Welcome to the seventh edition of Women’s Sport Insider – and the last one of this year!

I'm Molly McElwee, a sports journalist and author, holding the fort for Nancy this month.

It feels like the perfect moment to reflect on what turned into a blockbuster year for women’s sport. We’ll be taking you through three main learnings from 2025 and how they might shape what we see across the industry in 2026.

As always, we’ll also share the very best of what’s happening in women’s sport in our Top of the Table and Winning Women sections. 

Wishing all our readers a fantastic holiday period and 2026 ahead!

This year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup and the UEFA Women’s EURO were perfect examples.

At the EURO in Switzerland, the total in-person attendance of 657,291 broke the previous tournament record of 574,875 from 2022. More than 16 million in the UK tuned in to see England defeat Spain in a penalty shootout in the final too.

The attendances at the RWC were also record-breaking, and the 5.8 million UK television audience for the final between England and Canada was a record for the women’s game. It was also the most-watched rugby match in the UK this year.

In the autumn, India hosting the Women’s Cricket World Cup changed the game too. Nearly 300,000 people attended in person and 500 million people in India watched the home side win the tournament for the first time. Since then, the new stars of the team have graced the cover of Vogue India and become household names, stretching their influence beyond the pitch.

The power of these major events, if harnessed properly, is in how it can draw new fans and value into domestic leagues throughout the year. For example, in 2022, 75% of those who watched the Women’s EURO went on to watch the Women’s Super League (WSL) the following season.

In anticipation of the RWC, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) introduced Impact ’25 this year to provide resources at grassroots level to cope with what they hoped would be increased interest in the women’s game. When the domestic league began in October, Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR) reported a 183% year-on-year increase in attendance for the opening weekend of the season. According to a report in The Observer late last month, TNT viewing figures for the league are also up by 96% compared to at this point last season.

Those boosts are not a given though. We are still yet to fully understand the impact of EURO 2025, but some early domestic signs are not as optimistic. While fans are turning up to WSL matches in their droves, they don’t seem to be tuning in to watch the midday kick-offs from home as much. The Guardian reported that only 71,000 people watched Sky Sports coverage of Chelsea at Arsenal in November – compared to last season’s WSL average television audiences of 337,000 on Sky and 682,000 on the BBC.

Next year, there may not be a major event to look forward to in women’s football or rugby, but there is the Women’s T20 World Cup, which is being hosted in England and offers another opportunity to attract new audiences to women’s sport. Sustaining them long-term will be the true measure of the event’s impact.

Growth across the business of women’s sport remains healthy. According to figures released this year, sponsorship is growing 50% faster across women’s sports leagues than men’s. Total revenues across elite women’s sport are expected to exceed $2.35 billion this year, according to Deloitte.

Yet this is still a work in progress, as that revenue is not always translating into athlete wellbeing – from an emotional, physical, or financial standpoint.

On the latter, a FIFA report from earlier this year found that the average salary for women’s football players worldwide is $10,900 (£8,420). In the WNBA, negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement have been ongoing for months, as players try to secure better pay scales and revenue sharing structures. Caitlin Clark, for all her endorsement deals and international fame – both of which have helped boost the WNBA exponentially – has a base salary of only $78,000 (£58,400).

Athlete safety has also been a big talking point over the past year, as Clark and Emma Raducanu were among those who had stalking experiences, while online abuse of women in sport remains a huge issue. Chelsea manager Sonia Bompastor, England’s Jess Carter and tennis player Katie Boulter were among those to publicly highlight homophobic, racist, and violently threatening online abuse they receive on social media regularly. It’s an issue organisations and teams within sport are trying to tackle head on, but one which affects women in sport daily.

As for physical wellbeing, still only 6% of sports science research focuses on female athletes. A particularly bright spot from the past year was the commitment from Michelle Kang’s Kynisca Innovation Hub to invest in developing training methods in football that put women’s bodies at the forefront. Hopefully we will see more of that in the year ahead.

Sky Sports’s recent debacle, launching and then axing Halo – a TikTok channel focused on attracting new, young, female sports fans – was evidence that even the most experienced organisations are still grappling with how to target under 30s. While Halo was not purely based on women’s sport, it was about the female sports fan, and showed that young women and girls are still not fully understood in the sports space.

The Women’s League Cup draw a couple of weeks ago also fell flat. It tried to use influencer GK Barry’s platform to entice viewers onto a social media livestream, but it became another example of how not to treat women’s sport and its fans.

Navigating online spaces to bring in young female audiences is not a challenge unique to women’s sport, but the question remains over how to get them actively engaging in coverage. While neither of the above examples hit the mark, experimenting is probably the only way to find out.

Innovation is happening all the time across sports: from shorter formats and new scoring systems, to behind-the-scenes access and content. The upcoming Battle of the Sexes experiment is an example. Pitting world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka against tennis’s most divisive personality Nick Kyrgios is controversial and arguably an unnecessary exhibition concept, more than 50 years on from the famous clash between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. But organisers are clearly trying to attract eyeballs and tap into new audiences who aren’t regular tennis viewers – perhaps those who consume most of their sport online and who enjoy watching their favourite YouTubers take on outrageous physical challenges. We will see how it pans out live on the BBC later this month.

What is a proven formula to draw young women to sport? The individual athletes themselves. Ilona Maher’s injection of star power into domestic rugby during the 2024/25 season had a trickle-down effect across the game, positively impacting the way the sport and its athletes market themselves. She is an especially influential example, but recent Women’s Sport Trust numbers show that athletes like Maher and Lionesses captain Leah Williamson, and many of their teammates, have more sway on social media with younger generations than the large organisations or teams they represent.

Younger fans are directly influenced by those individual athletes – in part because of their ability on the field of play, but also because of the way they engage with social issues, culture and fashion, and their individual personalities too. Tapping into that star power will likely drive social media strategies in 2026.