With almost 9mn followers across Instagram, TikTok and other platforms, Ilona Maher is easily the most followed star at the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup.
She and her US teammates were heavily beaten by hosts and tournament favourites England in their opening game. But the 29-year-old American centre is nevertheless building on her team bronze in the women’s rugby sevens at the 2024 Olympics, her part in drawing record crowds at Premiership Women’s Rugby side Bristol Bears, and before that her dominance of the US college championships.
Away from rugby, she finished runner-up in the US reality TV series Dancing with the Stars last year and has been linked with professional wrestling. Her social media clips, often advocating around body positivity and gender issues, attract millions of views.
Maher is among a new generation of star female athletes, including basketball sensation Caitlin Clark, gymnast Simone Biles and English footballer Chloe Kelly, whose fame extends far beyond sporting arenas.
“We should give [Maher] an awful lot of credit for developing that sort of position based on her deep-held beliefs, you know, around gender equity, around body strength, body confidence, female empowerment,” says Sally Horrox, chief of Women’s Rugby World Cup.
World Rugby, the game’s international governing body, is embracing Maher’s fame ahead of its flagship tournament, which culminates with a sold-out final at the 82,000 seat Allianz Stadium Twickenham, the home of English rugby, on September 27.
More than 375,000 tickets have been sold for a tournament featuring 16 teams playing in eight stadiums up and down the country. When England hosted the competition in 2010, 12 teams had to make do with just two grounds in the south of the country.
Big personalities such as Maher have helped push elite women’s sport to what many believe is an inflection point. More than 650,000 football fans attended the recent Uefa Women’s Euro 2025, which attracted a cumulative live audience of over 400mn across the tournament. In North America, the popularity of domestic sports such as the Women’s National Basketball Association and National Women’s Soccer League is also growing.
Governing bodies have become increasingly adept at turning the buzz around big competitions into increased grassroots participation and commercial opportunity. They are identifying revenue streams beyond the broadcast revenues and gate receipts that typically underpin male sport.
The female car racing series F1 Academy has attracted sponsorship from beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury, while Arsenal Women created a fashion collection with designer Stella McCartney. Cricket has brought more girls, women and families to the sport in England and Wales through the creation of the Hundred, a short-format competition.
Total revenues across elite female sport are expected to exceed $2.35bn this year, according to Deloitte. Yet it remains in a very different league to men’s in financial terms, apart from a few exceptions such as tennis.
World Rugby has planned for the 2033 Women’s World Cup, due to be held in the US, to be the first to turn a profit. In football, the entire wage bill for England’s 12 Women’s Super League teams is around £50mn — less than a sixth of the wage bill at Liverpool FC, last season’s men’s Premier League champions.
Those developing women’s sport say it will take time to narrow such vast disparities. “When you think around cycles of growing professional sport, you know, it happens in decades,” says Nikki Doucet, chief executive of the WSL, which became a full-time professional league in 2018 — more than 130 years after the men’s game turned professional.
“We’re still at a very early stage of development from a professionalisation of domestic women’s sport leagues, irrespective of which sport you’re talking about.”
Genevieve Shore, executive chair of Premiership Women’s Rugby, acknowledges that the game at club level in England is still “absolutely tiny”.
“[The PWR is] two years old, that’s what we are,” she tells the FT. “Men’s rugby went professional in 1995. Women’s is going professional in 2025.”
In a 78-page document published ahead of the 2025 tournament, World Rugby set out its blueprint for growth in the women’s game. Key to the five-step plan is using broadcast deals and social media to increase visibility to fans and “make it impossible to miss” women’s rugby.
Although those with direct knowledge of the numbers say the World Cup is set to generate about £36mn in commercial, ticketing and media rights revenue, roughly double the previous tournament, its organisers have prioritised visibility rather than revenue maximisation from broadcasters and regard the loss it is likely to make as an investment.
“It’s unrealistic to expect women’s sport to be profitable in a few short years when that’s not how it happened in the men’s game,” says Alan Gilpin, chief executive of World Rugby. “This is a growth and impact journey.”
“This is a big stage, a really big stage for women’s sport” said Chris Mead, chief marketing officer of insurance company and world cup sponsor Gallagher. “The women do a phenomenal job from a social media perspective, really connecting with their fans, not just on social but on the pitch, in communities, schools and clubs.”
World Rugby also wants to empower players to tell their stories through documentaries and social media, build momentum through the “spikes of interest” created by international tournaments, attract fans to domestic clubs as well as national teams, and encourage more girls and women to play the game.
The sport has already come a long way since the first Women’s World Cup took place in Wales in 1991, without the approval of what was then called the International Rugby Football Board. World Rugby SVNS, a seven-a-side version of the women’s game, has taken place since 2012, while women have played sevens rugby at the Olympics since Rio in 2016.
The aim, says Horrox, is to transform the game from a niche discipline into a global force and turn spikes of interest into a loyal following between major events such as the World Cup and the annual Women’s Six Nations, a tournament between European national sides.
Premiership Women’s Rugby, the highest level of the game in England, is hoping to emulate football’s Lionesses, whose victories at Euro 2022 and again at Euro 2025 have spurred interest in women’s football and the WSL.
PWR chair Shore says almost 130 players, equivalent to about one in four at the Women’s Rugby World Cup, play in the league. But only around a third of its players are fully professional and the league barely generates revenue.
In a milestone attempt to reach fans on TNT Sports, BBC Sport and Google’s YouTube, all 75 PWR matches in the 2025-26 season will be screened live for the first time.
Its peak audience last season was 152,000, a record. Average audiences for live PWR matches on TNT Sports, a pay-TV channel, rose 86 per cent to 21,900, according to Women’s Sport Trust.
