The Monarch Collective Managing Partner discusses her women’s sports outlook for the new year, from media ratings to a WNBA renaissance.
Kara Nortman, the co-founder of Angel City and the venture capitalist behind Monarch Collective, is generally bullish on women’s sports in 2025. Monarch, the $100 million fund focused solely on women’s sports properties, already owns stakes in NWSL clubs Angel City, San Diego Wave, and the Boston expansion club coming next year.
In an in-depth conversation with Boardroom earlier this month, Nortman provided seven interesting thoughts on the state of women’s leagues and how the landscape would change over the course of the year.
Media Rights are Key to Revenue Streams
While Nortman celebrates promising new leagues like Unrivaled, LOVB, and the Women’s Lacrosse League, she believes investors tend to be slower and more cautious with leagues and sports that don’t yet have predictable media revenue or distribution on the horizon. It’s then a question of how much capital it takes to build a consistent fan experience or get star players for whom fans regularly show up.
For leagues that don’t have that media revenue, you really have to believe in the execution on the grassroots level with revenue streams that will break even or turn a profit with ticketing, sponsorship, and merchandise.
“But if you’re in leagues where media revenue is going up and to the right,” Nortman told Boardroom, “it’s going to reinforce all those revenue streams.”
Unrivaled, featured as Boardroom’s January Cover Story, NWSL, and LOVB are all on the right track with media revenue streams in 2025.
Find Ways to Go from Good to Great in Existing teams, Leagues
As Nortman knows in building women’s sports teams from the ground up, it’s hard to build quality fan experiences where fans want to show up while sponsors, brands, and partners all buy in. Over the next couple of years as expansion grows the WNBA and NWSL to 32 combined teams, she estimated that only five to seven of those teams have strong P&Ls right now.
“You have to look at where there’s maturity and where are existing assets that are doing pretty well and find ways to make them excellent,” Nortman said. “There aren’t many big, established multi-hundred million dollar businesses that are plug and play where you just put a new capital provider in and they just work.”
The UFC, she noted, went through multiple bankruptcies before it hit its stride. The WNBA endured its share of struggles over the first 25 years. It made Caitlin Clark an easy example, Nortman continued, of someone who not only compelled fans to show up everywhere but made stakeholders and sponsors at every level believe in the W’s market upside. But without examples like Clark, who we’ll get to a bit later, building consistency and reliability into a business is an important step in turning a league or entity from good to great.
The Frequency of Spikes
We’re experiencing all-time records and historic firsts in women’s sports at a faster rate than ever before. That includes viewership records in women’s college basketball, women’s soccer, and the WNBA, as well as 91,553 packing Camp Nou for a Barcelona-Real Madrid match, the European championships selling out London’s Wembley Stadium, or Angel City becoming the first women’s team achieving a $250 million valuation.
“In the last few years, the frequency of spikes is much greater than before and much more concentrated,” Nortman said.
It’s taken years of methodical work, she said, to improve stadiums and practice facilities, foster fan culture, and broker sponsorship deals that aren’t just plug and play to achieve the spikes we’re seeing in the modern age. And the stakeholders need to show up and keep doing it for this trend to continue.
Expect Continued WNBA, NWSL Ratings Growth
“If you look at the WNBA ratings, regular season games are pretty similar to NBA ratings,” Nortman said. While the W averaged 1.2 million viewers on ESPN and 2023-24 NBA regular season national games averaged 1.6 million, the WNBA national numbers go way down when factoring in other networks.
Even W games that didn’t include Clark had significantly increased viewership. A major reason why the NBA just got a $76 billion media deal, and the W got a little over $2 billion is the difference in the number of games available in a 30-team league to one with less than half that right now.
“But I wonder if lack of tonnage could be an advantage,” Nortman said, “in that there are fewer games, but they’re more important to watch. It’s not like if I miss this game, there’s going to be another one in two days and it goes on nine months of the year.”
There’s a shorter season for the WNBA and NWSL than their male counterparts, bringing a sense of importance to the existing matches. Nortman expects the ratings for both leagues to increase as more strong players and ownership groups enter their respective leagues and drive an excellent viewing experience.

The W has Entered a Magical Era
Like the 1980s in the NBA, Nortman pointed out, the WNBA has a lot of generational talent entering the league at once, including Clark and Angel Reese last year, Paige Bueckers likely next season, and superstars like JuJu Watkins coming soon. As the NBA entered the era of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, it evolved from a league whose Finals games aired on tape delay to live in prime time on major networks. Next year, the WNBA’s new TV deal with Disney, Comcast, and Amazon will greatly increase its global media distribution, ushering in a new age coinciding with the entry of incredible talent into the league.
Sports Fans are Getting Less Sexist
Fans and NBA players are wearing the Sabrina 2s at levels we haven’t seen before in women’s signature shoes. It’s now more common than ever before, Nortman said, for a 14-year-old boy to ask to have his birthday party at an Angel City game. This new generation of sports fans seems a lot more open to embracing women’s sports without inherent prejudices held by older demographics. And that means women’s sports could be on a more level playing field with the men in many aspects in the future.
“They’ve discovered a new world that has been inhabited by amazing people for a long time,” Nortman said. “So I think that’s a big cultural change. We’re just growing up with less embedded biases.”
New Innovation in How Women’s Sports is Covered
Nortman is pleased with both Amazon and Netflix getting into women’s sports rights along with ESPN devoting more shoulder content and coverage to its existing women’s rights, including College GameDay and its WNBA pregame show with Elle Duncan, Andrea Carter, and Chiney Ogwumike. It’s about driving eyeballs and storytelling to show what’s possible rather than the newest technological advancement.
“People were always looking for virtual reality 3D into your bedroom,” Nortman, “but I think modern fans are moreso looking for connection with the players and mass distribution with some commentary.”
Fans are going to look for coverage they can trust rather than what she called the superficial influencer. Just because you’re a famous expert in one area doesn’t mean it’s going to work when they try crossing over into another subject. And even if a show has a smaller audience, Nortman thinks fans are going to gravitate towards authenticity where people care deeply about a topic or a talent and stay loyal to that creator or channel.
“We’re going to move more deeply into trust, and there’s a lot of trust in women’s sports,” Nortman said, “but there’s still something to prove. And you’re going to see smaller audiences with bigger impacts, both at the team level and the player level.”
Look out for these overarching topics in 2025 as Nortman and Boardroom track how the trends play out.