Despite attendance dip, NWSL exhibits overall growth driven by young women fans

The GIST: There’s been a dip in YoY NWSL attendance, but that stat doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. Last week, the league shared insightful data on attendance, viewership, and social media records that women’s soccer fans smashed this year, all of which point to who’s winning the most with NWSL growth: Young women fans. Let’s kick it.

The dip: While fluctuations are normal for sports leagues, the NWSL’s drop is surprising considering most women’s sports leagues have only seen things go up. Overall NWSL attendance, however, has exploded by more than 400% since the league launched in 2013 (375K) to nearly 1.94M this year. And 2025’s season was still the second-highest attended in league history.

The attendance: It was a banner year for the NWSL — for the third consecutive season, average attendance per match topped 10K, marking the longest such streak in league history. And things were especially good for certain clubs, such as Bay FC, which set the league’s attendance record and was one of a record six clubs that sold out or surpassed 10K fans for every home game.

• NWSL stadiums have also been dotting the record books: Forty-eight of the 50 most attended matches in U.S. women’s professional sports league history were NWSL games. Fielding plenty of interest.

The viewership: The league saw its fourth consecutive year of viewership growth thanks to its landmark media rights deal. Viewership was up 22% YoY, with games reaching 214K average viewers across national broadcasts. This was especially fueled by women aged 18 to 34, where viewership increased 30% YoY as the NWSL remains one of the top sports properties for this demo.

• The digital reach helps, especially for the league’s younger fans: Total live streams went up by 30% as fans viewed a record 2.62B minutes across all platforms with a sharp 24% YoY increase on Ion’s FAST platform.

The following: As with its viewership growth, women aged 18 to 34 largely propelled the league’s growth across social media. The NWSL’s total followers went up 27% across platforms as TikTok followers doubled and engagement went up by 68%.

Zooming out: As always, it’s critical to go beyond the headlines and put data into context: The NWSL is clearly on the up-and-up, and soccer is becoming more popular than ever. That growth shows no signs of slowing — and the fact that the NWSL speaks to young women is more reason than ever to invest in the league. The pitch sells itself.