The AFL Women’s competition entered its tenth season in 2025-26 and the audience growth story has been genuinely impressive. The broadcast economics story is still a different conversation, and the gap between the two is the issue the AFL has been trying to close for years without quite succeeding.

The numbers landing through the early months of 2026 suggest the gap has narrowed but hasn’t closed, and the strategic question for the next broadcast rights cycle is what to actually do about it.

Where the audience sits

Average broadcast audiences for AFLW games in the 2025-26 season ran roughly 180,000-220,000 viewers across the Seven Network and Fox Footy combined for prime weekend fixtures. That’s a meaningful audience by any measure other than comparing it to the men’s competition, which it inevitably gets compared to. The same fixtures in the men’s AFL pull 600,000-900,000 depending on the matchup and timeslot.

Streaming viewership through Kayo and 7plus has shown stronger year-on-year growth than the linear numbers, with AFLW’s streaming audience up roughly 28% on the previous season according to figures discussed at the AFL annual industry day in March. The under-30 audience composition is heavily skewed toward streaming, which has implications for how the rights are valued.

Crowd numbers at venues have been mixed. The headline matches at Marvel Stadium and the MCG have drawn well — some have exceeded 25,000 — but the average attendance across the season at smaller venues remains below 5,000. The economic model assumes a mix of broadcast revenue, ticket revenue, and sponsorship, and the ticket side hasn’t grown at the rate the AFL expected.

The broadcast rights mismatch

The current rights deal that includes AFLW expires in 2026 and the negotiations for the next cycle have been underway throughout this season. The reporting from the AFR suggests the broadcast partners have been pushing back on the AFL’s preferred valuation for AFLW, with the gap between asking price and offered price being substantial.

The broadcast partners’ argument is that the audience numbers, while real, don’t yet command CPMs that would justify the rights fee allocation the AFL wants. The AFL’s argument is that AFLW is a long-term asset and that the audience growth trajectory should be priced into a multi-year deal rather than valued solely on current numbers.

Both arguments have merit. The historical precedent that the AFL points to is the men’s competition, which was itself a long slow climb in broadcast value before becoming the dominant property it is now. The counterargument is that women’s sport globally is competing in a much more fragmented attention economy than the men’s competition was at equivalent stages, and the linear extrapolation may not hold.

The sponsorship side

Sponsorship revenue for AFLW has actually grown faster than broadcast revenue, which is the encouraging part of the story. The 2025-26 season had multiple new club-level sponsors come in at meaningful levels and the league-level sponsorship inventory was effectively sold out. SmartCompany ran a piece in February on the AFLW sponsorship category that was useful reading for anyone trying to understand the commercial dynamics.

The interesting structural feature of AFLW sponsorship is that the sponsors are different from the men’s competition. There’s more category diversity, more brands targeting younger and female demographics specifically, and less reliance on the traditional alcohol and betting categories that dominate men’s AFL sponsorship.

This actually creates an argument that AFLW’s commercial value isn’t perfectly correlated with raw audience size — the audience composition is differentiated enough that some sponsors will pay disproportionately to reach it. Whether broadcasters can capture that differentiated value in their CPMs is a separate question.

The data and analytics piece

One of the more interesting commercial developments in AFLW over the last 18 months is the growth in detailed performance analytics that’s being made available to clubs and to broadcasters. The data infrastructure has caught up to what the men’s competition has had for years, and the broadcast graphics during AFLW games in 2025-26 have been notably more sophisticated than they were even two seasons ago.

A few clubs are now working with AI infrastructure providers on their performance analysis pipelines, which is producing internal data products that are starting to filter into the broadcast presentation. The combination of better data and better presentation has measurable effects on viewer engagement metrics — match centre time spent, multi-screen behaviour, social media interaction during games.

This sounds technical but it actually feeds back into the broadcast economics conversation. A more engaging broadcast product justifies higher CPMs, which moves the rights value calculation. The gap between AFLW and AFL men’s broadcast quality has narrowed considerably and the economic implications follow.

The international comparison

AFLW is roughly comparable in stage of development to the WNBA in the US around 2018-2019, the WSL in England around 2019-2020, and to NWSL pre-USWNT World Cup commercial breakthrough. Each of those competitions hit inflection points where audience and commercial value started compounding faster than the linear model would have predicted.

The WNBA in particular has had a remarkable couple of years that’s relevant context. Reuters covered the WNBA rights deal renegotiation through 2024 and the eventual outcome was a multi-billion dollar commitment that vastly exceeded what most analysts had predicted three years earlier. The catalyst was a combination of generational star power and broadcast investment that forced the audience numbers up.

AFLW doesn’t have a perfect equivalent of the Caitlin Clark phenomenon, but it does have a maturing star system and a competitive structure that’s stabilising. Whether 2026-27 produces the inflection moment is genuinely uncertain.

What the next deal probably looks like

The most likely outcome of the rights negotiations, based on what’s been reported, is a deal that gives AFLW more flexibility on streaming and digital rights while maintaining traditional broadcast commitments at a modestly increased value. The broadcast partners would prefer to underprice AFLW now and capture upside later. The AFL would prefer to lock in higher pricing now to invest back into the competition.

Where the deal lands will tell us a lot about how the broadcast partners actually value women’s sport in Australia in 2026. The signal from the negotiations matters beyond just AFLW — netball, A-League Women, NRLW are all watching closely because their next negotiations will be informed by this outcome.

The audience is real. The growth is real. The economic model is still catching up. That’s the honest summary as we head into the off-season.