When a group of investors paid a $110 million expansion fee in January 2025 to bring an NWSL team to Denver, it shattered records for North American women’s pro sports.
That was more than double the previous NWSL expansion price, the $53 million paid by Bay FC and Boston’s ownership group for expansion teams awarded in 2023. Meanwhile, just one year before that, the Wave formed with an expansion fee of only $2 million.
So when the group featuring Ariel Investments paid that $110 million fee for the Summit, Jason Wright—who now runs Ariel’s Project Level investment fund focused on women’s sports—says people thought, “Oh my gosh, we’re way past the value.”
But just 10 months later, last November, the bar was raised again when Arthur Blank paid $165 million for an NWSL team in Atlanta. Only five months after that, the Haslams paid $205 million for a team in Columbus.
That’s just one indicator of why Wright, the former NFL player and Commanders president, thinks the investment case for women’s sports is still accelerating.
While it’s “hard to see” an NFL team doubling in value in the next five years, Wright said onstage at Front Office Sports’s Huddle in the Hamptons event, women’s sports can do it. “We just watched WNBA valuations go from about $250 million average to $414 million average in a year’s time,” he said, “and that will continue to happen over the next five to seven years.”
Wright referenced a refrain from his boss, Ariel co-CEO and president Mellody Hobson: If sports assets are stocks, the NFL and NBA are Nvidia and Microsoft, while “women’s sports [are] the small caps” with a “faster base of growth.”
“They don’t have to become Nvidia or Microsoft to make a ton of money,” Wright said. “Because it’s the return base-on-base that matters. I don’t know that they will catch the NFL or the NBA.”
But Wright thinks NHL-level valuations are in sight for the WNBA. He said the numbers show the WNBA eventually should catch up to the NHL, “save for some weird gender bias that continues to oppress these values.”
The Valkyries are the most valuable WNBA franchise right now, with a $780 million valuation, according to Forbes. In the NHL, the most valuable team last year was the Maple Leafs at $4.4 billion, per Forbes.
Wright said the average NHL valuation is about $2.2 billion, while the average WNBA valuation is roughly $416 million. That’s still a significant gap. But Wright thinks it will close, including because average viewership for a regular season game in the NHL last season was around 450,000, far less than the WNBA’s average of 970,000 viewers.
“It’s no longer the rustbelt basketball fan saying ‘oh, they don’t dunk, it’s not real basketball,’” Wright told FOS. “They actually have a preference for the women’s game in some way.”
In March, Ariel president and general counsel Emma Rodriguez-Ayala told FOS during a panel at a Future of Women’s Sports event held in Nashville that a women’s pro franchise will achieve a $1 billion valuation within the next five years.
Wright believes the gap between NHL and WNBA valuations will close as women’s sports continues to prove itself as an appreciating asset class, especially because the fundamental reason for the growth of women’s sports is not going away: the uptick in girls’ participation in youth sports. According to the Aspen Institute’s most recent report, girls’ participation in youth sports rose for the third straight year in 2024, reaching its highest level since at least 2012, with 37% of girls ages 6–17 regularly playing.
The Summit’s early performance—they smashed the NWSL attendance record for their first home match in March—is evidence that the women’s sports boom is legitimate and sustainable, Wright said. The team is “pacing towards top three” in NWSL revenue for its first season, and Wright said he expects the team’s revenue to be larger than every women’s club in Europe, with the “potential” exception of Arsenal.
“This isn’t just a moment, it’s not just a media flash in the pan,” Wright told FOS. “This is a real economic drive behind these women.”
