They Were Running the Concession Stands. Now They Own the Stadium.
For most of professional sport's history, the relationship between women and sports economics was defined by what women were permitted to do within it. They could attend games. They could sponsor products. They could cheer. They could, in a narrow set of legacy cases, inherit ownership through a husband's death or a father's estate.
What they could not do, with any meaningful regularity, was buy in — directly, deliberately, as principals with strategic authority rather than as ceremonial figureheads.
That relationship is changing. Not slowly and symbolically, as representation conversations tend to go, but materially, financially, and at the level where sports has always truly been controlled: capital.
In 2025, Forbes debuted its first-ever dedicated list of America's Most Powerful Women in Sports. The publication's framing was precise: "Women are no longer just shaping the story of sports. They're shaping its capital structure." The list spotlighted women across ownership, investment, executive leadership, and athlete-driven business, and the top of the list left no ambiguity about where the power currently concentrates. Gayle Benson, owner and CEO of the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans, sat in the number one spot — the only woman in the world who controls franchises in both the NFL and the NBA, commanding a combined valuation of $8.35 billion and a personal net worth of $7.9 billion.
These are not soft influence metrics. These are the numbers that end arguments about whether women in sports are decorative participants or economic principals.
Gayle Benson: The Most Powerful Sports Owner You Have Never Heard Enough About
Gayle Benson became the owner of the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans in 2018, following the death of her husband Tom Benson. What she inherited was not a passive endowment. What she built from it is the evidence that the inheritance was never the story.
Under Benson's ownership, the Saints became the first NFL franchise with marketing rights in France, partnering with the Paris Musketeers of the European League of Football — a move that represents exactly the kind of international strategic vision that the NFL's long-term expansion ambitions require. She was instrumental in bringing Super Bowl LIX to New Orleans, a result that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged directly: "In business, philanthropy and football, Gayle is a leader, always advocating for the Saints and her native city."
The $8.35 billion combined valuation of her two franchises places her in the top tier of all sports owners globally. The NFL's average franchise value has climbed to $5.8 billion. The NBA's average has reached $4.7 billion. Benson controls one of each.
She is not the figurehead of a foundation or a minority stakeholder in an ownership group. She is the majority owner, the governor, the decision-maker — running two of the most recognisable sports brands in American professional sports from the same executive position that has historically been occupied almost exclusively by men.
Her position at number one on Forbes' inaugural Most Powerful Women in Sports list is not sentiment. It is arithmetic.
Willow Bay and the $250 Million Women's Sports Moment
When Willow Bay, dean of USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Bob Iger — her husband and the CEO of The Walt Disney Company — purchased a controlling stake in Angel City FC in 2024 at a $250 million valuation, they created the most valuable women's professional sports team in history.
The number requires context to fully land. Angel City FC was founded in 2020 by actress Natalie Portman, venture capitalist Kara Nortman, and entrepreneur Julie Uhrman. It launched with a founding ethos of female ownership and female empowerment, building an ownership group that included Billie Jean King, Abby Wambach, Lindsey Vonn, and more than 100 other investors including Serena Williams, Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria, and 13 former US Women's National Soccer Team players.
Four years later, the team valued at $250 million led the NWSL in attendance, revenue, sponsorship, and season ticket membership. It generated $31 million in revenue in 2023, nearly double the next closest NWSL team. It attracted 19,728 fans to a regular-season game — levels that many men's lower-league clubs would not approach.
Bay, who serves on and has full control of the Angel City board, articulated what the moment represents:
"Only the beginning of the ascent" is not marketing language. It is investment thesis. The NWSL, which has seen average attendance nearly double since 2022, set a single-game record of 40,091 fans at Bay FC's game against the Washington Spirit in August 2025 — the largest crowd in NWSL history. The league's current collective bargaining agreement, valid to 2030, includes a 55 per cent salary cap increase over five years. Since 2024, the NWSL has permitted private equity to take majority control and even 100 per cent ownership of a franchise — the most permissive ownership structure of any major US professional sports league.
The financial logic is straightforward and increasingly well-understood. Major US sports teams have experienced an average annual value appreciation of approximately 13 per cent over the last two decades, significantly outpacing the S&P 500's roughly 8 per cent annual growth. Women's sports, entering its institutional investment phase, offers the additional premium of early-mover advantage — the kind of compounding return available when you enter a growing asset class before it is consensus.
Serena Williams: The Athlete Who Became an Owner
Serena Williams is the most successful female tennis player in the Open Era, with 23 Grand Slam singles titles. She is also, increasingly, a case study in what happens when athletes leverage their careers into ownership positions rather than endorsement royalties.
