New Leagues and New Fans

The PWHL is booming and the intentionality of the league is contributing to that growth. Fans in Minneapolis describe feeling, for the first time at a professional sporting event, like they actually belong. A queer fan who wrote about attending a PWHL game said she felt not just at home, but wanted. That word carries more weight than it might appear when you apply it to sports, a space that has historically struggled with overall inclusion.

The numbers behind that feeling are depicting just how critical the development of that culture is for these new types of fans. The PWHL finished the 2025-26 regular season with 1,116,497 fans across 120 games, averaging 9,304 per game. That is a 71 percent increase from the league's inaugural season just two years ago. The New York Sirens sold out Madison Square Garden. The Seattle Torrent sold out Climate Pledge Arena with 17,335 fans, a new U.S. record for women's hockey. The Takeover Tour, which brought games to potential expansion markets, drew more than 200,000 fans across 16 stops. YouTube viewership grew 77 percent season-over-season and reached viewers in 154 countries. In-arena merchandise sales doubled. Online merchandise sales climbed 50 percent. Post-Olympics, merchandise demand spiked 190 percent. Brand partnerships grew 35 percent to 81 corporate partners. Detroit was just awarded the ninth franchise, with plans to reach 12 teams in the coming years.

What the Research Says

While the most persistent assumption in women's sports consumer behavior is that the audience is primarily motivated by family togetherness and social causes, findings from a 2024 study upend several longstanding industry assumptions. Women's sport fans showed significantly higher levels of team identification than fans of the comparable men's side. With roughly 70% of women's team supporters being classified as highly identified with their club and only 57% of men's team fans matching that same threshold. The study also found that the primary motives driving the most committed women's sports fans were the physical skill of the athletes and the sense of achievement from watching their team compete at a high level. Family motivation ranked last across every level of fan identification studied.

These types of findings are critical considerations for how organizations design and market their products. The women's sports industry has spent years promoting family-friendly atmospheres as a central selling point, leaning into the peripheral elements of the gameday experience rather than the product on the field or court. While some of those sentiments do hold true according to team GM’s and league officials, the data is also telling us that the most committed fans may simply be there for the sport itself. So, if a league buries the athletic excellence inside a party atmosphere or family day, they may be missing the mark for the very people they need to retain.

For newer or more casual fans, aesthetics and a sense of contributing to something larger do function as real entry points into the sport. That being said, simply deciding to attend one event is not the same as developing into a life-long fan.

Intentional Facilities Are Overdue

The most visible version of this conversation at the espnW Summit was happening in architecture and facility design. Specifically, most athletic facilities were not built with women's athletes or women-dominated fan bases in mind. The food and beverage areas, the bathrooms, the seating configurations, and the family accommodations were largely designed around dated assumptions about who would use these buildings.

What designers and organizations working in this space have consistently found is that women athletes are not a scaled-down version of a man counterpart. They have genuinely different needs and physiological realities like the ways menstrual cycles affect injury risk and training load were never factored into traditional facility design. Privacy in changing and recovery spaces matters differently and the social architecture of how women move through a venue matters in ways traditional stadium design simply never considered.

The Indiana Fever’s $78 million performance center, currently under construction in Indianapolis, takes this into account. The 108,000-square-foot facility includes a hair and nail salon, childcare space, mental performance rooms, hydrotherapy pools, an outdoor courtyard, and a podcast studio. Portland is also building a 12-acre dual-sport performance center for the Thorns and Fire, its new WNBA franchise, with total investment expected to exceed $150 million. The design integrates two women’s teams sharing a space built around collaboration. As noted during the Summit, these intentional and innovative design decisions are going to provide the opportunity for women athletes to spend more time in one central space, rather than floating between training and practice sessions and outside venues that they use for their other needs.

Intentionallity And Access

The espnW Summit conversation pushed beyond the buildings themselves into everything else that constitutes the product and how these elements build on each other. The research on team identification makes this connection even more explicit as higher identification drives the majority of consumption behaviors that organizations care about. Specifically, we are seeing that more committed fans attend more games, consume more media, and buy more merchandise. Among women's sport fans specifically, merchandise purchase showed the strongest correlation to team identification of any behavior measured in the study. In that sense, getting someone through the door the first time is the beginning of a process of building positive consumer behaviors, but the experience inside the facility determines whether identification will continue to grow.

Based on insights shared across the Summit, it would seem that the PWHL understood some of this by necessity. While the affordable tickets were part of what originally drew people in, the in-game culture, the chants, the friendship bracelet stations, the first-game certificates handed to newcomers, are what this specific fan base wants. These fans describe the experience as something between a community gathering and a celebration and have noted that they have never felt less gatekeeping at a sporting event. They bring their twelve-year-old daughters and best friends who have never watched a game before. As a result, the product was not built to serve only the committed hockey fan but the committed hockey fans showed up anyway.

This new fan’s relationship to women’s sport in incredibly powerful and can bring together a variety of new consumers who may not have felt included in previous versions of the industry. For example, the older fans who loved sport their whole lives but never had a professional women’s league to follow, the queer fans who felt genuinely included rather than tolerated, and the young girls seeing athletes who look like them at the center of a full arena. These connections are incredibly deep and often rare across the sports ecosystem. And, according to espnW Summit panelists, intentional planning and innovative event experiences are going to be required to sustain those connections. Pricing these new fans out or providing food and beverage options that fail to match their interests will only serve to stunt the growth of this new and unique sport industry fanbase.