Women’s Sports Are Turning Athlete Attention Into Investable Value

In March 2019, ? alexis-ohanian saw a mismatch between the attention women athletes were drawing and the prices being asked for their teams. A team with Megan Rapinoe, he recalled, was selling for about $3 million. Ohanian did not follow women’s soccer closely, but he knew Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, and knew the U.S. women’s national team would play in a World Cup that year. He expected millions of viewers and major brands to be watching. To him, the team’s low price made little sense if its players could already attract that kind of attention.

His reasoning came from his experience building Reddit. He saw social media as a contest for attention, and followers as evidence that athletes had valuable audiences. In the 2019 post he described, he said he would start a team in the National Women’s Soccer League and predicted it would one day be worth $1 billion. By January 2020, he had paid a little over $1 million—the expansion fee at the time—to start Angel City FC in Los Angeles.

Ohanian stressed that this was a business decision, not a charitable one. Being a father of girls and married to Serena Williams made the work personally meaningful, but his thesis was that the market was undervaluing women athletes and the attention they could bring. He has since invested in the Los Angeles Golf Club, women’s volleyball, and Los Angeles teams in Tiger Woods’s TGL and its women’s counterpart, WTGL. He also started a track-and-field league, reasoning that a sport that draws worldwide attention during the Olympics should not disappear from view between Games.

Ohanian thinks the value of those investments could eventually exceed the value of his Reddit shares. He also calls sports the “ultimate anti-AI bet”: even if synthetic video can convincingly depict a dramatic sporting moment, he argued, it cannot substitute for the fact that a real human achieved it. In his view, sports’ appeal rests on human effort and competition, not just the image on a screen.

“The whole point is that it’s a human exercise.”

Sports teams, he added, are still run with relatively little technology. Better software could make them more efficient, improve margins, and make the fan experience better—adding business value while helping teams hold attention.

For Ohanian, the first questions in assessing a team or league are how many people follow its players and how engaged those followers are. Fans watch sports because of athletes, he said. In established leagues, a team’s brand can seem to stand on its own, but he believes that loyalty begins with players. In emerging leagues, the sequence is easier to see: a player wins followers and affection, and the team can benefit from that connection.

He uses tattoos as an informal test of whether a property has built genuine attachment. Four years into Reddit, he saw someone with a tattoo of the site’s alien mascot and took it as evidence that people cared about the company. Angel City got its first tattoo about a year in, he said, and the Los Angeles Golf Club had recently seen one too. The test is not a precise measure of a market. It is a way of asking whether a team has earned attachment: showing someone a logo may not do it, but showing them a player they love might.

Ohanian criticized the NCAA’s handling of women’s tournament facilities, including the disparity in weight rooms. He argued that women’s basketball already had a larger following online than men’s, and that the attention should be treated as an economic signal rather than dismissed. A tweet shown during the discussion, posted under Ohanian’s X handle in March 2023, called the weight-room controversy “not just sexist, but also absolute business incompetence.” His point was that audiences were already responding to women’s basketball, while organizers and broadcasters were not matching that attention with support and promotion.

For emerging teams without the media deals enjoyed by established leagues, that attention can help attract sponsors. Ohanian cited Angel City’s DoorDash agreement as the first seven-figure front-of-kit sponsorship for a women’s professional team. An on-screen headline from Angel City FC identified the agreement as a “Founding Front-Of-Kit Sponsorship” and dated it March 15, 2022. Ohanian said the team could point to the followers of players such as Christen Press and make the case that a sponsor’s logo would appear on an athlete followed and loved by millions. In his account, brand partnerships bring in money to fund teams and players, helping start a cycle in which investment supports the product that attracts more attention.

Asked whether investors were late and how long they should tolerate losses, Ohanian estimated that the U.S. women’s sports market was in its third or fourth inning—not at the beginning, but still early. Globally, he thought, much of the opportunity was closer to the first inning. He also acknowledged that growth cannot continue at the same pace indefinitely: there are only so many new sports that can be created.

Ohanian is comfortable with businesses staying unprofitable for years if their revenue is growing. That tolerance comes from his background in startups, where companies often prioritize growth before profits. He compared women’s sports with the early NBA and NFL, which he said were also unprofitable for a period, while noting that today’s teams have a tool those leagues did not: social media, which can accelerate growth.

He sees that channel as becoming more consequential as recommendation systems improve. Ohanian argued that platforms would get better at identifying what people want to watch and serving it to them, while synthetic content would also improve. He sees a possible countervailing pull toward live events and shared experiences as screens become better at holding attention. His forecast was speculative: he said he believed many people would seek out in-person experiences, including the rivalries and shared stakes of sports.

