THE VISIBILITY PARADOX

What happens when women's sport finally gets the visibility it worked so hard for?

Over the past few decades, women's sport has been quietly growing from the sidelines, building towards one deceptively simple goal: visibility.

We wanted more opportunities, more coverage, more investment, and more recognition for our female athletes. The end goal was creating clear pathways for young women dreaming of a sporting career, and the visibility to show them that it’s possible. A fairly straightforward proposition from a communications perspective.

If women's sports attracted a larger audience, the rest would follow. Larger audiences mean greater commercial value, which attracts more sponsors, leading to bigger investments, that create better facilities, stronger pathways, higher pay and more professional opportunities for the athletes coming through.

Slowly, and almost imperceptibly at first, that visibility began to arrive, and now it’s difficult to argue that women's sport is operating on the margins of the sporting world. Our audiences are growing, brands are investing, athletes are becoming household names and women's competitions are increasingly finding their way into mainstream media and popular culture.

Factually speaking, the numbers back that up. In April this year, Deloitte projected that global revenues in women's elite sport would reach at least US$3 billion for 2026, which is a 25% increase on 2025 and a whopping 340% increase since 2022!

Commercial revenue, including sponsorship, partnerships and merchandising, is expected to remain the largest source of income, accounting for around 45% of the global total. Source: Deloitte

We could argue that Women's sport shouldn’t have to prove its commercial value in order to justify investment. Equality shouldn’t be a business case. Women and girls should not have to demonstrate a sufficient return on investment before being given the same opportunities afforded to men and boys, however… this is the world that we live in, and commercial value matters.

Commercial value also changes the landscape of a sport. Once audiences become large enough; revenues substantial enough; and sponsorship valuable enough, women's sport stops being viewed simply as an extension of a broader equality agenda. It becomes an industry in its own right.

And herein lies the catch. When there is more to gain, there is also more to lose. Industries come with higher expectations. They require stronger infrastructure, more sophisticated governance, greater accountability, better risk management and increasingly strategic communications. And this is the paradox I keep coming back to.

Visibility is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a very unforgiving one.

PART 1: The spotlight arrives

For generations, the argument for investing in women's sport was largely framed around equality, and rightly so. Women and girls deserve access to the same opportunities, resources and pathways as men and boys. They deserve to see themselves represented, and they deserve the opportunity to build professional careers in the sports they love. Increasingly, however, there is another argument that is much harder for the commercial world to ignore: The audience is there.

People are actually watching now. They’re attending games, following athletes, consuming broadcasts and content, buying merchandise and building communities around women's competitions. Where audiences go, commercial opportunity follows.

The numbers tell a remarkably consistent story. Women's sport is experiencing significant growth across revenue, broadcasting, matchday attendance and commercial investment, with commercial revenue now representing the largest share of the global women's sports market.

Deloitte's latest figures suggest that it’s not simply a story of increasing participation or social interest. It is becoming a significant commercial ecosystem. Source: Deloitte

That distinction matters.

Women's sport is no longer asking the commercial world to believe in its potential, because the market is beginning to demonstrate that it does.

Football and basketball are currently leading the global women's sports revenue landscape, while cricket, rugby, volleyball and other sports are also attracting increased investment. Source: Deloitte

Here in Australia, the AFL has been talking explicitly about the commercial future of the women's game, while participation across women and girls continues to grow. In 2025, the AFL reported a 14% increase in women and girls' participation, with women and girls accounting for almost a quarter of all registered participants nationally. Source: AFL

This is a significant shift in language.

We are no longer simply talking about creating opportunities for women to participate in sport. We are now talking about building commercially successful women's sporting properties, and that growth is not confined to what happens on the field.

Women's sport is increasingly finding its way into the culture surrounding sport as well. The success of Welcome to Wrexham, for example, demonstrated the extraordinary power of storytelling to turn a football club into a global cultural brand, reaching audiences well beyond traditional football supporters. Although it’s primarily a men's football story, it still illustrates a broader lesson: compelling sporting stories can bring people into a world they might otherwise never have entered.

