Fans and sold-out arenas prove the power of women’s sports | Canada Voices

If you’ve ever questioned whether there is an audience for women’s sports, let the first season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League provide your answer. Toronto’s home team debuted at the Mattamy Athletic Centre and promptly sold out of both season and single-game tickets in the 3,850-seat arena. They’ve since moved to the Coca-Cola Coliseum, which has a capacity of 8,500, where they still sell out playoff games. A one-off game last season at Scotiabank Arena against Montreal’s PWHL team also sold out, with an audience of 19,285 spectators gathering to watch the matchup.

Diana Matheson, founder of the Northern Super League – a Canadian professional women’s soccer league launching its inaugural season in 2025 with six teams – is happy to see the now proven popularity of women’s sports in Canada combatting long-standing myths and misconceptions.

“It was the common belief by most of the men running pro sports, and the general public, that people don’t watch women’s sports and it doesn’t make money,” she says. “So what happened was women’s sports wasn’t invested in, it wasn’t marketed and it wasn’t put on TV.” Because would-be fans of women’s sports couldn’t find any place to watch it, its growth was hindered. “But as soon as you put it on TV, the audience grows and grows,” says Matheson.

That growth has resulted in an increase in the value of women’s sports teams. The July 2024 sale of Los Angeles’ Angel City FC, valued at US$250-million, was the highest-ever amount for a women’s sports team. “They were purchased a decade ago for just a few hundred thousand dollars,” Matheson says.

Fans are a big part of what fuels the success of women’s sports. Matheson believes that the fan culture around women’s sports makes it distinct from men’s leagues. “On the soccer side, in other countries, you have your hooligans in men’s soccer but that sort of culture doesn’t really exist in women’s soccer,” she says. “It’s much more a community. I think women’s pro sports is a lot more accessible.”

That approachability is part of what made Amy Wan Renton, a long-standing hockey fan, eager to support the Professional Women’s Hockey League. For the league’s inaugural 2023-2024 season Wan Renton missed out on both season tickets and single-game tickets for her home team in Toronto. So she and a group of fellow fans travelled nearly 10 times that season to Boston, Ottawa, Montreal and Pittsburgh to watch their team play.

Wan Renton has noticed a difference in the composition of the audience at PWHL games. “There are more women and kids,” she says, adding that she’s brought her 10-year-old daughter to both PWHL games as well as the first-ever WNBA game at Scotiabank Arena, an exhibition game between the Minnesota Lynx and Chicago Sky in May 2023. Before that game, Wan Renton wasn’t a big follower of basketball before, but “that turned me into a fan of basketball,” she says.”It was awesome.”

Viewership numbers echo Wan Renton’s habits. According to a report from sports marketing platform Parity and SurveyMonkey, seven out of 10 people now say they watch women’s sports. Of those fans, 54 per cent of them only began watching within the past three years, showing a great potential for growth.

The popularity of women’s sports leagues has a significant ripple effect into the sports ecosystem. Matheson points to sales of team merchandise, for example. In July 2024, WNBA fans of Indiana Fever player Caitlin Clark bought out the All-Star editions of her jersey in just 15 minutes.

More women are finding work in professional sports, too. Saskatchewan’s Jessica Campbell was hired by the Seattle Kraken as the first female assistant coach in the NHL. The Olympics Broadcasting Services hired 35 female commentators for Paris 2024, which representing 40 per cent of commentators – an 80 per cent increase in female commentator representation compared with Tokyo 2020, and a 200 per cent increase from Rio 2016. And opportunities for women coaches, referees, business executives and sports scientists are increasing as well.

Importantly, there’s the growth in opportunities for players themselves. When Ann-Renée Desbiens was growing up in Clermont, Que. in the early 2000s, there were no girls’ hockey leagues available. “I had to play hockey with the boys, and it was kind of the norm,” Desbiens recalls. “I grew up dreaming of playing in the NHL because there was no women’s league. You quickly realize that you don’t have the same opportunities as your male counterparts.”

Despite having an uncertain career path, Desbiens persevered, playing on the women’s ice hockey team at the University of Wisconsin and eventually joining the Professional Women’s Hockey League as the goaltender for Montreal’s team during the inaugural year. “Now that people can see us play, there are little girls who have women’s hockey players as role models,” she says.

Enrolment in girls’ hockey has increased as a result of players like Desbiens making their debut in the PWHL. In the U.S., a report from the Aspen Institute, a non-profit focused on promoting equity, found that participation rates of girls in sports in 2023 was the highest it had been in the country since 2013. Unfortunately, figures in Canada show that girls’ participation in sports hasn’t yet experienced similar growth. But Desbiens is hopeful that the shift is coming soon. She’s witnessing it in a subtle way, in her own family. “My four-year-old niece just started playing hockey this season because she saw us on TV,” Desbiens says. “I think there’s definitely going to be more girls in sports.”