Women’s Sport Has Momentum. What Happens Next Will Define It
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Millions of viewers tuned in for the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Packed stadiums for the Women’s European Football Championship, with 3.5 million viewers in France during the 2025 edition, a tournament that topped sports broadcast rankings in both Germany and the United Kingdom. Competition after competition, record-breaking audiences continue to put an end to a debate that should never have existed: yes, women’s sports attract. Yes, audiences are showing up. This is no longer a hypothesis, it is a documented, quantified, indisputable reality.
In this Insight:
At SPORTFIVE, we witness this every day. Our 2025 whitepaper on women’s football confirms it. The rise of the women’s game is not a trend but a structural movement driven by a convergence of factors. The timing is right. The question is no longer whether women’s sports deserve support, but rather how to support them.
Behind the Records
These audience spikes are victories that conceal a misleading reality. They create the impression of a deep, lasting shift already underway. The truth is more nuanced. On a global scale, women’s sports still accounted for only 8% of prime‑time sports coverage in 2025. The exceptional visibility of major tournaments hides structural imbalances that continue to persist. What we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg.
Still Playing Catch-Up
While major international competitions now benefit from genuine media coverage, national leagues remain almost invisible. Sponsorship and commercial exposure are still heavily concentrated around a handful of flagship events, leaving the rest of the ecosystem without the financial oxygen it needs. The consequence is direct and tangible: pay gaps that continue to force high‑level athletes to work a second job alongside their sporting careers.
In rugby, French internationals earn between 3,000 and 4,000 euros per month, on contracts renewed according to performance, while male rugby players are salaried by their clubs and earn an average of 20,000 euros per month. Today, 75% of Elite 1 female players still juggle rugby with another job. A structural issue.
Culture and Competence
In 2026, having to learn an athlete’s name and achievements live, while she is competing, should be unthinkable. Yet the lack of training and genuine knowledge of women’s sports among many journalists and commentators still leads to embarrassing, and at times sexist, situations. A paternalistic tone, an excessive focus on appearance or personal life rather than technical skills: these reflexes reveal a professional culture that has yet to fully recognise women’s sports as a subject in its own right.
Athlete Livelihoods
Competition and training schedules often fail to account for the realities of women athletes’ lives, whether it’s the mental load of family responsibilities, which still falls predominantly on women, or the economic constraints mentioned earlier. Medical monitoring and training protocols also remain largely modelled on the male body, due to insufficient research on female‑specific physiological needs.
In 2020, the captain of the French national handball team, Estelle Nze Minko, published an op‑ed denouncing the taboo surrounding menstruation in sports, revealing in passing that the topic had never been addressed in most of the clubs she had played for. Five years later, the Persil x Arsenal campaign, designed to break the taboo around periods in sport, showed that 78% of British girls aged 15 to 18 had already stopped practicing sport because of their menstruation. These figures are not isolated; they reflect a system designed, built and still largely governed without women in mind.
Motherhood is no exception: it remains a taboo in women’s professional sports, with very few contractual frameworks capable of truly protecting the athletes concerned.
Change Starts at the Top
Behind each of these issues lies a common reality: decisions are still overwhelmingly made by men. The figures speak for themselves. In 2024, women held only 5.7% of presidencies within Olympic federations in France. And according to the COSMOS 2026 Gender Balance Barometer, they account for just 11% of salaried leaders within sports organisations, a number that is rising, certainly, but still far from sufficient. Moreover, 38% of organisations surveyed report genuine difficulties in transforming their governance structures, particularly within institutions historically led by men.
The law of 2 March 2022 now mandates full gender parity within the national bodies of sports federations, a significant step forward, with results required from 2024 for national governance and from 2028 at the local level. It is a strong signal. But a law does not change a culture. As long as leadership structures fail to reflect the diversity of those who practice sport, change will remain superficial. The transformation of the women’s sports economy cannot take place without a parallel transformation of those who lead it.
Some Already Got It Right
This picture would be incomplete without acknowledging those who are already doing things differently. OL Lyon and its partnership with Kynisca offer a model that goes far beyond visibility, building a genuine ecosystem around elite women’s football, driven by a long‑term vision. The French Women’s Handball League, which has introduced a one‑year maternity leave for its professional players, has also taken a bold step, sending a clear signal of what “caring for athletes” truly means in practice.
These initiatives demonstrate that change can happen when the will is there, and that this momentum does not come solely from institutions. Brands like AXA, Intermarché and Orange have understood this: committing long‑term to women’s sports means helping to build a stronger, more resilient model, not merely gaining visibility.
The SportOnSocial 2026 report confirms it unequivocally: investing in the development, visibility and storytelling of female athletes is no longer a value‑driven option, it is a strategic necessity. Beyond being a playing field, sport is a catalyst for social change, a symbol of progress, and one of the clearest long‑term investment opportunities in the global sports landscape.
The momentum is here, and so is the audience. Ten years from now, we will still be talking about the brands that chose to commit at the right moment, the ones that understood, ahead of everyone else, that women’s sports were not a cause to support but a strategic opportunity to seize. The history of sport has always rewarded those who had the courage to leap first. Women’s sports, however, will not wait any longer.
