Sports Business Journal recently reported that the Professional Women’s Hockey League had brought in its first outside investors since launching in 2023: Kilmer Sports Ventures, led by Larry Tanenbaum, and the Ilitch Companies (PWHL). The story is ostensibly about a young league raising money for strategic capital partners.
It’s actually about the most sophisticated capital in sports underwriting a thesis I’ve been making for a while: women’s sports clear roughly the same bar as men’s sports on the metrics that drive enterprise value, revenue, brand, and fan engagement, while still trading at a discount to the men’s sports. The discount is the opportunity, and the people writing these checks know it.
The Update: Who Actually Wrote The Checks
Kilmer invested US$100 million directly into the PWHL, with Tanenbaum’s group becoming the league’s first Canadian investor and Ilitch its first U.S. backer. They both hold advisory rather than operational roles, joining foundational owners Mark and Kimbra Walter (CBC; Sportico).
These are not casual checks. Tanenbaum is chairman emeritus of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. The Ilitch Companies is the parent company of Ilitch Sports + Entertainment, which owns the Detroit Red Wings and Tigers, It also operates Little Caesars Arena, which will be the home of the PWHL’s new Detroit-based team. Operators of that caliber would likely only commit to a three-year-old league that they are confident can produce substantial return on investment capital.
Why The Metrics Already Justify The Bet
Strip away the narrative and look at the numbers the way an investor would. There are three reasons the fundamentals already support the valuation.
First, revenue. Deloitte projects global women’s elite sports revenue to surpass US$2.3 billion in 2025, with commercial revenue, sponsorship and partnerships, the single largest line (Deloitte). That is no longer a rounding error against the men’s side; it’s a real, fast-compounding top line.
Second, brand and partnership. Partnership dollars are flowing into women’s sports roughly 50% faster than into men’s, and 86% of sponsors say the investment has met or exceeded expectations. Brands don’t renew and expand programs that underperform. The spend is sticky precisely because the activations are working.
Third, fan engagement converting into enterprise value. The average WNBA franchise is now worth about $269 million, up 180% in a single year, and the Golden State Valkyries became the first women’s team valued at $500 million (Sportico). Hold that next to the men’s comparable: the average NBA franchise carries a $5.4 billion valuation. Similar engagement and a lower of the entry price. That gap is the potential alpha.
Men’s Sports Still Win, But the Multiple Is the Point
I want to be precise, because this gets caricatured as a bet against men’s sports, and it isn’t. Men’s sports remain a strong option to deploy capital, and institutional money is committing billions to them for good reason. Private-equity sports deals reached roughly $12.1 billion and that capital should keep generating returns.
But the math of a multiple is unforgiving about the starting point. When a franchise is already worth several billion dollars, even an excellent outcome compounds off an enormous base; a $5 billion asset becoming $7 billion is a terrific result and a 1.4x. A women’s asset entering at a fraction of that comparable, on metrics converging toward the men’s side, can return a far larger multiple on invested capital as the valuation gap narrows. The alpha isn’t in believing women’s sports will be bigger than men’s. The alpha is in the entry price.
It’s Not Just About Buying Franchises
Here’s the part of the PWHL deal that gets overlooked, and it matters more than the headline number. The PWHL is a single-entity league. Every club is centrally owned and operated, so Kilmer and Ilitch didn’t buy a team. They bought into the league entity itself (JohnWallStreet).
That structure is a tell about where this asset class is heading. The instinct in sports investing is to reach for franchise equity, because that’s the inventory everyone knows how to price. But the most interesting capital is increasingly buying the layer underneath and around the teams, the league, the platform, the infrastructure, because that’s where ownership of the whole growth curve sits, not just one slice of it. If your mental model of women’s sports investing stops at ‘which team can I buy a piece of,’ you’re looking at a narrow door into a much larger building.
This is exactly the conversation I’m having with Jason Wright on an upcoming episode of the ROAR Podcast. The investable surface in women’s sports runs well beyond team cap tables: purpose-built real estate and mixed-use development around venues, fan-engagement platforms, technology, and the analytics layer that increasingly underwrites every commercial decision in the business. Those categories are where much of the next decade of value gets created, and they’re open to investors who will never own a franchise.
Bottom Line
The PWHL’s first outside investors didn’t buy in for the optics, and neither should anyone reading this. They priced an asset class that increasingly matches men’s sports on revenue, brand, and fan engagement, but still trades at a discount on enterprise value, and they did it by buying the league, not a team.
Men’s sports will keep absorbing institutional billions and returning capital. What women’s sports offer on top of that is a higher potential multiple off a lower entry point, and a widening set of ways to invest that have nothing to do with owning a club. The smart money already sees it. The rest of the market is about to.
Interesting perspective, Adam. When sophisticated investors start allocating capital, they’re usually betting on future value creation—not just current performance.