These offers are valued at $2.2 billion—or roughly six times the worth of the W’s present take care of ESPN—and would possibly attain as a lot as $3 billion with extra companions (like present WNBA broadcaster ION). In consequence, Wasserman’s women-focused observe, The Collective, expects NWSL viewership to develop 24% by 2027 and WNBA viewership to leap 32% throughout the identical span.
With ESPN seeing rising viewership for ladies’s school sports activities and new ladies’s leagues for volleyball, rugby, basketball, soccer, hockey, and softball all receiving media rights offers of their very own, Deloitte’s projection for $2.35 billion in ladies’s sports activities income by the top of 2025 made The Sports activities Bra’s franchising appear practically inevitable. Now, The Sports activities Bra is looking consideration to ladies’s sports activities groups all through its new markets, together with the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and Indiana Fever (hosts of this yr’s WNBA All-Star Recreation), the Girls’s Nationwide Soccer Convention’s Las Vegas Silver Stars, NWSL 2026 enlargement franchise Boston Legacy FC, the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League’s Boston Fleet, and the Girls’s Soccer Alliance’s St. Louis Slam.
“Collectively, we’re serving followers nationwide who’re hungry for areas that not solely champion ladies’s sports activities however create a group the place everybody looks like they belong,” Nguyen mentioned. “There isn’t any higher second than this to open these locations.”
