The Professional Women’s Hockey League played its first season and entered its second season, the Northern Super League worked to launch women’s soccer in Canada, and the WNBA announced its expansion into Canada.
Women’s professional sports in Canada will reach critical mass in 2024.
“It was hard to believe that in 2023 there wasn’t a women’s professional sport here,” said PWHL Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations and Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford.
The PWHL, comprised of three Canadian and three American teams, is a single entity, geographically centralized in central and eastern North America, and backed by billionaire American sports mogul Mark Walter.
The Toronto Tempo, who will join the WNBA in 2026, the league’s 30th anniversary, are backed by deep-pocketed Canadian sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum.
The NSL, which will feature six teams starting in April 2025, is a Canada-wide venture of club owners purchasing leagues that are building businesses from the ground up. The team signed players for 2024 and introduced club ownership and management.
Sports heavyweights including international soccer star Christine Sinclair and former CFL commissioner Mark Cohon are in its corner.
“There was probably a confluence of timing and where we are culturally is huge,” said Diana Matheson, NSL co-founder and former Canadian women’s soccer team player.
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From Caitlin Clark to Summer McIntosh to the launch of a professional women’s hockey league, 2024 has been a transformative year for women in sports. We take a closer look at what it took to get to this moment, the big business of the women’s game, and what the future holds for female athletes.
The key to the emergence of women’s professional sports in 2024 was the market finally being evaluated as a valuable brand and growing.
Social justice has impacted social media and streaming since the pandemic, upending the traditional ways sports connect with fans, and data refuting the idea that people aren’t watching women’s games has contributed to a new sports ecosystem in Canada.
“Concepts and theory have turned into reality,” said Cheri Bradish, director of the Sport Institute and Future of Sport Initiative at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Business.
Canadian Women and Sport conducted a poll and found in its 2023 report that two in three Canadians are female sports fans, and just as important for business, the fan base is diverse, well-educated and affluent.
“Dunking has been a popular sport for women,” said Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, CEO of CWS.
“The data and research we’ve done is starting to shatter these myths. People have to be willing to look again, look past the myths, and seize the opportunities that are there.”
Those in power with money became interested.
“Whether it’s an individual investing or an individual team investing, ultimately the investment is going to happen,” said Brian Levine, a sports agent who handles sponsorship sales for the NSL’s AFC Toronto.
Canadian Tires are ready. The home, automotive and sports retailer has pledged to spend half of its 2023 sponsorship money on women’s professional sports by 2026.
“As a sponsor, you can only put your money where there is something to support,” said Kim Saunders, vice president of sponsorships, among her company titles.
“All these moments started to present themselves as opportunities.”
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The company was a founding sponsor of the PWHL and NSL in multi-year, multi-million dollar deals. Canadian Tire has a sponsorship with NBA Canada (and by extension the WNBA) and was involved in bringing exhibition games to Toronto in 2023. Saunders said the company is in “active conversations” with Toronto Tempo.
“This is not a charity,” Saunders said. “I have to report to leadership on every sponsorship dollar we spend and justify the (return on investment) for it.
“So what we absolutely need is brand exposure and awareness, brand storytelling and differentiation so we can show how we are making life better in Canada. We can put those costs and brands aside and make sports better in Canada. We are creating new companies and helping them grow.”
Sponsors’ demand for advertising provides key pillars of the professional sports ecosystem: how people watch it on screen and the copyright revenue it generates.
“It’s kind of chicken and the egg,” Levine said. “It costs money to broadcast, so you need to know if advertisers will be there before you broadcast.
After a first season with all games available on YouTube to expand its fan base, the PWHL signed an exclusive deal with a Canadian broadcaster for its second season.
“What we’ve seen in the PWHL over the course of a year has amazed us all,” Saunders said. “NSL is coming online and Toronto Tempo is going to explode in popularity as well.”
What the PWHL, NSL and Toronto Tempo have in common are women in decision-making roles. Hefford and Amy Scheer are operations leaders for the PWHL, Christina Litz is president of the NSL, and Teresa Resch is president of Tempo.
“Having a woman at the forefront of a lot of these things has definitely made a difference,” Matheson said.
“All of us, Jayna, Teresa and everyone behind this league believe that Canada is world-class in women’s sports and we are just getting started.”
