Is women’s sport the next big thing?

For decades, women’s sport has been consigned to the shadows while the spotlight shone on the men’s sporting landscape – awash in attention and flush with cash.

But developments in recent years have upended that paradigm.

Across a myriad of sports, records are being broken in the key metrics – in-person attendances, TV viewership, sponsorship dollars, prize money, grassroots participation and athlete compensation.

While there is by no means a genuine levelling of the playing field between the genders, the saturation of an already high viewership amid changing consumption habits, high barriers to entry for investment and lower return ratios mean that while the men’s game continues to flourish, it is no longer the biggest growth area in sport.

Boom spells huge potential

Viewership and attendance figures for 2025 sporting showpieces – football’s European Women’s Championship in Switzerland, the Women’s Rugby World Cup in England and the Women’s Cricket World Cup in India and Sri Lanka – all broke attendance and viewership records.

Last August, consultancy giant McKinsey & Company’s analysis showed that between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women’s sport grew 4.5 times faster than that the men’s.

It added: “The sector is far from reaching its full potential, leaving many billions of dollars on the table for stakeholders across the value chain.”

Professional services firm Deloitte in March 2025 projected that global revenues in women’s elite sports would reach at least US$2.35 billion (S$2.97 billion) for the year. In 2024, it was US$1.88 billion. A year earlier, revenues did not even crack the billion-dollar mark.

Said Pete Giorgio, Deloitte Global Sports practice leader: “We’re witnessing a transformational movement in women’s sports... The conversation is no longer about proving value but about scaling for the future.”

‘This is not charity’

The boom has kicked off, but it is still possible to get in on the action.

In 2024, a report from financial services company S&P Global said “women’s sports is yielding investment opportunities with relatively low entry-level valuations and high-growth potential”.

According to a study by sports and entertainment intelligence platform SponsorUnited from March 2025, women’s sport sponsorship is growing 50 per cent faster than men’s major leagues in North America.

And sponsors are getting more bang for their buck.

Eighty-six per cent of respondents for a 2024 survey by UK charity Women’s Sport Trust said that their sponsorship of women’s sport had either met or exceeded their return on investment expectations.

In dollar terms, every A$1 (S$0.90) invested by a sponsor into the visibility of women’s elite sport translates to over A$7 of customer value for the organisation, according to Sport and Recreation Victoria.

The message is clear, what was once seen as a charity case is now a market opportunity.

Michele Kang, owner of football clubs OL Lyonnes, Washington Spirit and London City Lionesses told The Guardian in 2024: “I’m on a mission to prove that women’s sports is good business. The gap between where it is and what it could be, is huge. I’m flabbergasted that no one saw that.

“This is not charity. This is a serious investment. As a woman, I think it’s almost insulting that these world-class athletes are being considered by some people as some sort of ‘DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) project’.”

Forbes in 2025 ranked the South Korean-born American businesswoman, who built her fortune in healthcare IT, as the fifth-most powerful woman in sport.

The 66-year-old has put her money where her mouth is.

Aside from ownership and investment in her football empire, Kang also pledged US$55 million to US Soccer for the development and research of the women’s and girls’ game and donated US$4 million to the US women’s rugby sevens team to help them prepare for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, another major investor in women’s sport – who launched the women-only athletics meet Athlos and has also invested in volleyball and football – was even more blunt than Kang.

The husband of tennis great Serena Williams told Time magazine last December: “There were lots of people trolling me... (saying) no one watches women’s sports, you’re an idiot. You’re gonna lose all your money.

“I saved those screenshots because I feast on their tears. Every time we hit a new revenue milestone, every time we have another sell-out crowd, every time we hit another record-breaking valuation, I update the world, and then I tag those trolls from five years earlier and thank them.”

One place above Kang in the Forbes power rankings is the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark, the highest-ranked athlete on the list. The 24-year-old has been credited as a catalyst in the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) soaring popularity.

Tennis holds the aces

The two highest revenue-generating women’s sports in 2025 were basketball (US$1.03 billion, 44 per cent) and football (US$820 million, 35 per cent), per Deloitte’s projections.

But it was tennis players who dominated Forbes’ list of highest-paid female athletes in 2025.

