model, the league plays out of a single location in Miami. It added a mid-season one-on-one tournament and took the league on the road to Brooklyn and Philadelphia (where it broke the arena’s all-time attendance record). Micky brings the same mindset to potential sponsors, asking them: “What have you been told in the past that you couldn’t do in sports? Let’s try to do that.”
The momentum isn’t just anecdotal. Sports betting platforms are seeing it in the numbers. Underdog founder Jeremy Levine called the Caitlin Clark effect “one of the best things to happen to our business.” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has described women’s sports as “a huge growth category,” pushing back on the assumption that the surge is being driven primarily by women. The same proportion of bettors who wager on NFL games, he said, are now betting on women’s sports.
"The attention is great, the investment is great," said ESPN journalist Sarah Spain on Rapid Response. "But what comes with that is an expectation that will suddenly turn women's sports into the same as men's. And there's a real gift in it not being the same."
You can watch all of these conversations on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
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