Private equity interest in sports has never been higher, nor have team valuations. With many of the obvious themes—media rights appreciation, sports betting, scarcity—now well-known or played out, how much upside is left?
“We’ve gotten to a point where I think assets are plus or minus in that zone of being fairly valued today,” says Dave Dase, Global Co-Head of Sports Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, speaking as part of the firm’s discussion series on investment in sport.
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“I think the returns will still continue to be very, very good, but it’s been incredible in terms of what these returns have looked like over the last decade or so.”
It’s not all over, though. Women’s sports increasingly looks like the next big opportunity, and it’s still early days for outside investors.
Across leagues, growth has hit an inflection point. In 2024, live attendance grew 48 percent year-over-year for the WNBA and 42 percent for the NWSL. Broadcast viewership is also setting records: in the past three years, ratings for women’s college basketball, the WNBA, women’s international and club soccer, and women’s volleyball are all up at least 75 percent.
Person for person, a women’s sports audience can also be more valuable.
Data from Nielsen show that women’s sports fans are more affluent, more educated, and more tech-savvy. Nearly three-quarters are their household’s primary earner.
Even better, they demonstrate significantly greater purchase intent than their counterparts. Fans of WNBA teams, for example, are 13 percent more likely to purchase team merchandise than fans of NBA teams.
They also score higher on measurements across social media engagement and team interaction. But it’s not just with teams that fans are more deeply engaged: sponsors also see better brand interaction, lower acquisition cost, and better retention from women’s sports advertisements, according to research from Sports Innovation Lab.
The key takeaway, though, is that nearly 85 percent of brand sponsors are planning to increase their media investment in women’s sports channels.
Media rights trends are equally attractive.
Earlier this year, the WNBA signed an 11-year, $200 million annual agreement that is four times larger than its previous deal (and works out to a 20 percent year-over-year growth rate).
The agreement includes a three-year renegotiation clause, which could mean another step up relatively soon. The NWSL is expected to see similar momentum coming out of its own negotiation in 2027.
Both media rights and valuations are still comparatively small dollars today, but the trajectory is familiar.
“You can’t help but look at the example of what came before and use that as sort of a guide,” says Dase.
“So if you look at the NBA and where the WNBA valuations are relative to the NBA, they’re growing at not quite the growth rate that the NBA’s valuations were growing at, but it’s a pretty similar CAGR.”
“The NWSL is growing way faster than MLS. So if you use sort of those leagues’ growth as a guide, the WNBA and NWSL are well on their way to achieving valuations similar to what we see in the NBA and MLS today.“
Younger and more flexible women’s leagues also tend to have fewer hurdles to institutional capital.
Sixth Street’s investment in San Francisco’s Bay FC and Carlyle’s investment in Seattle’s Reign FC are early examples of controlling stakes that wouldn’t be possible in men’s leagues.
The other example from Reign FC is the possible outcomes for investors. Carlyle’s deal for the team closed in June 2024 and handed seller OL Groupe a 15x return over four years.