Who Controls The Capital Now

From billion-dollar team owners to top investors and media power players, these 25 women are reshaping the global sports economy and changing who controls the game.

This year, women’s sports reached an inflection point. Record viewership, sold-out arenas, major media rights deals, and investment reshaped a corner of the broader athletic economy long viewed as niche. Yet the real transformation isn’t happening on the field. Power in sports has always lived behind the scenes, in ownership suites, investment committees, and boardrooms where billion-dollar decisions are made. What’s changing is who holds the capital.

Forbes is debuting the 2025 list of America’s Most Powerful Women in Sports to capture this fundamental shift. Women are no longer just shaping the story of sports, they’re shaping its capital structure. The list spotlights women redefining influence across the entire sports economy, from owners and investors to executives and industry amplifiers, and athletes capturing the upside of the businesses they’ve helped build. For decades, women fueled the commercial engine of sports while being locked out of its economics. Now as this list reflects, they hold the capital and that changes who builds, who benefits, and what gets funded.

Ownership remains the ultimate leverage point, with Gayle Benson landing in this year’s top spot. As owner and CEO of the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans, two franchises valued at a combined $8.35 billion, she occupies a unique position as the only woman who controls teams in both the NFL and NBA. Benson sits in the boardrooms that shape the commercial spine of the two most profitable leagues in U.S. sports. Amy Adams Strunk, who owns the Tennessee Titans, wields similar clout, helping engineer the franchise’s growth within an NFL ecosystem that generated $23 billion last season.

When Clara Wu Tsai and husband Joseph Tsai acquired the Brooklyn Nets in 2019, the New York Liberty were viewed by some as a $10-to-14 million afterthought—underfunded, overlooked, and struggling to build commercial momentum. Six years later, under Wu Tsai’s ownership and CEO Keia Clarke’s leadership, the team is valued at an estimated $450 million, believed to be a record for a women’s professional sports franchise. Strategic investment, integration with the Nets and Barclays Center, and professional infrastructure have transformed the Liberty into a commercial growth engine for the WNBA.

Michele Kang has taken a different route, building the first global multi-club platform in women’s soccer—owning the Washington Spirit, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin (OL Lyonnes), and London City Lionesses, with a clear belief that soccer team valuations will reach $1 billion or more in the near future. She’s backing that conviction with infrastructure: $25 million to the United States Soccer Federation and $50 million to the Kynisca Innovation Hub, both advancing female-centered sports science and performance systems. It’s a bet that lasting growth won’t come from headlines alone, but from building the foundations that make scale possible.

Kara Nortman saw women’s sports as an underdeveloped asset class pricing in legacy constraints rather than forward growth. A seasoned venture capitalist, she cofounded Angel City FC in 2020 when NWSL expansion fees were just a few million dollars. She later launched Monarch Collective with Jasmine Robinson, a $250 million fund that invests not just capital but hands-on operational expertise. Angel City’s rise to an estimated $280 million valuation validated her thesis that when capital, infrastructure, and expertise align, the market scales fast.

What makes this moment equally historic is that players are no longer waiting for the system to value them, they’re building the infrastructure themselves.

The Caitlin Clark effect is well documented. The WNBA rookie was responsible for an estimated 26.5% of all league economic activity in 2024. But her eight-year, $28 million Nike deal signals more than marketability, it reflects a recalibration in how female athletes are valued as economic forces in their own right. WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier launched Unrivaled, a 3-on-3 basketball league not as an ancillary product of men’s basketball, but as its own commercial entity. It raised $35 million, secured a TNT deal, and reached a $340 million valuation after its first season (a record figure for a new professional league), proving innovative models can generate institutional returns. (Full disclosure: this author invested in an early fundraising round for Unrivaled.)

Beyond ownership sits the infrastructure layer and the women who control the platforms, capital, and distribution that shape which sports scale and which stay on the margins. Amy Howe runs FanDuel, which commands 41% of the U.S. sports betting market and has become one of the most important drivers of viewership. FanDuel doesn’t just facilitate wagering, it fundamentally changes viewing behavior and therefore how properties are valued. Nike President Amy Montagne steers Nike’s $4.7 billion annual marketing machine, controlling over 40% of the global sportswear market with the power to make or break athletes and leagues through a single endorsement decision.

Others act as gatekeepers who determine which sports become commercially viable, making them the essential bridge between capital and returns. Rosalyn Durant controls ESPN’s programming and acquisitions, determining which sports reach mass audiences and which remain invisible. Hillary Mandel oversees media rights negotiations at IMG, structuring the deals that dictate how billions in revenue flow through the entire ecosystem.

Jessica Berman represents how this power extends to league governance itself. In three years as commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League, she has led a transformation from crisis to growth. A $240 million media rights deal replaced a package worth just $1.5 million annually, attendance climbed past 2 million, and viewership soared nearly 300%. But the real shift runs deeper. By eliminating the draft and giving players control over where they sign, Berman shifted leverage from owners to athletes, forcing clubs to compete on culture and investment.

What makes this moment unique is that power in sports is more widely distributed than ever, with women now controlling and steering capital at every layer. This year’s listees also invested in infrastructure for women’s sports when others wouldn’t from stadiums and leagues to media deals and training facilities. The audience showed up in massive numbers. They proved the market was there all along, it just needed someone willing to build for it.

But the picture remains incomplete. Women are still underrepresented in ownership groups, league governance, agency leadership, and at the highest levels of media and tech companies reshaping the industry. The sports economy is repricing rapidly. Who controls capital now determines what gets built and who profits for decades. This list captures the women rewriting those rules.

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