For years, women’s sport was discussed in the language of potential—potential audience, potential growth and potential commercial upside. That framing now feels outdated.
Across APAC, women’s sport has moved decisively from the margins of the sports economy into the centre of culture. The shift is measurable, visible and, if you spend even a few minutes on social media during a major tournament, impossible to ignore. And yet many brands still behave as if this is an emerging trend rather than an established reality.
Take Australia, where 11.15 million people tuned in for the Matildas’ 2023 World Cup semi-final, that's the largest sporting audience in the country’s history
In India, the Women's Premier League has exploded out of the gate. The 2026 final became the most-watched women’s T20 match ever, with viewership up nearly 70% year-on-year and fans consuming more than 34 billion minutes of content across the tournament. The Premier Volleyball League in the Philippines has evolved into one of the region’s most engaged sports communities and digital engagement around the league jumped more than 40% in recent seasons, fuelled largely by Gen Z and millennial women building creator-led fan ecosystems around stars like Alyssa Valdez.
This isn’t a niche.
Women already make up roughly a third of sports fans across the region and 40% of F1 viewers globally. They also represent the most commercially powerful consumers in APAC, acting as primary purchasing decision-makers in a vast proportion of households.
Which makes the disconnect harder to ignore. Because while the audience has evolved rapidly, much of the brand playbook hasn’t. Too often, women’s sport is still treated like a calendar moment. A campaign for International Women’s Day. A one-off activation around a major final. A sponsorship announcement accompanied by a short burst of empowerment messaging.
Then the tournament ends and so does the brand’s presence. To fans, the signal is obvious: the brand was interested in capturing eyeballs on the event, not the community.
The irony is that the modern sports fan economy is increasingly built in the off-season. Social platforms have turned fandom into a year-round narrative engine, where athletes operate as creators, personalities and cultural figures.
You see this clearly in the Philippines, where PVL stars command enormous online communities that extend far beyond match highlights. The conversation blends sport with fashion, lifestyle and entertainment; a hybrid fandom ecosystem that looks very different from the traditional broadcast-first model that defined men’s sport for decades.
And increasingly, it’s being fuelled by a new generation of athletes who don’t fit the old mould of the single-discipline sports star.
Look at Eileen Gu, who shot to global prominence during the 2022 Winter Olympics. She is as comfortable on the cover of fashion magazines as she is landing a double cork on the halfpipe; a Stanford student, model and Olympic champion in equal measure. Or American figure skater, Alyssa Lui, part of a new wave of athletes redefining what modern sports stardom looks like: culturally fluent, commercially savvy and entirely at ease moving between sport, media and lifestyle.
For younger fans, especially, these athletes are not just competitors. They are cultural protagonists; glamorous, unconventional and multidimensional. Their stories travel across platforms and communities in ways traditional sports marketing was never designed to capture.
Some brands have figured this out.
In the Philippines, Allianz embedded itself in volleyball culture not through advertising bursts but through sustained investment in athlete welfare and grassroots sport via its Allianz Move programme. The brand became part of the infrastructure of the sport rather than just a sponsor of the spectacle.
In Australia, beauty retailer MECCA tapped into a similar cultural crossover during the Australian Open, blending creator culture, beauty and tennis in a way that reflected how many younger fans actually experience sport: through feeds, personalities and style as much as through scoreboards.
But these examples are still the exception rather than the rule. Too much brand activity around women’s sport still feels like it was designed using frameworks built for a completely different audience; one focused primarily on broadcast viewership, match statistics and short tournament windows.
The reality is that women’s sports fandom has evolved into something more culturally fluid. It moves seamlessly between live sport, social media, entertainment and identity. In other words, it behaves less like a traditional sports audience and more like a modern pop-culture fandom. So brands that feel most natural in this space are often those comfortable operating at the intersection of culture rather than strictly within sport. What comes next will depend on how seriously brands choose to participate in what is already a fully formed cultural space.
Suzie Shaw is APAC CEO at We Are Social
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
