Just 10 months after signing a then-record $700 million, 10-year contract, Shohei Ohtani of Japan took the Los Angeles Dodgers to the World Series, where the team beat the New York Yankees for the title.
The Boston Celtics won their league-best 18th NBA championship ring. In Las Vegas, the Kansas City Chiefs celebrated their second straight Super Bowl title with the most famous fan on the planet, Taylor Swift, cheering on her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce. One athlete, though, best captured the zeitgeist of 2024: Clark.
Brazen in her passing, clutch in her shooting, she drew frenzied young fans when she shattered the collegiate scoring record at Iowa and led her team to the NCAA championship game. There, the Hawkeyes lost to a perfect Dawn Staley-coached South Carolina squad, drawing a record audience of 18.9 million people on ESPN — about 4 million more than the men’s title game the next night.
Then, as the Indiana Fever’s No 1 pick en route to winning rookie of the year, Clark lifted WNBA attendance figures to a 22-yearhigh and brought record TV audiences, which averaged more than 1 million viewers each time the Fever played. She and her fellow rookie Angel Reese of the Chicago Sky continued their collegiate rivalry, driving the mainstream sports conversation.
For men’s sports in 2024, it was big business as usual. For women’s sports, the stories, the product and the investments were finally proving to be good business. Witness the lines at Rough & Tumble in Seattle, a 2-year-old bar dedicated to showing men’s and women’s sports equally. Iowa women’s basketball fans first sold out the bar for several games in 2023. Then, in 2024 , lines went around the block for every game for the 250- seat venue. “A lot of people talk about the Caitlin Clark effect, and we certainly saw that, but I think that’s just a sign of the fact that everything is changing,” said Rough & Tumble owner Jen Barnes. “The biggest difference is that there’s finally financial investment happening,” Barnes added.
“There are more women athletes and more women decision-makers in sports media—and that’s increased the amount of women’s sports programming.”
The WNBA negotiated a $2.2 billion media rights deal over 11 years starting in 2026, albeit a fraction of the NBA’s approximately $77 billion deal. Clark and Reese drove the highest social media buzz of any two players in the WNBA.
They also saw the flip side of social media: a surge in trolls and online abuse. Reese, who is Black, said that since she and Clark tangled in college, she had been getting death threats. Some, Reese said in her podcast “Unapologetically Angel,” were from Clark’s fans.
The WNBA’s New York Liberty — one of only three remaining original franchises from 1997 — won their first title by knocking off the Minnesota Lynx in overtime in October.
Superstars Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones joined the team’s sassy mascot, Ellie the Elephant, for a ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan, celebrating the city’s first pro basketball championship in 51 years. For better or for worse, women’s sports are no longer a grassroots operation.
