Why the NWSL clubs top sports team valuation lists?

At the end of last year, Forbes published a list of the world’s most valuable women’s sports teams in 2025. Of the 25 teams featured, 13 were football clubs and eight were clubs playing in the NWSL, making it the most-represented football league on the list. What have these NWSL clubs done to earn such high valuations?

Independent ownership

The biggest advantage that NWSL clubs have over their overseas counterparts is that the vast majority of them are owned and operated independent of a men’s side. Only four clubs in the league share ownership with a top-tier men’s side, and only one of those teams managed to make Forbes’ list. Although this is changing with time, clubs associated with men’s teams tend to be deprioritized when it comes to the allocation of resources and investment. In fact, the English Premier League just banned selling women’s teams’ assets in order to ensure men’s sides’ compliance with Financial Fair Play regulations this past November. 

NWSL teams’ independent ownership means they aren’t competing with a more commercially successful men’s team for resources and investment, and are owned and operated by people and entities who care about women’s football specifically and want to see it grow. We have seen this in clubs like Angel City FC — the highest-ranked football club on this list — and the Washington Spirit, where big investors have eagerly put millions of dollars into the team. Other clubs, like the Kansas City Current (ranked 7th; 2nd among football clubs), have been able to capitalize on their independent ownership by building the world’s first purpose-built professional women’s sports stadium and creating a lot of value through infrastructure development.

More media and sponsorship opportunities

In 2024, the NWSL signed a media deal that is to this the largest of its kind in women’s football globally (and at the time the largest media deal in women’s sports history), averaging $60 million a year among US- and Latin America-based broadcasters alone. This eclipsed the league’s previous media rights deal, which earned the league an average of $1.5 million a year, by a multiple of 40. In 2025, the WSL inked a new broadcasting deal worth £13 million ($16.9 million) per year, despite the NWSL having set a much higher precedent just a year earlier. This continues to be the most lucrative broadcast rights deal in Europe, marking a much more difficult media landscape in the continent overall. 

NWSL clubs have also been able to attract high-quality sponsors. The NWSL was estimated to have earned $39.5 million in 2025 from league-wide sponsorship alone, while team sponsorship summed up to around $66.5 million, with more than 400 brands and companies investing in the league. As of 2024, the average front-of-kit sponsor paid $1.1 million for the spot. With all of its deals, Angel City FC generated a whopping $20 million in sponsorship revenue in 2024, a number that has likely only grown since then.

For clubs in Europe that have a men’s counterpart, the landscape is a little different. While women’s sides can have sponsorship deals independent of the broader organization, it is not as common. The WSL’s top earner, Arsenal, generates between £6 million and £8 million annually ($8 million to $10.7 million) from sponsorships exclusive to the women’s side, which is less than half of what Angel City rakes in across the Atlantic.

What can the rest of the world learn?

The big lesson here is to value women’s sports. Although shared ownership with men’s clubs isn’t inherently a bad thing, it requires club ownership and operation to make sure to invest in their women’s counterparts and not let them fall by the wayside. Clubs need to invest in women’s football and its development in order to draw more fans, and clubs need more fans in order to attract investors, sponsorship deals, and media deals that make them more valuable.