The first European women's football championship took place in West Germany in 1957, despite women being forbidden to play competitive football there. England's Football Association deemed the sport "unsuitable for females". The English women won the tournament but received no recognition at home. Global governing bodies of football, rugby and cricket did not start recognising women's matches until the 1990s.
The Women's Tennis Association has run women's tennis independently since 1973, making tennis a leader in gender parity. Women's tennis matches often compete with men's for attention at the biggest tournaments, including Wimbledon. In 2024 six of the ten highest earners in women's sport were tennis players.
Deloitte forecasts revenue from women's professional sports will reach $2.4bn in 2025, up from $692m in 2022. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) launched the Women's Premier League in 2022; its five city-based franchises were sold to some of India's biggest conglomerates for $572m, with TV and digital rights for the first five years raising a further $116m. In 2023 Mukesh Ambani of Reliance, India's biggest conglomerate, paid $111m for one of those teams. In 2024 Bob Iger, boss of Disney, spent $250m buying Angel City, one of 14 teams in the NWSL, America's women's soccer league. The NWSL split from US Soccer, America's governing body, in 2021 and has flourished since under a seven-strong leadership team, six of whom are women.
Cristiano Ronaldo, men's football's biggest earner, made around €200m ($232m) in 2024. Aitana Bonmatí, his female equivalent, made just €1m. Ahead of the 2023 women's World Cup, only 40% of footballers playing in the qualifiers were professional, and only 70% received any sort of payment from their national federation, according to FIFPRO, the players' union.
As recently as 2022, women's sports accounted for a mere 15% of sports coverage across media platforms. Ilona Maher, an American rugby player, has far more followers on TikTok than the All Blacks, New Zealand's formidable men's team. Rugby's global body reckons half of the audience for women's matches are newcomers to the sport. Fans of women's sports are 60% more likely to take their children to matches, according to Two Circles, a marketing firm. A typical women's fan is younger than in men's sports and more likely to be female.
FIFA aims to double to 60m the number of women playing organised football worldwide by 2027; over 250m men are reckoned to play the game. In Saudi Arabia, girls were banned from playing sport in public until around 2018; by 2025, 70,000 take part in the school soccer league.
England's women's football team retained the UEFA European Women's Championship in July 2025, held in Switzerland. They lost their first group-stage match and trailed in all three knockout games, clinching the title in a penalty shoot-out. England's men have not won a tournament since 1966.
On November 2nd 2025 India's women won the Cricket World Cup for the first time, beating South Africa before 45,000 in Mumbai. Some 200m watched on screens; India became the first non-Western country to be crowned women's world champions. The BCCI had ordered gender parity in match fees around 2022 and launched the Women's Premier League the following year.
The 2022 women's European Championship sold 570,000 tickets, up from 240,000 five years earlier. The men's 2024 European Championship drew 2.7m. Last season England's Women's Super League drew around 7,000 fans per match, lower than the men's third tier but rising steeply.
Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.