Analysis: No Matter the Sport, Women Need a Fair Share of the Biggest Stages

Analysis: No matter the sport, women need a fair share of the biggest stages By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large

Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - 10:19

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The Women's Cricket World Cup in India once again proves that women's sport shines brightest on the biggest stages. In 2025, nothing else will do, writes Callum McCarthy.

India's victory in the Women's Cricket World Cup against South Africa on Sunday to win the World Cup for the first time will come to be viewed as the catalyst for India's women's sport revolution.

Some 45,000 people attended the game, selling out the stadium in Navi Mumbai and eclipsing the record for a women's ICC tournament that was set during the semi-finals. Over the course of the tournament, India's fans made the kind of noise usually reserved for crowds of 80,000 or more; the kind of noise you hear at IPL finals, or Indian men's games. It was the sound of a country changing.

Jemimah Rodrigues, a 25-year-old Roman Catholic from Mumbai, won the India v Australia semi-final for her country with an unbeaten innings of 127 (for European readers, this is good).

Until Thursday afternoon, Rodrigues' religion had made her and her family infamous in India, far beyond her cricketing ability. But in the space of a few hours, she became India's first female cricketing hero; partly because of her performance, but mostly because of the stage on which she performed. Those 35,000 people made every run sound like it mattered.

Over the past decade, hundreds of millions of people have come to enjoy watching women play sport. Before the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, low demand for women's football was often thought to be because women were bad' at the sport. But women didn't become good at football in 2015. Instead, this was the year that women started playing it on a comparable stage to their male counterparts.

That year's Women's World Cup was played in full, loud stadiums; in primetime TV slots on major broadcasters; on 10-plus-camera setups that made the game feel like elite sport; and against a background of blanket media coverage.

All of these factors gave women's football an excitement factor previously reserved for the men's game. And with five-figure attendances and viewership in the millions, women's football also began to provide a sense of collective belonging - something that all good sport has in common.

All along, women's sport has been equally capable of entertaining the masses. It just needed a chance.

The trap

We are now roughly a decade into the women's sports revolution, and things are going quite well. So well, in fact, that an entirely new branch of the sports industry was created to facilitate the demand.

This offshoot industry has rushed to fill each sport's professional calendar with domestic club and franchise competitions to give fans something to hold onto between tournaments. It has largely adopted the structures and practices of its men's counterpart, mirroring its calendar.

In doing so, it has fallen into a trap.

Men also play a vast amount of club sport. They do it on every available weekend or weekday primetime slot, usually from August to May. They do it in the stadiums used for those marquee women's tournaments, on the broadcasters that showed those tournaments, using all of the cameras that captured those games.

Because of this, men's sport commands the vast majority of media coverage and the lion s share of attention among those hundreds of millions who watch marquee women's sports events. It does so not because the sport is necessarily better to watch, but because the stage it occupies is always so much larger.

The message is sent to the viewer: men's sport matters more.

The identical alignment of the women's club sport calendar has forced the world's best women athletes into stadiums fit for amateurs; onto streaming platforms that nobody subscribes; onto the darkest corners of public broadcasters websites; into bad timeslots; and onto broadcasts with a fraction of the cameras used for a Women's World Cup of any variety.

Arsenal Women's Uefa Women's Champions League game against OL Lyonnes last month was played at Meadow Park, the home of fifth-tier men's football team Boreham Wood. The environment and the broadcast were more non-league than elite sport.

Conversely, Arsenal Women's home game against the same team at the Emirates Stadium (capacity: 60,704) in April had the right timeslot, 40,000 attendees and production values in line with a stadium of that size. It was the right-sized stage for the quality on show - the kind of stage Disney was willing to pay money for.

Those in charge at Arsenal Women know exactly how important this is and have been at the forefront of change in this regard. In the 2025-26 season, the team will play all 11 of their home Women's Super League games at the Emirates, proving to every other club in the league that it is possible to do so.

After three home fixtures, Arsenal's WSL attendances have not dipped below 24,000.

Work around, or force in

Whether international, franchise or club, elite women's sport flourishes whenever it is given the same red-carpet treatment as men's sport.

Ten years ago, the final of the women's NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament was played on a Tuesday night, live on ESPN. It attracted about three million viewers - a respectable total for the time - and continued to attract roughly this number of viewers all the way until 2023, when the game was switched to free-to-air network ABC.

In a primetime, free-to-air slot on Sunday, the women's final attracted 10 million viewers across linear and digital platforms, smashing the previous record of just under five million. A year after, in 2024,

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