Now, with the return of Ted Lasso and its fictional women's football team, the Lady Greyhounds, at the centre of the fourth season, women's football is increasingly being treated as a mainstream cultural story rather than a niche sporting subject.

Neither television show is a commercial metric for women's sport, they are, however, part of a much broader cultural shift.

Visibility is no longer simply about putting women's sport on the screen. It is about putting women's sport into the culture.

That matters because the more visible something becomes, the more people develop a stake in what happens to it. Fans, sponsors, broadcasters, investors, athletes, journalists, advocacy groups, politicians and parents are all watching. Increasingly, so are people who have never watched a game before. The spotlight has arrived, and it turns out that it doesn’t discriminate between what you want people to see and what you would rather they didn't.

PART 2: Once everyone is watching

There’s a point at which visibility changes from an advantage into a responsibility.

When a sporting organisation operates largely within its own ecosystem, its decisions are primarily judged by the people inside that ecosystem: players, coaches, officials and fans. Once they grow, so too does the audience surrounding it, and that changes the job.

A sporting organisation is no longer simply running a competition. It’s managing a public-facing brand with an increasingly complex network of stakeholders, each with different expectations and, sometimes, fundamentally different ideas about what the organisation should stand for.

Consider what happens when a sporting organisation has to make a difficult policy decision. To one athlete, it may be about safety or fairness. To another, it may be about inclusion or the right to participate. To a fan, it may be about the integrity of the competition. To a sponsor, it may be about brand reputation. To an advocacy organisation, it may be about human rights. To a journalist, it may simply be a story.

The organisation itself may be trying to make the best decision it can within the rules, evidence and policies available to it, but that one decision can have six entirely different interpretations.

Add to the mix, this day and age of technology and social media give a platform for all six interpretations to exist simultaneously, publicly and at enormous speed.

This is where the distinction between a difficult problem and a communications problem becomes important. Some problems are genuinely difficult. There may be no outcome that satisfies every stakeholder, and no carefully crafted statement can change that.

Good communications cannot make an inherently complex issue simple, but what it can do is make an organisation's thinking clearer. It can explain what is known, what is not known, which principles are being applied, where responsibility sits and what happens next. It can give people somewhere to put their questions. Most importantly, it can prevent an organisation from allowing everyone else to define its position for it, because when an organisation fails to explain its position clearly, the vacuum does not remain empty. Someone else fills it.

There is, of course, a temptation for organisations under pressure to think of communication primarily as reputation management: find the right words, calm the backlash, protect the brand and move on. The difficulty is that some problems cannot be communicated away.

Sometimes the communications problem is actually a systems problem wearing a communications costume. If the underlying policy is unclear, communication cannot manufacture clarity. If governance is inadequate, a press release cannot fix governance. If different stakeholders have legitimate but competing interests, a carefully worded statement cannot make the conflict disappear.

That distinction becomes particularly important when sporting organisations are asked to navigate questions that extend well beyond sport itself: sex and gender, safety, inclusion, equality, identity, human rights, evidence, privacy and the boundaries of who gets to participate in which category.

These are not simple questions, nor are they questions that sporting organisations can necessarily answer in isolation. Yet increasingly, they are being asked to do exactly that, and when the answers prove controversial, the organisation itself often becomes the story.

PART 3: When the problem isn't actually the problem

Before you can solve a problem, you have to be sure you are solving the right one. It sounds obvious, but in a high-pressure environment it is surprisingly easy to confuse the thing everyone is arguing about with the thing that actually needs to be solved.

A sporting controversy may look like one problem from the outside, while the organisation sitting inside it is dealing with several different problems at once:

The underlying issue: What are people actually concerned about?

The sporting problem: What does the organisation need to decide?

The public controversy: What are people arguing about?

