2025 saw several significant landmarks, with international competitions, including the UEFA Women’s European Championship and Women’s Rugby World Cup, providing major global platforms that elevated visibility, accelerated professional investment, and helped set new benchmarks for attendance, broadcast reach, and commercial growth across women’s sport. The 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup, which was held in England, broke new ground for live crowds, with more than 440,000 tickets sold over triple the total from the previous tournament, reveals GlobalData, a leading intelligence and productivity platform.
GlobalData’s latest report, “Strategic Intelligence: Women in Sport 2026,” reveals that Women’s sport attendance broke global and domestic records in 2025, driven by major tournaments and increased club-level investment. Despite these records, women’s sport still faces a substantial gender pay gap, largely due to long-term underinvestment, unequal media exposure, and weaker commercial revenue streams.
Olivia Snooks, Sport Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Commercially, the 2025 Women’s Rugby Cup delivered a 330% uplift in sponsorship income compared to the previous edition. It also amassed 147 million broadcast viewing hours worldwide, underlining the growing international appetite for women’s rugby. That momentum carried strongly into digital channels too, with over one billion social media impressions, raising players’ profiles to global star status and expanding the sport’s reachable audience dramatically’.
“Women’s sport is seeing rapid digital acceleration, driven by athlete-led storytelling, the growth of women-focused streaming and highlights ecosystems, and younger audiences who primarily discover sport through social platforms. On TikTok and Instagram in particular, women’s leagues and teams are generating video view growth at a faster pace than men’s properties, signalling a shift in where fandom is built and how attention is won globally. In 2025, the WNBA was the standout women’s sports property for short-form social output on Instagram and TikTok, publishing 1,000 more Instagram videos than the next-largest women’s account, the WTA.”
Snooks continues: “Digital growth is becoming central to the expansion of women’s sport because it is now the fastest way to build an audience at scale, especially where traditional broadcast coverage has historically been limited.”
According to GlobalData, there has been a 103% increase in female-only sports sponsorship deals between 2020 and 2025, and the average value of female-only deals has increased by 15.5% across this period. When comparing this to male-only partnerships, these deals have increased by 30% over the same period, therefore suggesting that brands are increasingly making agreements with women’s sports.
The largest sponsorship deals in women’s sport as of 2026 are the Mercedes-Benz partnership with the WTA and Barclays with the WSL; female athletes with some of the largest deals include Naomi Osaka’s deal with Nike and Coco Gauff’s with New Balance.
Snooks concludes: “For years, many brands avoided women’s sport due to lower media coverage and the perception that returns would be weaker than in men’s sport. Over the last 12–18 months, that view has started to change. Brands are increasingly recognizing the benefits: alignment with female empowerment and social progress, plus access to a large and often under-targeted audience of women consumers.”
