Top women’s sport trends for 2025

Paris 2024 will go down in history for its gender equality achievements, but it will also be remembered as the Olympic Games that generated an explosion of captivating TikTok content. Following the relaxation of social media guidelines for athletes during the Games, related TikTok content garnered billions of views and female athletes often took centre stage.

According to statistics from the Women’s Sports Trust, gymnast Simone Biles garnered 600 million total video views and was the sixth most-viewed TikTok account using the hashtag Olympics, beating media outlets such as the Daily Mail and ESPN. Fellow American Ilona Maher accumulated 308m video views in total with her engaging and empowering content, becoming the most followed rugby player in the world.

Lina Nielsen attracted the highest number of TikTok views of any British athlete, while four of the six most viewed TikTok videos uploaded by Team GB members came from female athletes.

TikTok and other social media platforms are giving female athletes a unique platform to show off their personalities to an engaged audience. This not only raises the profile of female athletes, but also presents women’s sport as a commercially viable and attractive option for brands.

The Women’s Professional Leagues Limited, which has taken over the running of the Women’s Super League and Championship from the FA, capitalised on this while negotiating a new broadcast deal with Sky Sports and the BBC for the next five years.

Players now have the digital rights to show their own highlights clips on their social media channels, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to build their own brand and attract commercial opportunities.

Indeed, 2025 should see more female athletes than ever take advantage of the growing audience for women’s sport on social media. The IOC and the WPLL have demonstrated how governing bodies can be a helping hand in this process.

Attendance figures have always been a hot topic of conversation in women’s sport, and with the UEFA Women’s EURO, Rugby World Cup and Cricket World Cup all taking place in 2025, this is only set to continue.

The goal for EURO 2025 in Switzerland is to sell all 720,000 tickets for the tournament, surpassing the 574,875 tickets sold for EURO 2022. This would mean sold-out stadiums for every single match, an ambitious but doable target.

For the Rugby World Cup in England, the target is to sell out Twickenham for the final. Not only is this looking very likely, but the tournament is also set to be the best attended Women’s Rugby World Cup in history after 220,000 tickets were snapped up in the first sale period.

These tournaments are the marquee sporting events of 2025 and provide a huge opportunity to attract new fans and increase engagement with women’s sport.

But organising committees and governing bodies will have to ensure they are balancing tradition with innovation when considering ways to increase attendances, ensuring they do not alienate long-term supporters in their attempts to draw in fresh audiences. If they get this right, the next 12 months could be transformative for building women’s sport fandom.

The health and wellbeing of female athletes has long been overlooked, from ill-fitting equipment made for men to a lack of research on how elite sport impacts women’s bodies. Rising awareness of this neglect has given rise to initiatives addressing these issues.

Football is leading the way here. UEFA has assembled a team of experts to study the prevalence of ACL injuries in women’s football and invested in pioneering research on the menstrual cycle’s effect on performance, for example.

Well HQ, in partnership with the Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship, is now providing online courses for clubs covering topics like the menstrual cycle, injury risks, and pelvic health. Clubs must also appoint a health lead dedicated to player welfare.

Meanwhile, in the United States, businesswoman Michele Kang has committed $50 million to improve female athletes’ health. She has also invested in IDA Sports, which produces football boots tailored for women.

These initiatives should start to reduce the number of career-threatening injuries among female athletes and may even boost their performance, inspiring similar action across the world of sport in the coming year.

The Netball Super League embarks on a decade-long professionalisation journey in 2025 with the end goal of delivering “the most competitive, commercially vibrant and captivating league in the world”.

To do this, the league has been cut down from 10 to eight clubs, squad sizes have been reduced and talented players are set to be distributed across the teams. Major venues across the country will host 50 per cent of fixtures and provide an enhanced match day experience for supporters, with the grand final set to take place at the O2 Arena in London.

The benefit to the players will be a new salary cap and banding structure, an increase in the average salary by 60 per cent and the doubling of the minimum salary payment.

This is an exciting new era for the most popular female participation sport in the UK, but there will be challenges.

In women’s football, the dependency on affluent men’s clubs is often touted as a negative aspect of the game, but it does mean that women’s teams have a pool of resources to fall back on. There is less of this in the Netball Super League, with the exception of Nottingham Forest Netball. This means that the successful professionalisation of the competition relies heavily on strong fan and sponsor engagement from the start.

If the Netball Super League is successful in its endeavour, then it offers an excellent blueprint for other women’s sports entities and competitions which are also hoping to professionalise. As a result, all eyes will be on the revamped Netball Super League in 2025.

Multi-club ownership is a bone of contention in men’s sport, but it is being presented as a unique opportunity in women’s sport.

Michele Kang is at the forefront of this in women’s football with ownership of Washington Spirit in the NWSL, Olympique Lyonnais in Première Ligue and London City Lionesses in the Women’s Championship. She is determined to prove that women’s sport is good business and is planning to buy more teams in the future.

Similarly, Mercury 13, an investment group committed to acquiring and advancing women’s football clubs, has opened its portfolio with the purchase of FC Como.

On the one hand, this type of multi-club ownership guarantees dedicated investment for women’s teams which no longer must depend on the financial wellbeing of men’s clubs. This could speed up the professionalisation of women’s football and set new standards for female players.

On the other hand, the multi-club ownership system has often been criticised for manipulating the system, weakening competition and creating conflicts of interest.

As such, the debate around multi-club ownership in women’s football and alternative solutions for financially sustainable women’s teams will be prominent throughout 2025.

Gender equality may seem like too obvious a choice here, given it is always a trend in women’s sport. But 2025 should see an increased push for gender equality off the field of play.

This has been sparked by the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. While gender equality was achieved on the field of play, there were questions raised about female representation in coaching, officiating, leadership and media roles. This is true across the board in women’s sport, as well as in other areas such as medicine, research and volunteering.

Addressing these disparities is essential to ensure female representation in all aspects of sport. While gender equality milestones such as that achieved at Paris 2024 should be celebrated, the conversation for more progress will continue next year.