Why Alexis Ohanian Bet on Women's Sports Before Everyone Else

Alexis Ohanian says his thesis began with a March 2019 Twitter rant: a team featuring stars such as Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan was reportedly valued at only about $3 million, despite the U.S. women’s team heading into a World Cup, millions of potential viewers, major brands, and enormous social followings. Drawing on his 15 years building Reddit, he argued that attention is valuable and said he would start an NWSL team worth $1 billion one day. By January 2020, he had spent just over $1 million on Angel City FC.

Ohanian calls sports the “ultimate anti-AI bet” because even a flawless artificial video of a game-winning home run would not matter if a real human did not perform it. He now owns or invests in Angel City FC, the Los Angeles Love volleyball team, LA teams in TGL and WTGL, and a track-and-field league designed to keep Olympic athletes visible between Games. Although being a girl dad and Serena Williams’s husband makes the investments personally meaningful, he insists they are first and foremost business decisions and predicts they may eventually make him more money than Reddit.

When assessing a team or league, Ohanian starts with player follower counts and engagement because fans follow athletes, not owners or logos. His “tattoo test” helped him believe in Reddit after seeing someone tattoo the alien he had drawn; Angel City and LA Golf Club have since passed the same test. He says NIL made college athletes’ online audiences immediately valuable, citing Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Paige Bueckers, and argues that women’s college basketball had more attention than men’s by Internet data. That attention helped Angel City secure DoorDash as the first seven-figure front-of-kit partner for a women’s professional team.

Asked what inning women’s sports are in, Ohanian places the United States in the third or fourth and much of the world in the first. The Golden State Valkyries became the first billion-dollar women’s team, reaching that mark in roughly seven years rather than his predicted ten. He says startup investors can tolerate years of losses if revenue and growth are strong, noting that early NBA and NFL teams were also unprofitable, but social media now accelerates discovery. Alex Rodriguez adds that a WNBA game featuring Indiana, Caitlin Clark, and Sophie Cunningham peaked at 3.2 million viewers, versus roughly 1.5 million for a typical ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast.

Ohanian predicts algorithms and synthetic content will make screens increasingly effective at delivering dopamine, but believes roughly 80% of people will respond by seeking more in-person experiences. He points to baseball teams creating additional reasons to attend games and rejects the idea that empty midseason stadiums prove baseball lacks value. For him, sports provide real communal stakes, rivalry, struggle, and triumph—experiences that cannot be replaced by endlessly pressing a button for digital gratification. He also expects women’s sports to face a growth limit once the supply of new leagues and sports reaches saturation.

Ohanian says women’s sports currently have more brand energy than consolidated media inventory: a sponsor can buy a team or league, but there is not yet a single large destination for the broader women’s-sports story. He expects incumbents such as ESPN and Yahoo Sports to help build that critical mass. He also says women’s teams require operators with a different, more hands-on DNA than established men’s franchises, because athletes must actively build their stories and audiences. That gap creates technology opportunities: after rejecting poor media-management software at Angel City, he helped fund Scoreplay, which spread to half the NWSL within six months and later to parts of the NBA and major tennis events.

Ohanian is recruiting successful entrepreneurs to become owners, often hosting dinners to persuade them that women’s sports are businesses rather than charities. He cites Michelle Kang’s investment in Washington and Alan Waxman’s focus on enterprise value as examples of a new ownership mindset, and recommends prospective investors first join as minority investors to learn the industry. For people who do not want team stakes, he points to sports infrastructure companies, including Scoreplay and Jump, which is trying to offer a better ticketing experience than Ticketmaster while giving teams more useful fan data.