The communications problem: What is the organisation being perceived to say or do?

The systems problem: What policy, governance or infrastructure gap allowed the situation to emerge in the first place?

Those are not usually the same thing and treating them as though they are, can make an already difficult situation considerably harder to resolve.

A useful case study: the WNBA

The current debate around transgender participation in women's sport provides a particularly interesting example because the WNBA has become one of the most visible women's sporting organisations in the world at the moment, as this broader cultural debate has intensified.

The issue itself is much bigger than basketball. It encompasses questions of fairness, safety, inclusion, sex and gender, athlete rights and, inevitably, politics.

That can make it tempting to look to the WNBA to find the solution, but I think that’s entirely the wrong starting point.

A more useful approach would be to ask, ‘Why is the WNBA being asked to solve this problem in the first place?’

There are women who genuinely believe that the integrity and safety of female sport are being compromised, full disclosure, I am one of those women. Then we have the transgender community who feel they are being excluded, dehumanised or denied a legitimate place in elite sport, which is also a real issue. And on somewhere in the middle, we have athletes who simply want to play their sport without becoming the centre of a political argument.

None of those experiences become less real or valid simply because they conflict with one another.

That is precisely what makes the issue so difficult.

A good strategy does not require pretending that competing interests do not exist. It requires acknowledging them honestly while still making decisions, and this is where the conversation becomes bigger than the WNBA.

Sporting organisations are increasingly being asked to resolve questions that straddle sport, medicine, law, human rights, social policy and cultural identity; yet sporting organisations do not control all of those systems. They cannot write legislation, resolve broader questions about sex and gender or create a universal framework for every sport.

What they can do is establish clear sporting rules, explain the principles behind them, communicate honestly and advocate for the infrastructure they need to operate fairly and safely. That requires someone to define where the sporting organisation's responsibility ends, and the wider social responsibility begins.

How can we ask a sporting organisation to carry the weight of a problem that society itself has not resolved?

PART 4: Who is actually responsible?

If women's sport is being asked to carry increasingly complex social questions, the next question is obvious: Who is actually responsible for answering them?

It is tempting to look at the league or competition where a controversy becomes visible and assume the responsibility sits there. Sometimes it does. However, elite sport is rarely governed by a single organisation. Behind most competitions sits a web of governing bodies, policies, regulations and jurisdictions, each with different responsibilities and, sometimes, different ideas about how the same issue should be handled. The organisation most visible to the public is not necessarily the organisation with the greatest authority.

If a problem crosses sporting boundaries, national borders, medical questions, legal frameworks and human rights considerations, asking one league to solve it independently is unlikely to produce a consistent or durable answer. But there is another issue here that I think deserves more attention.

Society has spent years having a rapidly evolving conversation about sex, gender identity and transition. Language has changed. Policies have changed. Legal and social expectations have changed.

However, the infrastructure required to support the consequences of those changes has not necessarily evolved at the same pace. Sport is one of the places where that gap becomes particularly difficult to ignore.

Sport requires categories. It has to decide who competes against whom. It has to establish eligibility, manage physical safety and determine what constitutes a fair competitive environment. Those questions do not disappear simply because the wider social conversation has become more complex.

At some point, someone still has to write the rules. That does not mean sporting organisations should be expected to solve society's broader questions by themselves. They have responsibilities to their athletes, their competitions and their fans, but responsibility does not mean isolation. If women's sport is genuinely entering a new era of commercial and cultural significance, it deserves infrastructure capable of supporting that growth.

The alternative is to ask individual sporting organisations to make high-stakes decisions under extraordinary public pressure while simultaneously carrying the reputational consequences of problems that extend far beyond the boundaries of their sport.

That is not a sustainable governance model.

So why aren’t we putting pressure back onto the powers that be, to create a workable and sustainable solution across the board? Where are the men’s leagues in these debates?

Why are women’s sporting leagues the being made responsible for an issue that stems beyond their control?

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