Ariel Investments, an investor in the Denver Summit expansion NWSL team and League One Volleyball, believes women’s sports is approaching a breakout moment, and projects that a women’s pro franchise will achieve a $1 billion valuation within the next half-decade.
“That’s going to happen pretty soon,” Ariel president and general counsel Emma Rodriguez-Ayala told Front Office Sports during a panel at a Future of Women’s Sports event held in Nashville in March.
Women’s sports teams are already hitting heights previously unseen. In March, the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun were sold to the Fertitta family for a record $300 million. In May of last year, the New York Liberty brought on a group of minority investors, including Alibaba founder and billionaire Jack Ma and supermodel Karlie Kloss, in a deal valuing the franchise at $450 million; that represented a record valuation for a pro women’s sports franchise. In soccer, an ownership group led by IMA Financial Group CEO Robert Cohen paid a record $110 million expansion fee for the Summit in January 2025.
Ariel, a Chicago-based asset management firm, is led by co-CEO and president Mellody Hobson, the former chair of Starbucks who in her personal capacity is an investor in the Broncos and White Sox. Other investments in the Ariel portfolio include Manchester United and Madison Square Garden Sports Corp.
Recently, Ariel has been making waves in the world of women’s sports, including in February, when the firm announced it had raised $250 million for Project Level. That fundis still raising money with a reported goal of $1 billion. It is invested in the Summit and LOVB. It targets women’s teams and leagues in the U.S. and Europe, as well as adjacent real estate and other businesses, like ticketing platforms and data analytics companies.
Comparing teams to stocks, Rodriguez-Ayala said women’s sports is the “small caps” of sports investing. “If you think of Nvidia or Microsoft, that’s like men’s sports, right? That’s the Giants, that’s Real Madrid. But if you think of small-cap investing, how we invest in little companies that are still public companies, or private, that can blow it out of the park—that’s women’s sports.”
In men’s pro sports, valuations have reached unprecedented levels. Two examples: the Lakers were valued at $10 billion in their change-of-control sale to Mark Walter, and the Dolphins reached a $12.5 billion valuation in the recent sale of a 1% stake. Women’s sports have more room to grow, Rodriguez-Ayala told FOS.
“There’s no men’s team that in five years is going to be $24 billion, absent, I mean, the world going crazy,” she said. “Doubling at that big size is really hard. But doubling at the smaller sizes is easier.”
Ariel is not alone in predicting women’s sports will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Last month, Deloitte issued a report saying global revenues in women’s sports are expected to reach at least $3 billion this year, which would represent an increase of 340% in four years. The report also pointed to the “escalating valuation” of teams, saying “the narrative around women’s sports has shifted from potential to acknowledging sharp growth.”
Rodriguez-Ayala doesn’t think the rising valuations are tied to any exponential growth in the talent of female athletes. “The talent has been amazing a long time,” she said.
“We actually think it’s the youth,” she said. “Girls are, for the first time, at parity playing youth sports with boys.”
That is the same idea espoused by former NFL running back Jason Wright, who spent five years as president of the Commanders and was the first black team president in league history. Wright, a managing partner at Ariel who is head of investments for Project Level, told FOS in February that women’s sports has entered a structurally different phase than past bursts in popularity. The evolution is fueled in part by a surge in girls’ youth sports participation, which helps create a pipeline of future fans and athletes, as well as a willingness from younger generations to find, and watch, emerging sports leagues on digital platforms.
“There’s strong commercial momentum that is going to last longer than just a flash in the pan,” Wright said. “It’s going to be a great 10-year run no matter what, even if we all fumbled it. But if we do this right, this becomes a 30-year run on these assets that will continue to grow even faster than men’s sports.”
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