From billion-dollar workforce house owners to prime traders and media energy gamers, these 25 girls are reshaping the worldwide sports activities financial system and altering who controls the sport.
This 12 months, girls’s sports activities reached an inflection level. Record viewership, sold-out arenas, main media rights offers, and funding reshaped a nook of the broader athletic financial system lengthy seen as area of interest. Yet the actual transformation is not taking place on the sector. Power in sports activities has all the time lived behind the scenes, in possession suites, funding committees, and boardrooms the place billion-dollar selections are made. What’s altering is who holds the capital.
Forbes is debuting the 2025 checklist of America’s Most Powerful Women in Sports to seize this elementary shift. Women are not simply shaping the story of sports activities, they’re shaping its capital construction. The checklist spotlights girls redefining affect throughout the whole sports activities financial system, from house owners and traders to executives and business amplifiers, and athletes capturing the upside of the companies they’ve helped construct. For a long time, girls fueled the business engine of sports activities whereas being locked out of its economics. Now as this checklist displays, they maintain the capital and that adjustments who builds, who advantages, and what will get funded.
Ownership stays the last word leverage level, with Gayle Benson touchdown on this 12 months’s prime spot. As proprietor and CEO of the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans, two franchises valued at a mixed $8.35 billion, she occupies a singular place as the one girl who controls groups in each the NFL and NBA. Benson sits within the boardrooms that form the business backbone of the 2 most worthwhile leagues in U.S. sports activities. Amy Adams Strunk, who owns the Tennessee Titans, wields related clout, serving to engineer the franchise’s progress inside an NFL ecosystem that generated $23 billion final season.
When Clara Wu Tsai and husband Joseph Tsai acquired the Brooklyn Nets in 2019, the New York Liberty have been seen by some as a $10-to-14 million afterthought—underfunded, missed, and struggling to construct business momentum. Six years later, beneath Wu Tsai’s possession and CEO Keia Clarke’s management, the workforce is valued at an estimated $450 million, believed to be a document for a girls’s skilled sports activities franchise. Strategic funding, integration with the Nets and Barclays Center, {and professional} infrastructure have remodeled the Liberty right into a business progress engine for the WNBA.
Michele Kang has taken a unique route, constructing the primary international multi-club platform in girls’s soccer—proudly owning the Washington Spirit, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin (OL Lyonnes), and London City Lionesses, with a transparent perception that soccer workforce valuations will reach $1 billion or more within the close to future. She’s backing that conviction with infrastructure: $25 million to the United States Soccer Federation and $50 million to the Kynisca Innovation Hub, each advancing female-centered sports activities science and efficiency programs. It’s a wager that lasting progress will not come from headlines alone, however from constructing the foundations that make scale potential.
Kara Nortman, co-founder of Angel City Football Club, from left, Actress Natalie Portman, and Julie Uhrman, co-founder of the Angel City Football Club, throughout an interview in Los Angeles, California, in 2023. Photographer: Allison Zaucha/Bloomberg
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Kara Nortman noticed girls’s sports activities as an underdeveloped asset class pricing in legacy constraints somewhat than ahead progress. A seasoned enterprise capitalist, she cofounded Angel City FC in 2020 when NWSL enlargement charges have been just some million {dollars}. She later launched Monarch Collective with Jasmine Robinson, a $250 million fund that invests not simply capital however hands-on operational experience. Angel City’s rise to an estimated $280 million valuation validated her thesis that when capital, infrastructure, and experience align, the market scales quick.
What makes this second equally historic is that gamers are not ready for the system to worth them, they’re constructing the infrastructure themselves.
The Caitlin Clark impact is properly documented. The WNBA rookie was accountable for an estimated 26.5% of all league financial exercise in 2024. But her eight-year, $28 million Nike deal alerts greater than marketability, it displays a recalibration in how feminine athletes are valued as financial forces in their very own proper. WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier launched Unrivaled, a 3-on-3 basketball league not as an ancillary product of males’s basketball, however as its personal business entity. It raised $35 million, secured a TNT deal, and reached a $340 million valuation after its first season (a document determine for a brand new skilled league), proving progressive fashions can generate institutional returns. (Full disclosure: this writer invested in an early fundraising spherical for Unrivaled.)
Beyond possession sits the infrastructure layer and the ladies who management the platforms, capital, and distribution that form which sports activities scale and which keep on the margins. Amy Howe runs FanDuel, which instructions 41% of the U.S. sports activities betting market and has grow to be some of the vital drivers of viewership. FanDuel would not simply facilitate wagering, it basically adjustments viewing conduct and subsequently how properties are valued. Nike President Amy Montagne steers Nike’s $4.7 billion annual advertising and marketing machine, controlling over 40% of the worldwide sportswear market with the ability to make or break athletes and leagues by way of a single endorsement resolution.
Others act as gatekeepers who decide which sports activities grow to be commercially viable, making them the important bridge between capital and returns. Rosalyn Durant controls ESPN’s programming and acquisitions, figuring out which sports activities attain mass audiences and which stay invisible. Hillary Mandel oversees media rights negotiations at IMG, structuring the offers that dictate how billions in income circulate by way of the whole ecosystem.
Jessica Berman represents how this energy extends to league governance itself. In three years as commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, she has led a transformation from crisis to growth. A $240 million media rights deal changed a package deal value simply $1.5 million yearly, attendance climbed previous 2 million, and viewership soared almost 300%. But the actual shift runs deeper. By eliminating the draft and giving gamers management over the place they signal, Berman shifted leverage from house owners to athletes, forcing golf equipment to compete on tradition and funding.
What makes this second distinctive is that energy in sports activities is extra broadly distributed than ever, with girls now controlling and steering capital at each layer. This 12 months’s listees additionally invested in infrastructure for ladies’s sports activities when others would not from stadiums and leagues to media offers and coaching amenities. The viewers confirmed up in large numbers. They proved the market was there all alongside, it simply wanted somebody prepared to construct for it.
But the image stays incomplete. Women are nonetheless underrepresented in possession teams, league governance, company management, and on the highest ranges of media and tech firms reshaping the business. The sports activities financial system is repricing quickly. Who controls capital now determines what will get constructed and who income for many years. This checklist captures the ladies rewriting these guidelines.