WASHINGTON (AP) — When Meghan Sells heads to Providence Park to watch Oregon’s professional women’s soccer team, she finds herself among a fairly mixed crowd — groups of young women, dads bringing their children, youth players checking out the Thorns’ latest match.
The physician’s assistant is a self-described lifelong sports fan and former softball player who “will watch any sport.” That includes both collegiate and professional sports for women, putting Sells squarely in a fan base that suddenly has more options than ever before and is seen as fertile ground for teams and advertisers eager to ride the rising interest in the women’s game.
About 3 in 10 U.S. adults follow women’s professional or college sports “extremely,” “very” or “somewhat” closely, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s lower than the share who follow men’s sports by the same measurements — about half — but it also shows that Sells is far from alone.
As interest and investment in women’s sports have picked up in recent years, so have the entry points for fans. The meteoric rise of Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa phenom-turned-WNBA star, helped bring wider attention to women’s basketball, and increased streaming availability, international success and name, image and likeness deals have elevated the value and viewership of women’s sports.
That includes people like Matthew Behr, 58, a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Brewers in his home state of Wisconsin. He doesn’t watch a lot of basketball, he said, but when the sport crosses into news coverage, he will read up on it.
That’s how he started following Clark, whose final seasons at Iowa were credited with bringing new viewers to the sport and who now plays for the Indiana Fever.
“I was seeing it on MSNBC,” he said. “I don’t watch a lot of basketball. It’s not a men’s and women’s thing. If she was playing in a women’s football league, I’d probably watch that.”
Attending games
Men’s sports — with larger leagues, bigger TV deals and a more expansive media ecosystem — have a more fervent audience. About two-thirds of men’s sports fans said they “frequently” or “occasionally” attend a professional sporting event in person, compared with roughly half of women’s sports fans.
One possible reason women’s sports fans aren’t showing up at sporting events is they’re less likely to be attached to a specific team. Only about one-third of women’s sports fans said the teams they support or follow are “extremely” or “very” important to why they follow the sport. For men’s fans, the figure was around 50%.
However, nearly identical shares of men’s and women’s sports fans said that certain athletes they support were at least “very” important to why they follow women’s sports.
Bernard Seltzer, a high school administrator and math and science teacher in Tampa, Florida, considers himself a general sports fan and said he enjoys watching the most skillful athletes, regardless of their gender. Even at the high school level, he is impressed by the finesse he sees female athletes demonstrate.
“Sometimes it’s more impressive than watching masculine people banging their heads against the wall,” he said.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,260 adults was conducted April 17-21, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