But Shore says women’s rugby must also do a better job of explaining to sponsors that digital media is changing the way fans engage with the sport. New metrics are coming into play, she says — PWR estimates that it reached almost 25mn accounts on Meta and TikTok in 2024-25.
“That blows our broadcast [audience] out of the water. But if I talk to businesses, their [chief marketing officers] ask how many watched the TNT live match,” she says. “What are the measures that matter in the next five years?”
Women’s rugby is competing for attention from fans, broadcasters, sponsors and investors against the dominant forces in women’s sports: basketball and football. Golf and tennis are also increasing revenues.
The US Ladies Professional Golf Association said revenues for 2024 will exceed $252mn. The commercial arm of the Women’s Tennis Association, WTA Ventures, which is backed by private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, expects to make earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of about $90mn on $170mn of revenue in 2025, up from $83mn and $150mn in 2024, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
The rise of women’s sport is attracting institutional investors and wealthy individuals, particularly in North America. The region is predicted to generate almost $1.4bn of elite women’s sport revenues this year, according to Deloitte, more than three times Europe’s $420mn.
“I think the market [in England] is still young and immature relative to where the US market is from a women’s sport professionalisation,” says WSL chief Doucet. “We’re just at a different phase of our growth, it’s still an early-stage market and that’s why I still use start-up language on purpose.”
The Women’s NBA and National Women’s Soccer League are setting attendance records in the US. In 2024, the WNBA had more than 54mn unique viewers across broadcast, while attendances increased 48 per cent year on year to more than 2.3mn, the highest in 22 years. The same year, NWSL’s regular season attendance crossed the 2mn mark for the first time.
A series of high-profile investments has underlined the appeal of the NWSL. Sixth Street Partners, an institutional investor that has backed Spanish football giants Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, committed $125mn to acquire the new Bay FC NWSL team in San Francisco in 2023.
Kay Cossington, head of women’s football at Sixth Street, says it’s vital for women’s football to invest in staff and infrastructure. Bay FC plans to open its new performance centre in 2027, while it is exploring locations for a permanent stadium.
“How does the game generate revenue, fandom, that commercial kind of appeal if they don’t have a home?” asks Cossington, who was previously women’s technical director at the English Football Association and heavily involved with the Lionesses. “The stadium aspect is a crucial component to the growth of women’s football and other sports.
“We’re in this for the long haul . . . we look for long-term revenue streams beyond the next five or 10 years,” she adds.
Unlike some European women’s leagues, the NWSL is a closed league in which teams do not have to fear relegation to a lower tier, removing the risk to investors from a sudden reduction in sponsorship or broadcast revenue. That has helped encourage investment; private capital group Carlyle backed the $58mn acquisition of the team now known as Seattle Reign, while Angel City FC was valued at $250mn last July.
“I think football is going to be a lion’s share of the growth,” says Kara Nortman, the venture capitalist co-founder of Angel City FC. “Basketball has the advantage of being a very international sport as well.”
As managing partner of Monarch Collective, which was formed to invest in women’s sport and has interests in NWSL teams Boston Legacy FC and San Diego Wave, Nortman says Europe also has potential.
“You can drive very similar if not possibly even bigger results in Europe given the focus on it in particular right now,” Nortman tells the FT.
Investment firm Mercury 13 bought FC Como Women in Italy, while businesswoman Michele Kang has acquired English side London City Lionesses and French side OL Lyonnes.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of social media platform Reddit, bought a minority stake in the Chelsea women’s team in May, but its £250mn valuation remains an outlier in Europe.
WSL attendances have soared from 252,001 in 2021-22, the season before the Lionesses first won the Euros, to 876,765 in 2024-25. In the second-tier WSL2, attendances more than trebled to 231,157 over the same period.
Last year, WSL agreed a £65mn five-year domestic broadcast deal with Sky Sports and the BBC, up from £7mn to £8mn a season under the prior deal, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
But the 12 WSL clubs made an aggregate pre-tax loss of £28mn in 2023-24, according to Deloitte. Their revenues rose 34 per cent to £65mn in the 2023-24 season and Deloitte predicts WSL club revenues will hit £100mn in the 2025-26 season. But sports experts point out that owners often give less resource to their women’s teams.
Uefa, the governing body for European football, said before the event that it expected to make revenues of €128mn from Euro 2025, almost double those of Euro 2022, driven by sponsorship and commercial growth. But it still expected to lose €20mn to €25mn on the tournament, a stark contrast to the profit of more than €1.2bn achieved by the men’s Euro 2024 championship.
While World Rugby is budgeting to lose money on the Women’s World Cup, the governing body’s recent report said the women’s game offered “untapped potential” for sponsors and investors.
Merchandise is another possible moneymaker; only 9 per cent of women’s rugby fans buy the sport’s merchandise, although those who do each spend 16 per cent more on average than fans of men’s rugby. In 2023, pressure from football fans persuaded US sportswear giant Nike to create a replica of the number 1 shirt worn by England goalkeeper Mary Earps, having initially opted not to do so.
Horrox, of Women’s Rugby World Cup, sees these as evidence of untapped potential, and thinks more tailored products can help women’s rugby to close the gap with the men’s game. She draws inspiration from the WNBA’s 601 per cent increase in merchandise sales last year, online and at its flagship New York City store.
Women’s sport organisers are also targeting international growth. Brazil will host the Fifa Women’s World Cup for the first time in 2027, with the US on course to take a leading role in 2031. The Women’s Rugby World Cup is heading for Australia in 2029, followed by the US in 2033.
“We are trying to shift rugby from being a sport that’s previously been regarded as a niche sport absolutely squarely into the mainstream,” Horrox says. “For big markets like England and certainly the US, there we have a chance of it absolutely becoming a hugely financially sustainable sport.”
Data visualisation by Maya De Souza
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