Ten of the 20 athletes on the list were tennis players, including table-topper Coco Gauff (US$33 million), who led a quintet including Aryna Sabalenka (US$30 million), Iga Swiatek (US$25.1 million), Zheng Qinwen ($22.6 million) and Madison Keys (US$13.4 million) in occupying five of the top six positions.

Only Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu infiltrated the leaderboard at No. 4 on US$23.1 million.

Other athletes on the list were Gu’s winter sports contemporary Lindsey Vonn (US$8.2 million); golfers Nelly Korda (US$13 million) and Jeeno Thitikul (US$10.3 million); basketball players Clark (US$12.1 million), her perennial rival Angel Reese (US$9.4 million), Paige Bueckers (US$9.1 million) and Sabrina Ionescu (US$10.5 million); track and field star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (US$8.2 million) and rugby trailblazer Ilona Maher (US$8.1 million).

The other WTA Tour representatives who made the cut were Naomi Osaka (US$12.5 million), Elena Rybakina (US$12.5 million), Jessica Pegula (US$12.3 million), Amanda Anisimova (US$11.3 million) and Jasmine Paolini (US$8.3 million).

As impressive as those numbers were, no woman cracked Forbes’ roll call of best-paid athletes in 2025 – footballer Cristiano Ronaldo claimed top billing at US$275 million.

Even within the women’s charts there were interesting discrepancies with Forbes breaking down the totals into on-field earnings – base salaries, bonuses, stipends and prize money – and off-field earnings that included endorsements, licensing, appearances, memorabilia and outside business returns.

Despite football and basketball being the highest revenue-generating sports, their players’ on-field earnings were dwarfed by those of their tennis- and golf-playing counterparts.

Footballers did not even make the top 20.

Trinity Rodman became the world’s highest-paid female player in January

, though her reported over US$2 million annual contract could not be considered for the 2025 list. Even if it was, it would be hard for her to make a dent compared to the likes of Sabalenka (US$15 million) and Jeeno’s (US$8.3 million) on-field earnings.

Similarly, the biggest contract in the WNBA is around US$250,000. The sport’s best-paid players make the bulk of their earnings outside the WNBA and players can now supplement their income in the upstart Unrivaled league, where players were paid an average salary of US$220,000 for the 2025 edition.

Charting their own path

Ilona Maher is perhaps the prototype for how female athletes can leverage their sporting prowess and personality to generate off-field earnings. Of her US$8.1 million accumulated in 2025, just US$100,000 came via on-field earnings.

While the development of women’s rugby is still relatively nascent compared to football or tennis, the 29-year-old American is the most followed rugby player on social media regardless of gender, with 9.4 million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.

A promoter of body positivity, Maher works with more than 20 brands, including Adidas, Coppertone and Maybelline, and will have her own Barbie doll in 2026.

In Singapore, 100m hurdles record holder Kerstin Ong has built up a sizeable social media presence, with nearly 140,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.

The 28-year-old told The Sunday Times: “In many cases, it feels like you are a content creator first and an athlete second. Brands still look very closely at numbers: reach, impressions, engagement, and the overall impact you can bring to their product or campaign.

“Many of my brand deals have come largely because of my social media presence and following, never once purely because of my sporting results... The reality is that there are still very limited paid opportunities on the ‘athlete’ side alone.”

Trailblazing national footballer Danelle Tan, meanwhile, believes women’s sport should not limit itself to following the models of the men’s game.

The 21-year-old plays in Japan’s top flight for Nippon TV Tokyo Verdy Beleza, having previously had stints in England, Germany and Australia.

She said: “It’s about rethinking what clubs can offer when they’re not competing with men’s football on scale. The women’s game has smaller crowds right now, so you can provide intimacy and access that simply isn’t possible when you’re filling 60,000-seat stadiums.

“The fan base for women’s football is so different from the men, even of the same club. They are two separate entities. So why would you treat them identically?

“There’s genuine commercial opportunity in letting the women’s team build its own brand, secure its own partnerships, and create its own identity.

“When you do that, people start viewing the women’s team as a team in its own right, not just an extension or a ‘by the way’ to the men’s team. Which is a huge and important difference to growing the game.”