Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and the WNBA’s meteoric rise, in a single chart
The WNBA’s new season is off to a meteoric begin, in only one signal of the momentum ladies’s sports activities presently have.
Within 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 %, stories the AP’s Doug Feinberg. In-person audiences are up 14 % in comparison with final yr as properly, Feinberg provides. And the league’s app downloads have equally skyrocketed, rising 146 %.
The WNBA’s success is due partly 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 ladies’s basketball throughout this yr’s NCAA match and set new information for scoring and viewership throughout their undergraduate careers. When these athletes had been lately 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, for example, introduced in 2.1 million viewers, probably the most of any WNBA recreation on ESPN platforms, in line with the community. And the celebs are bringing within the subsequent era of followers as properly: Notably, one of many largest rankings will increase the WNBA has seen is from women between the ages of 12 to 17.
These positive factors construct on regular progress the league has made in the previous few years. As Sportsnaut stories, 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 best variety of complete 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 properly. The league lately introduced the launch of recent groups within the Bay Space and Toronto, which can carry the variety of energetic groups as much as 14. The Golden State Valkyries and Toronto’s yet-to-be-named staff mark the primary expansions the WNBA has manufactured from its league since 2008 and sign new alternatives to succeed in individuals. They’ll imply extra gamers, new rivalries, and extra storylines to observe within the years to return.
“Final 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 middle Shakira Austin advised NBC Information. “I feel we’re simply going to proceed to raise and, you understand, hopefully our league is ready to, you understand, 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 ladies’s sports activities, together with main expansions in soccer, volleyball, and hockey. Collectively, this curiosity highlights the large 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 Tremendous League, a brand new ladies’s soccer league that already has eight franchises throughout the nation, will play its inaugural season this yr. A skilled ladies’s hockey league has additionally launched in 2024 with six groups, and a skilled volleyball federation has launched as properly with seven groups.
The brand new leagues mirror growing demand for ladies’s sports activities. In accordance with Nielsen, a rankings monitoring firm, curiosity and viewership in ladies’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 Nationwide Girls’s Soccer ultimate and the NCAA ladies’s basketball ultimate had been each broadcast throughout primetime on a significant community for the primary time in years. Assist and pleasure for ladies’s sports activities have additionally emerged as there’s been a higher dedication to gender parity throughout completely different fields, each in pay and in illustration.
Given the successes and expansions that completely different leagues are experiencing, Deloitte estimates that elite ladies’s sports activities as an business will rake in over $1 billion in 2024, representing a 300 % enhance in income in comparison with 2021.
More and more, as sold-out WNBA stadiums are demonstrating, this rise in enthusiasm towards ladies’s sports activities is changing into the norm.
