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, Caitlin Clark’s rising star was on show for a peak audience of 24 million viewers, driven by a media frenzy around her rivalry with LSU star Angel Reese.

None of those 24 million viewers cared whether the basketball was NBA quality. This was an elite sport broadcast with an elite sport atmosphere, bringing a nation together around TVs, laptops and phones.

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When Clark and Reese were drafted into the WNBA in May 2024, they transferred to a stage that was slightly smaller, but still worthy of their talents. The WNBA is a summer league that avoids clashes with men’s leagues like the NBA, NFL and NHL. The schedule runs from May through to the end of September, ensuring that broadcasters, fans and media know where to focus their attention.

An average of 1.3 million viewers watched nationally-broadcast WNBA games in the 2025 season, a small uplift on a record-setting 2024. The rivalry between Clark and Reese continued to spark interest, attracting an average of over two million viewers across the five games their teams played against each other.

It’s no coincidence that the WNBA will become the only women’s sport property earning media revenue comparable to some men’s competitions – $200m per season from 2026 to 2036.

By contrast, England’s Women’s Super League fought tooth and nail for its £10m-per-season deal with Sky, up from about £6m per season in the previous deal. Last season’s undefeated champions, Chelsea, played the majority of their home games at Kingsmeadow, a stadium with just over 1,600 seats.

A switch to play club football in the summer may be the answer to growth for women’s football. It could work for women’s rugby, too.

Whatever needs to be done for women’s sport to achieve its sky-high potential, should be done. We can start by getting men out of the way.

• For more of SVG Europe Editor at Large Callum McCarthy’s analysis articles click here