According to a report by Sports Innovation Lab, run by women's hockey legend Angela Ruggiero, investment in women's sports is on the rise.

According to a new report by Sports Innovation Lab, a company run by women's hockey legend Angela Ruggiero, investment in women's sports continues to rise.

According to the report, brands are increasing their year-over-year investments "but are still underinvesting in relation to the potential high-return revenue opportunity."

Specificially, the 41-page report, titled The ROI of Women’s Sports: A Blueprint for Value Investing, found that 83% of brands plan to increase their investment in women's sport in 2024, but currently only 9% of total investment budgets, on average, were being spent on women's sport.

The report is hoping to move the conversation from simply reporting that there is underinvestment, to explaining why there is underinvestment, and now helping to guide brands toward how they can capitalize on the opportunity in women's sport, including in leagues like the new PWHL. 

“Since launching our first women’s sports report in 2021, The Fan Project, we’ve been using data to tell the industry why investing in women’s sports was a smart business decision,” said Angela Ruggiero, co-founder of Sports Innovation Lab. “This report is the how. It’s providing a blueprint to both maximize the ROI of a brand’s marketing investment in women’s sports, while at the same time breaking down barriers inhibiting the industry’s growth.”

The report also identified three barriers to brands investing in women's sport. Those barriers included the reach of leagues due to poor time slots on television and lack of media coverage, despite the fact women's sports fans are more likely to subscribe to streaming platforms to watch games than men's fans. The second barrier was the quality of in-person fan experience. The reduced quality of entertainment and service off the field, court, or ice occurred despite more fans of women's sport (53%) paying for a ticketed sports event in 2022 than fans of men's sport (38%). Finally, the mere discoverability of women's sports is a significant barrier, as fans struggle to find where they can watch women's sport online or on television.