Breaking the Value Barrier: Why Brands and Athletes Need to Play Bigger in Women’s Sport

It’s time for marketing teams to drop the “support women’s sport” platitudes and treat female athlete partnerships with the strategic rigor worthy of any serious investment. The 2025 Elite Female Athlete Survey lays bare the strengths and flaws of the current landscape: 100% of surveyed athletes worked with at least one brand in the past two years, yet 56.5% have never been paid, for most, sponsorship still equals freebies and exposure, not true partnership.

Let’s be brutally clear: value-in-kind is not a strategy, it’s a cop-out. Brands: if you’re in market for relevance, loyalty, and long-term growth, you must invest with conviction. Seek athletes aligned to your values, activate their authentic stories, and pay them well. Female athletes bring credibility and cultural weight, but only if brands treat them as growth partners, not one-off campaign assets. Long-term relationships, not hashtags and borrowed reach, deliver lasting impact.

At the same time, athletes must step up commercially. The days of relying solely on Instagram for “brand-building” are gone. LinkedIn is the commercial playing field. Build your business acumen, seek out mentors, and surround yourself with people who understand contracts, growth, and brand management. Confidence is a commercial asset, as vital as skill or visibility, yet only 1 in 8 female athletes feels equipped to build a personal brand—now is the time to invest in the know-how that drives negotiations and career growth.

Next steps:

• Brands: Make direct payment, shared values, and multi-year partnerships your standard, not your exception.

• Athletes: Treat your commercial journey with discipline, expand to LinkedIn, network proactively, and invest in commercial education.

• Both: Build stories for impact, not optics. Demand data, not just impressions.

The real prize? Sustainable growth for women’s sport, richer brand engagement, and a new generation of athlete-business leaders who know their worth and expect it to be met.

Source: The 2025 Elite Female Athlete Survey, Women’s Sport Alliance.