2024 is shaping up to be a milestone year for women’s sports, both in terms of investment and engagement. Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
This year’s Women’s March Madness has been showcased on prime-time TV, while more and more outlets are maintaining regular and knowledgeable coverage of these athletes. The result has been gangbusters ratings — 14.2 million people tuned in to watch Friday’s Final Four matchup between Iowa and UConn — and, accordingly, headlines about the women’s tournament have at times outpaced the men’s. Today’s championship between Caitlin Clark-led Iowa and the undefeated South Carolina squad will be a game for the ages. As The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch put it, “Welcome to the motherf—— new world.”
Turns out, when you put effort and dollars into the infrastructure of the women’s game, people watch.
As viewership has continued to rise over the past few years, so too has betting on women’s sports. According to Maria Marino, host at The Action Network, FanDuel reports that LSU-Iowa was the top betting event on Monday, boasting a 28% increase in wagers over last year’s national championship game. Betting in the WNBA, which has a partnership with FanDuel, is similarly exploding. And this staggering growth is happening globally across women’s sports: Last year, a study published by the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) found that betting on soccer has grown by 20% annually since 2020, while tennis, basketball and cricket saw more than 10% annual growth from 2017 to 2022.
Sports betting clearly benefits women’s sports in many ways. It’s yet another metric to further prove their commercial viability, and points to the revenue they can generate. Money was always going to be the primary pathway to equality.
Women’s sports thus offer the purest distillation of the current landscape of sports betting, as well as its dilemmas….
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