Retired soccer star Brandi Chastain was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Hame in 2018. She's one of the investors in Bay FC.
The calculus for the value in women’s soccer is simple. Over a billion people watched the 2019 Women’s World Cup, and FIFA is projecting close to double that for this year’s tournament. American women are the best of the best, having half of all Women’s World Cups, and the national team’s stars like Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe have become household names.
“The big picture is that the overall scale of that entire group at large is bigger. All of those subgroups are bigger,” Kassouf said. “It wasn’t that long ago that soccer was like, ‘Oh, soccer? That’s cute.’”Kassouf and Waxman attribute that change to advances in technology that simply make soccer easier to follow.
Other European leagues are following suit. La Liga, where Barcelona and Real Madrid play, bought out its U.S. media rights contract with Qatar-based BeIN Sports to sign an eight-year, $1.4 billion deal with ESPN.“The introduction of streaming … for people to actually find the games and then also follow their idols on social media, that just didn’t exist five years ago,” Waxman said.