Williams was an early investor in Angel City FC. In March 2025, she expanded her sports ownership portfolio by joining the ownership group of the Toronto Tempo, a new WNBA franchise. "Thrilled to join the Toronto Tempo ownership group and continue fighting for women in sports," she said when the news broke.
The Williams investment pattern is not unique. Brittany Mahomes, wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, has held a stake in KC Current — the NWSL's Kansas City team — since 2020. Naomi Osaka joined the ownership group of NJ/NY Gotham FC in January 2021. The convergence of athlete-as-owner with celebrity-as-investor has produced an ownership culture in women's sports that is structurally different from what exists in men's leagues — and not by accident.
The founding ownership model of Angel City FC was explicitly designed to embed women with long-term stakes in the franchise rather than one-time endorsement relationships. That model — athletes and women holding meaningful equity rather than appearing in promotional contexts — is the template that the most intentionally built women's sports organisations have adopted. It changes the incentive structure: an owner wants the franchise value to grow over decades, not just the quarter in which a sponsorship deal is active.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The scale of women's sports investment in 2025 and 2026 is categorically different from what existed five years ago.
Women's sports currently receive a comparatively small share of overall sports investment, but that share is growing rapidly and the investment infrastructure around it is maturing. Goldman Sachs, in a March 2026 strategic advisory note, identified women's sports as presenting a "unique investment opportunity" with multiple entry points from team ownership and stadium development to sponsorships and media rights.
The WNBA's new collective bargaining agreement, negotiated in 2025, saw Caitlin Clark's salary jump from $76,535 as a 2024 rookie to approximately $530,000 in 2026 — a signal that player earnings are beginning to reflect the commercial value of the league's most prominent talents. WNBA viewership reached record levels in 2024, driven by Clark's first season with the Indiana Fever. The Professional Women's Hockey League, launched in 2024, has sold out multiple games in its first two seasons across cities including Boston and New York.
The structural change that is making all of this possible is institutional capital access. Historically, sports franchise ownership was confined to wealthy individuals and families. Over the last 15 years, leagues have progressively allowed private equity, hedge funds, and institutional investors to take ownership positions. The NWSL's decision to permit 100 per cent private equity ownership of a single franchise is the most radical version of this shift — creating an on-ramp for capital that did not previously exist at this scale in women's professional sport.
What Women Running Leagues Actually Changes
Ownership is the ultimate leverage point in sport. But the executives who run leagues — who set competitive structures, negotiate media rights, build commercial frameworks — exercise a different kind of power, and women are increasingly holding those positions too.
Cathy Engelbert has served as WNBA Commissioner since 2019, overseeing the league through its most commercially significant period in history. The WNBA's new CBA, the explosion of viewership around Caitlin Clark's 2024 rookie season, and the expansion of the league to new markets are all occurring under her tenure.
The NWSL, the PWHL, the WTA, and the rapidly growing women's golf and athletics circuits each have women in significant executive leadership positions — shaping the commercial structures, broadcast rights negotiations, and competitive frameworks that determine how much money flows into these sports and where it goes.
The Women's Pro Baseball League, co-founded by Justine Siegal — the first woman to serve as a coach in an MLB game — launched in 2026 with four teams across Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It is, structurally, a women-led organisation at the founding level of a new professional sports league, which makes it one of the more unusual governance experiments in contemporary sports.
The Capital Structure Is the Story
The most important thing to understand about the new female sports moguls is that this is not primarily a story about representation. It is a story about economic incentives.
Sports franchise ownership has been, for two decades, among the most reliably appreciating asset classes in any alternative investment category. The people who own sports teams get rich over long timescales in ways that are structurally protected from the market volatility that erodes other asset classes. The NFL's lowest-valued franchise is now worth more than $3 billion. The WNBA, still comparatively early in its commercial development, represents exactly the kind of entry point that sophisticated investors recognise as the equivalent of buying an NBA franchise in 1990.
Women who own sports teams are not making a statement. They are making an investment. The fact that these investments happen to be in leagues where women are the athletes, and communities where women are the fans, and organisations where women are increasingly the executives, is the structural alignment that makes women's sports the most interesting ownership category in global sport right now.
As Forbes put it when launching its first women in sports power list: "For decades, women fuelled the commercial engine of sports while being locked out of its economics. Now, as this list reflects, they hold the capital, and that changes who builds, who benefits, and what gets funded."
The stadium was always built on women's economic participation. The question that 2026 is answering is who owns it.
