This article is a summary of Chapter 4 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules, a report produced by World Football Summit documenting how the global football industry has changed over the past decade. A new chapter will be published each week. Download the full chapter free of charge at worldfootballsummit.com.
In 2016, women’s football already had leagues, national teams and millions of players worldwide. What it didn’t have was a market. No women’s match had aired on British television as recently as 2012, in one of the most commercially developed football markets in the world. Sponsorship dedicated specifically to the women’s game accounted for just 4 per cent of the entire European football sponsorship market. Without visibility or sponsors, a club weighing whether to field a women’s team wasn’t choosing between two sporting priorities: it was choosing between guaranteed costs and revenue nobody had ever shown up to pay.
Chapter 4 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules traces how women’s football went from a bundled afterthought to a standalone asset class — and what that transformation still has left to prove.
Selling it apart
Where broadcasters and sponsors did show interest, the rights on offer still weren’t priced on their own. Rather, women’s football came thrown in whenever a broadcaster or sponsor bought the men’s package. “Those assets were often left on the table,” UEFA’s Kayleigh Grieve said of the years before her organisation unbundled the two competitions. Breaking that habit took on different forms depending on which side of the deal you were on. For example, when negotiating to sponsor the US women’s national team, Google found the rights were still bundled with the men’s team, and forced, through a clause, guaranteeing that at least half its money went to the women’s programme directly. Visa took the opposite route from the outset, signing a seven-year sponsorship with UEFA built around the women’s game alone.
An audience nobody built for
Once rights had a price of their own, what was actually drawing people to the women’s game became visible too, and marketable. Diana Matheson, who built Canada’s Northern Super League from nothing, points to a fan base that “haven’t felt welcome” in football until now, finding a version of the sport that finally looks like them. Sponsors have priced that connection in: sponsorship in the women’s game now returns between 15 and 18 times the investment.
Proof at the top
That repricing first showed up at World Cup scale. The 2019 tournament sold 1.1 million tickets against a forecast of 700,000. Four years later, in Australia, tournament revenue came in at 540 million dollars, audited, and a further 1.32 billion was delivered to the Australian economy, value that is on a par with hosting a men’s Rugby World Cup.
The same logic now plays out one balance sheet at a time. FC Barcelona Femení increased its revenue from roughly 7 million euros in 2020-21 to 25 million four years later, reaching full financial self-sustainability by 2022-23, a milestone the club’s business director, Judit Farré, believes no women’s football club anywhere had reached before.
Patience, not capacity
The remaining resistance isn’t about whether the numbers work. It’s about how long investors are willing to wait for the return on their investment. A tech start-up gets five to ten years before anyone expects it to turn a profit, CONCACAF’s Heidi Pellerano points out, while women’s football is expected to break even from day one. Patricia Rodríguez, who ran a men’s club through Spain’s 2013 football bankruptcy crisis, when most clubs in the country’s top two divisions were in insolvency proceedings, makes the comparison directly: men’s football before that crisis was, in her words, the least profitable activity she had ever known, and the losses women’s clubs absorb today are no larger.
Even inside the women’s game, growth hasn’t been even. UEFA’s most recent Women’s Euro drew 35 per cent of its travelling fans from outside the host country, with broadcast reach now extending to 229 countries, proof that the international game has already made its case. National team football, UEFA’s Nadine Kessler said at WFS Madrid in 2025, “is flying.” Club football, the daily business that Barcelona’s own numbers show is possible, “is not there yet.”
This is a summary of Chapter 4 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules. Download the full chapter free of charge at worldfootballsummit.com here.