Women’s sports properties often claim to have a differentiated audience than their male counterparts.

“There is something incredibly special about women’s football, and it also has a very different audience from men’s football,” former Arsenal CEO Vinai Venkatesham said at UEFA’s Business Case for Women’s Football event in May 2024.

Outgoing WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert expressed a similar sentiment in a July 2025 interview with NBC Sports Bay Area.

“We are obviously more diverse. We have more women fans, more families, kids,” she said.

Engelbert noted that just 4% of Golden State Valkyries season-ticket holders had previously owned Golden State Warriors season tickets as evidence.

But that framing is incorrect, and certain to lead to incorrect decisions being made. 

"[Most people] think about and talk about fandom as if it's vertical. [They view] NBA fans as distinct from WNBA fans as distinct from NFL fans; [separate] cohorts, unique groups of people,” Ben Valenta (EVP, strategy and analytics, Fox Sports) said. However, “it's more accurate to think about fandom as [being] horizontal. The more sports one follows, the more likely they are to follow the next sport. Fandom is like a muscle [in that regard]. Think about it this way: would it be easier to sell an NBA fan on another version of basketball or convince someone who isn't interested in basketball to start loving the game? Of course, the [former] is more likely to opt into another [league]." 

While the demographics Engelbert cited are certainly represented within the WNBA fan base, they only account for a portion of the total opportunity. And just because a women’s team’s season-ticket holder has never owned seats to the NBA franchise in the local market, doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t a fan of the team or men’s league.

"The majority of WNBA fans, those who attend [and] watch, are people engaging with the major sports leagues,” Valenta said.

He would know. He and Fans Have More Friends co-author David Sikorjak recently conducted a study that surveyed more than 84,000 respondents, including ~17,000 self-identifying WNBA fans. 84% of those individuals reported watching NFL games and 83% said they tuned in for NBA games at least a few times per year.

Engelbert used the composition of the Valkyries’ STH base as evidence supporting her assertion that the league is attracting a distinct fan base. But that conclusion cannot necessarily be drawn from a single data point. 

"If you're focused on season ticket holders, you're looking at a narrow slice of the [team fan base] to [begin] with,” Valenta said. “Having two season ticket packages is an edge case given the money and time involved [in purchasing and using them]. Framing season ticket purchasers [as representative of the entire audience in a single market, never mind across the league] is a trap."

Women’s sports properties tout incremental audiences to appeal to media partners and sponsors. The logic is brands spending in men’s sports will supplement those investments with women’s team and league partnerships that can deliver unreached segments.

Of course, college-educated females with household incomes above $100,000 also represent a particularly valuable consumer segment. 

“They control a lot of the purchasing decisions [and] are a lot more likely to be word-of-mouth spreaders [for your product],” Valenta said.

A women’s team’s season ticket holder base can certainly look different from the fans attending men’s games in the same city. At scale though, women’s sports properties are attracting many of the same consumers. 

“It’s not some wholly new group of people showing up. It's the engaged, High Value Fans,” Valenta said.

High Value Fans are defined by how they engage with the Big 6 sports: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football and men's college basketball.

“The vast majority of Liberty fans were caught up in the Knicks championship run [last summer],” Valenta said. “And Valkyries fans celebrating [their] championship right now are also excited about the ‘Niners."

It just might not feel that way because social media has turned much of the women’s sports conversation into a left-leaning political battleground that distorts the reality of who is actually engaging with these leagues. 

"Perception is largely driven by the funhouse mirror that is social media,” Valenta said. “It feels like what resonates online is a reflection of reality, but when you actually talk to fans [as we have], you see the distortion: social media is not the real world."

If women’s sports properties are largely attracting the same audiences as the men’s leagues, they are, by proxy, competing for the same pool of commercial dollars. 

However, it also means there remains significant opportunity to grow the business. Just a quarter of the NFL’s much larger fan base currently watches WNBA games.

Recognition of the audience overlap can benefit men’s properties as well. Big Four teams should be able to convert a percentage of women’s sports season-ticket holders into paying customers of their own.

Having a clear picture of who the fan base is should help rights owners across the board to better market their product––assuming they understand how fandom works (see: horizontal) and why fans engage (i.e. community). 

Teams within the same market are not competing with one another for share of wallet or mind. They can and should be working collaboratively to cultivate more High Value Fans and grow their respective businesses. 

“Baseball should be marketing football and football should be marketing baseball,” Valenta said.

And the local women’s teams in town should be looking to partner with both.  

On the latest episode of JaneWallStreet Presents: At The Table, a biweekly podcast exploring the intersection of sports, media, and finance through the lens of (mostly) female decision-makers, JaneWallStreet Executive Chair Deirdre Lester sits down with Premier Lacrosse League Co-Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer Paul Rabil.

The two surface and discuss a range of actionable insights, including how challenger leagues can use their first media deal to build a case for the next one, why they should build an investor base that brings more than capital and why pro leagues are best positioned to rebuild recreational sports.

📺 Watch the full episode on JohnWallStreet’s YouTube page.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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