Alex Rodriguez offered a television example from his work with ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. He said an average Sunday broadcast drew about 1.5 million viewers, with marquee Yankees matchups reaching roughly 2 million or 2.1 million. A WNBA game featuring Indiana and Minnesota drew 3.2 million viewers at its peak, he said. Ohanian attributed the audience to storylines built online and argued that networks have a business incentive to give women’s sports more prominent platforms when viewers are already showing up.

Ohanian also pointed to tennis as evidence that women’s sports can command broad audiences. He said the Williams sisters and Billie Jean King helped establish tennis as a sport whose women’s competition is understood as equally compelling as the men’s. He cited the U.S. Open as a measure of that appeal: in seven of the previous ten years, he said, more people in America watched the women’s final than the men’s. For Ohanian, that history offers a model for other leagues: sustained attention and visible investment can make women’s competition a natural part of the sport’s mainstream.

He identified a more immediate business constraint: brand interest is outpacing the available ways to reach a broad women’s-sports audience. A company can sponsor a team or league, Ohanian said, but there is not yet enough consolidated media inventory for a brand that wants to buy into women’s sports as a whole. Teams can only put so many logos on a jersey. He expects established media companies to help build a larger platform and said his own group had ideas it might introduce in the coming quarters.

Another challenge is that women’s teams cannot simply borrow the operating assumptions of major men’s franchises. Ohanian argued that a newer team needs people who will tell athletes’ stories when they are not playing and who see building a fan base as daily work. He contrasted that with established franchises whose players and brands may already be widely known. In his experience, women athletes understand that they are stakeholders in their teams’ success and are highly engaged in building that connection. The difference, he said, calls for distinct day-to-day leadership and a different way of operating.

Ohanian has tried to recruit successful technology executives and entrepreneurs to invest in women’s sports as a business rather than treat it as charity. He described holding small dinners to explain the investment case and make team ownership less opaque.

He recalled contacting tech executives in 2019 and 2020 who passed on women’s soccer, with some choosing to start pickleball teams instead. Ohanian still thinks those investors missed an opportunity: soccer is the world’s biggest sport, he argued, and women’s soccer already had strong recognition in the United States. His broader point is that new investors can bring a different ambition to leagues that, in his account, had not always been run to build enterprise value.

He pointed to Michele Kang’s investment in Washington and to Alan Waxman, whom he remembered as the first other owner to use “enterprise value” in a board meeting. That language mattered to Ohanian because it suggested a goal beyond simply accepting annual losses for tax purposes. The growing presence of owners who want to invest, win, and build a valuable business can change expectations across a league.

For people who want to enter the space without taking on the responsibility of running a team, Ohanian suggested starting as a minority investor. He described introducing a prospective investor in Chicago to emerging-team and established-team owners so she could meet people and be considered if an opportunity arose. That kind of investment can provide an education in the business, he said, without requiring the investor to lead operations.

The panel also discussed how quickly a new women’s team could reach a high valuation. Rodriguez said, while qualifying it as his own off-the-cuff assessment rather than a fact, that the Golden State Valkyries may have reached a billion-dollar enterprise value faster than any team in sports. He said the team had surpassed that mark in a year and a half. Ohanian cited a published figure of about $80 million in revenue for its first season and noted that a billion-dollar valuation would imply a high revenue multiple. He also acknowledged the premium associated with the Golden State name. His emphasis was on the published revenue figure and what it suggested about the scale of the business in its first season.

The opportunity, in Ohanian’s view, extends beyond buying stakes in teams. For years, he said, technology investors believed sports was a poor market for startups: there were few potential buyers, and teams were assumed to be irrational customers with little interest in best-in-class software. That perception discouraged founders from building sports technology.

Emerging leagues and new owners have begun to change demand. When a new team president arrives, Ohanian said, they may ask from first principles what the best tool is for a particular job, rather than simply accept what established teams use. He described his CMO at Angel City showing him a system for managing photos and videos. Ohanian found the system so poor that he refused to use it; Angel City either had to build something itself or find a company that could supply a better option. They chose the latter, bringing in ScorePlay. He said half the NWSL was using it within six months, and that it later reached about a third of the NBA and major Grand Slam tournaments. In his telling, the expanding sports market made infrastructure software a viable business.

Ticketing is another opening. Ohanian mentioned Jump, a company he and Rodriguez had worked on, as an effort to challenge Ticketmaster by offering fans a better experience. The opportunity is not only to sell tickets, but to help teams understand their audiences and treat fans better. Teams, he said, want data that helps them understand their fan base, while fans want to be treated well.