Mainstream TV audiences for Women’s Super League dropped 35% last season | OneFootball

Average broadcast audiences for the Women’s Super League have dropped by 35% year on year, a report by the Women’s Sport Trust has found, but there have been vast increases in engagement for women’s sports on social media platforms. In rugby union, average audiences per game for the Women’s Premiership were up 86% on TNT Sports last season, while England’s Red Roses had 75% more TikTok views than England’s men’s rugby union side between January and April 2025.

However, for the first time since 2021, the charity’s report found a dip in the number of hours of women’s sport coverage on mainstream television, down 15% year on year.

The most notable decrease in average viewers per game was in the WSL, which had climbed sharply in the previous two campaigns after the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 triumph and their run to the 2023 World Cup final. Last season was women’s football’s first campaign since 2021 that had not immediately followed a major international tournament. The league’s 35% television audience drop follows a 10% decrease in the men’s Premier League’s viewership.

Attendances doubled in the Women’s Championship – which has been renamed WSL 2 – compared with the previous season, reaching an average of 2,086 per game, but crowds in the WSL fell by 10% to an average of 6,661. The WSL’s new broadcast deal with Sky and the BBC kicks in next season and the league has announced an expansion to 14 teams from the summer of 2026, with a new playoff decider for relegation aimed at driving up jeopardy and engagement.

The report found audiences for the BBC’s highlights show, the Women’s Football Show, dropped to their lowest post-pandemic level. The programme was aired at a later time, starting from midnight or later 76% of the time, although it does air earlier on the BBC iPlayer.

However, the WSL attracted nearly 40m views on YouTube, making it the world’s second-most watched women’s sports property on that platform, behind tennis’s WTA. There has also been growth in the WSL’s overseas audiences, with about a quarter of their viewers being based in the United States.

WSL clubs had a 154% increase in year-on-year TikTok views, overtaking the men’s EFL Championship clubs to be the second-most viewed domestic league in England, and the league’s account enjoyed a 35% rise in Instagram engagements. Thanks largely to Bristol Bears’ signing of Ilona Maher, Premiership Women’s Rugby’s social media interaction levels shot up by more than 1,000% compared with last year to climb to 2.3m TikTok views.

The Women’s Boat Race, with a peak audience of 2.18m, is the UK’s most-watched women’s sporting event of 2025, but that is expected to be eclipsed during next month’s women’s football Euros and the Women’s Rugby World Cup, which starts on 22 August.

Header image: [Photograph: Nick Potts/PA]