With media deals expiring, could women's sports leagues cash in on growing audience?

The audience for women’s sports just keeps growing — and now, with several media rights packages soon up for grabs, a new era of richer media deals may be on the horizon for women's leagues.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman outlined the four major women’s sports rights packages that will soon expire. They include packages for the WNBA, NCAA women’s college basketball, the FIFA Women’s World Cup and National Women’s Soccer League.

Collectively, these packages could usher in a new era where women’s sports leagues will finally be cashing in on their worth. It would make investment in women's sports the rule, not the exception.

Let’s take the case of NCAA Division I women’s basketball.

Concerns over inequalities between the men’s and women’s tournaments in 2021 sparked outrage. That prompted the NCAA to pay several experts to look at how this happened and how things could be improved in the future. One report looked at the league’s media and sponsorship rights. It determined that the women’s tournament is one of the NCAA’s most valuable assets and, because of the way the NCAA had packaged it in the past, the event was grossly undervalued.

Experts estimated that the championship alone would be worth between $81 and $112 million annually beginning in 2025, the first year after the current NCAA agreement with ESPN expires. The tournament is part of a packaged media deal with ESPN that includes rights to some other sports and is currently worth about $34 million annually.

In other words: the NCAA could be making a lot more money if they invested more wisely.

Fast forward to 2023. Division I women’s basketball just had one of its most successful postseasons. The NCAA tournament saw record-breaking viewership, drawing more eyes than average NBA games at the time.

And on Thursday — the same day of the NFL draft, and well into the college basketball offseason — one of the biggest sports stories of the day was how ex-Louisville star Hailey Van Lith, among the best point guards in college basketball, transferred to LSU, the defending national champions. It's only been a month since the tournament ended, and fans are already looking forward to next year.

It remains to be seen what the NCAA will do with women’s college basketball media rights — but NCAA president Charlie Baker said this week he expects to decide on that by the end of December.

WNBA deal expires soon

The WNBA’s current agreement with ESPN expires after the 2025 season. The league’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has said the WNBA would seek a deal worth more than $100 million a year — and, as she told The Journal, that could translate to better salaries and resources for its athletes.

Let’s not forget about women’s soccer. The FIFA women’s World Cup this summer is sure to be one for the books, with the United States women’s national team vying for its third consecutive championship.

Women's World Cup media rights

In October, FIFA said it rejected several bids for media rights to this summer’s tournament for being too low. “This is not a case of being priced out,” FIFA’s chief business officer Romy Gai told Bloomberg at the time, “but rather testament to a lack of willingness of broadcasters to pay what the women’s game deserves.”

The Journal reported that FIFA is in the process of calculating a separate value for rights to the women’s tournament for the first time, projecting that the 2023 tournament’s value will be more than $300 million. That would make the tournament the most valuable women-only sporting event in the world, according to The Journal.

NWSL deal with CBS expiring

Then there’s the NWSL, which has its current deal with CBS on the verge of expiring. The league has a domestic media rights deal with CBS that was reportedly valued at $4.5 million over a three-year period, or roughly $1.5 million per year. After the media giant’s exclusivity window for a rights renewal closed, the league hit the open market with its media rights and is actively shopping around for a new package.

It will be exciting to see what this new deal with look like.

For all we know, we could very well be reading about a new historic media rights deal for NWSL this summer while also watching the next world champion lift the FIFA World Cup. What an exciting moment that would be for women's soccer, and all of women's sports.

Women & Sport is a NorthJersey.com column devoted to female athletes from the rec league level to those in college and the pros. If you've got a tip on an athlete from North Jersey who should be noted in the column, no matter how young they are or how old, please drop me a line at anzidei@northjersey.com.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Women's sports leagues could cash in with media rights deals