Women's Sport Isn't Behind. It's on Its Own Growth Path.

7 October 2026

The framing I hear most often goes something like: women's sport is where men's sport was 20-30 years ago. Be patient. The investment will follow, and parity will come.

It is meant as optimism from those supporting women's sport. But when I listen to people actually building in women's sport, the investors, executives and founders, almost none of them use men's sport as a comparison reference point. They understand that women's sport is different from men's sport: from the product to the services to the commercial models to the athletes and the fans.

The wrong reference point

Bex Smith, founder of Crux Football, put it plainly on the Business of Sport podcast: the structures of European women's club football, as they exist today, don't work for the women's game. That doesn't mean the answer is to provide more resource or investment, even though women's sport would welcome both of these. It means it needs to be built differently.

The equal pay debate is a good example here, as it is a legitimate social argument. It is not, on its own though, a good business argument, because you cannot apply a pay-parity framework when there are fundamentally different commercial structures, revenue bases and growth trajectories. Demanding increased pay before a commercial model can support it would work against an organisation's ability to grow sustainably. The social case and the commercial case are both real but they aren't the same, and these nuances are important.

The deeper issue I think about is inheritance. When women's sport takes on existing infrastructure, governance models, performance systems, commercial frameworks and medical protocols of men's sport, it is being asked to scale inside structures it was never designed for. I see this also in start-ups when they start to struggle. You have to find your own way and strategy to do things.

Building from first principles means asking what female athletes actually need, rather than adapting a male model and assuming it transfers. The recent FIFA-backed research on pregnancy and postpartum return to play is a good example of building for the women's game specifically.

From breakout to build-out

There is a reading of the recent numbers in women's football that sounds like bad news and isn't. Growth has slowed. I would argue that is a signal of maturity rather than a cause for concern.

PwC's most recent global sports survey still finds the large majority of executives, 91%, expecting double-digit revenue growth in women's sport over the next few years. What has changed is the ceiling. The forecasts of 30% and above that marked the breakout years have cooled to something steadier. That is the shift from breakout to build-out, from the first rush of attention to the slower work of building something that lasts. It is also where the real questions start, because a market in build-out doesn't only need capital. It needs the right capital, the right infrastructure, and a clear view of what success actually looks like. The floor needs to rise.

There is no single blueprint

The mistake would be to replace one borrowed template with another. There isn't a single right way to build in women's sport, and that is part of the opportunity. The strategy a club or a competition should run, the infrastructure the market still has to build, the kind of capital worth taking and the kind worth refusing, how long a realistic return actually takes, and the structures that let players, coaches and practitioners share in the upside, these are all still open questions rather than settled ones.

Each of them deserves its own answer, and I will come to them in turn. What matters at the outset is resisting the instinct to benchmark and being honest that building properly is a series of deliberate choices, with still quite a lot of unknowns. We are in the test-and-learn phase.

A market, not a movement

This is why I keep returning to the same distinction. Women's sport and female athlete health isn't small. It is early, under-capitalised, and being built in real time. Remember we are still talking about 50% of the population. That re-framing, from niche to early-stage, changes how investment should be allocated, how it should be measured, and the investment timeframe.

The patient-optimism version of this story says wait for women's sport to become a smaller echo of men's. The version I think about is that it should never be compared to men's sport.

So, if you stopped asking when women's sport will catch up and start asking what it looks like when it is built with its own strategy, the answer is it is still being built.

Sources

Bex Smith, Business of Sport podcast, Ep92, "Women's Football Should Be BIGGER Than Men's...And This Is Why": https://businessofsport.fm/podcasts/bex-smith (also on Apple and Spotify). Her ownership-model argument is also written up by SportsPro: https://www.sportspro.com/features/finance-investment/womens-football-ownership-crux-football-bex-smith-montpellier-fc-rosengard/

PwC Global Sports Survey, 9th edition, 2026 ("Blazing a new trail"), 517 executives across 48 countries. The 91% double-digit growth figure for women's sport is confirmed here: https://www.pwc.co.uk/industries/hospitality-leisure/insights/sports-survey.html