The world’s first stadium purpose-built for a girls’s sports activities franchise opened in Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday, March sixteenth as the brand new dwelling of the NWSL’s Kansas City Current.

The venue, which was first introduced in 2021, serves as one other reminder of the surge girls’s sports activities has seen in recent times. Deloitte estimates that in 2024, girls’s elite sports activities will generate greater than $1 billion in income for the primary time – a 300% improve from 2021, and a research by SponsorUnited discovered that the variety of sponsorship offers in girls’s skilled sports activities has increased by greater than 22 p.c year-over-year.

In 2023 alone, a number of data have been set in girls’s sports activities.

The FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup reportedly generated essentially the most income in match historical past and was essentially the most attended occasion within the historical past of the Women’s World Cup.

With the addition of two extra groups in 2024, the NWSL signed the most important broadcasting deal in girls’s sports activities in 2023 and set a league attendance file.

The WNBA’s New York Liberty hosted the most important crowd for a sport in league historical past for Game 3 of the WNBA Finals at Barclays Center.

Perhaps essentially the most important girls’s sports activities file that was damaged in 2023 was when the University of Nebraska’s girls’s volleyball workforce set a world file for attendance at a girls’s sporting occasion.

Hosted in Memorial Stadium, the college’s soccer stadium, Volleyball Day in Nebraska attracted 92,003 followers, surpassing the earlier world file of 91,648 followers set at a soccer match between Barcelona and Wolfsburg in 2022.

The assist of girls’s sports activities became a higher end result than simply an attendance file for the University. “The ripple effect is tremendous,” mentioned Doug Ewald, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Associate AD on the University of Nebraska. “The economic impact for a typical home Saturday football weekend is $12 million to $13 million. For this event, the economic impact to the city of Lincoln, the state of Nebraska, was over $10 million.”

The social worth of the day by itself added one other $2 million, Ewald added. “To this day, it still keeps on giving.”

The attendance file landed on the anniversary of a serious milestone in girls’s sports activities. “When we set this up, it was really a celebration of 50 years of Title IX,” mentioned Ewald. Title IX protects college students from sex-based discrimination in any training program or exercise that receives federal monetary help. “Let’s be honest. There’s not a better way to celebrate our women here in Nebraska – and across the entire country – but to set a world record.”

The pleasure round girls’s sports activities was evident throughout Volleyball Day in Nebraska, and it’s equally as pronounced within the Kansas City Current’s new stadium funding.

“As the first stadium purpose-built for a professional women’s sports team, CPKC Stadium is a proof of concept in many ways,” mentioned Chris Long, co-owner of the Current. “It will prove how investment and stadium ownership is the key to success for women’s sports. It provides the revenue streams needed to reinvest in players and the fan experience. We are the first, but we won’t be the last.”

The Current’s stadium isn’t alone positioning girls’s sports activities for a powerful 2024.

Globally, the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris will characteristic an equal variety of female and male athletes for the primary time ever. Additionally, two new girls’s skilled sports activities leagues, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWSL) and the Pro Volleyball Federation, already launched in January. The latter set an attendance record for girls’s skilled volleyball in its first match.

From world data to landmark stadiums, the surge of girls’s sports activities isn’t slowing in 2024.