Bloomberg's Jason Kelly on Reframing Women's Sports Valuations
How Bloomberg's investor audit converts skepticism into committed capital
Jason Kelly has spent 23 years at Bloomberg covering Wall Street, private equity, and sports business. As Chief Correspondent for Bloomberg Originals and host of The Deal with Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly, he tracks where sophisticated capital flows before most observers recognize market shifts.
Bloomberg’s coverage philosophy centers on "follow the money,” which led Kelly to start covering women's sports five years ago; he noticed institutional investors asking the right questions but using the wrong metrics to evaluate answers.
Through years of interviews with executives like Jess Smith (Valkyries/Angel City), Laura Correnti (Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment), and investors like Josh Harris, Mark Lasry, and David Blitzer, Kelly identified a four-phase approach to evaluating women's sports investments. His reporting consistently emphasizes reframing valuation conversations beyond media rights, auditing infrastructure as ownership commitment signals, evaluating discoverability execution across platforms, and matching portfolio risk allocation to property maturity levels.
Key Takeaways:
Media rights represent one input among several—audience demographics and sponsorship revenue provide alternative value drivers traditional analysis ignores
Infrastructure investment separates franchises genuinely competing for long-term position from those treating women's sports as portfolio diversification
Fragmented platform distribution creates discoverability friction that undermines ROI even when ownership builds excellent facilities
Portfolio allocation strategy spans established properties, emerging leagues, and pre-launch challengers, each requiring different success metrics
When Proven Investors Remained Skeptic
Private equity players Kelly had previously covered on the Wall Street beat, sophisticated investors who understood emerging markets and high-growth opportunities, remained skeptical about women's sports valuations despite impressive growth headlines. Kelly encountered this pattern repeatedly while covering women's sports for Bloomberg's investor audience.
The NWSL media rights deal exemplified the disconnect. In 2024, the league secured a four-year broadcast agreement forty times larger than the previous contract. This sounds transformative until you recognize it was tiny before and remains fairly small in the context of overall global media spend on sports.
Investors comfortable with high-growth, high-risk opportunities need proof that underlying business fundamentals supported the valuations being asked.
Kelly observed four specific pain points creating capital deployment hesitation:
Media rights dominate valuation conversations despite representing a fraction of total revenue opportunity
Sponsorship revenue and engaged audience demographics get ignored in traditional analysis
Infrastructure quality gaps create perceived execution risk that deters commitment
Discoverability friction across fragmented platforms makes audience size difficult to measure accurately
The challenge wasn't convincing investors that women's sports had potential—Kelly's audience already understood that. The challenge was providing valuation inputs that captured the full commercial opportunity beyond broadcast deals.
Follow the Money, Not the Feel-Good Narrative
Kelly's approach to covering women's sports for Bloomberg's audience positions women's sports as a high-growth business opportunity requiring the same analytical rigor investors applied to any emerging market.
He’s found that sophisticated investors respond to honest assessment of both upside potential and current limitations.
Phase One: Reframe Around Audience Quality, Not Reach
Alternative value drivers are often veiled by the media rights reality in women’s sports. Kelly’s experience in the industry consistently reinforces that sponsorship revenue and audience composition tell a more complete story than broadcast deals alone.
When Bloomberg covered Angel City's founding or the NY Liberty's move to Brooklyn, Kelly’s reporting emphasized sponsorship revenue trajectories, average ticket prices, and household financial decision-maker demographics rather than leading with broadcast viewership.
Laura Correnti revealed that women's sports audiences skew heavily toward household financial decision-makers, a demographic detail that changes sponsorship value calculations but rarely appears in media rights discussions.
Jess Smith, who built the most valuable women's soccer club in the United States at Angel City and now runs the most valuable women's basketball franchise at Golden State, reinforced this pattern, understanding how to get the dollars in the door.
Brands and leagues need to present women's sports investments as audience quality plays rather than reach plays to continue growing.
Phase Two: Separate Committed Owners from Opportunists
Kelly developed a straightforward evaluation method: look at what ownership is building, not what they're promising. Infrastructure investment functions as a leading indicator of franchise health that separates serious competitors from portfolio diversification plays.
During his reporting on Clara Wu Tsai's Liberty ownership, Kelly tracked the franchise's move from Westchester to Brooklyn and the subsequent championship pursuit. The infrastructure investment signaled long-term commitment and created a template for evaluating other franchise opportunities.
Kansas City Current built a purpose-designed stadium demonstrating capital commitment to long-term competitiveness while the North Carolina Courage operate in substandard facilities, signaling ownership hasn't deployed capital necessary for sustained excellence.
Players notice, ownership around the league notices, and executives notice.
This sorting mechanism helps brands identify which franchises will deliver sustained value versus which might create partnership risks before committing multi-year sponsorship deals.
Phase Three: Cross-Promote Women's Sports During High-Traffic Windows
Kelly recognized that split media distribution creates both opportunity and risk.
Ownership groups can build excellent facilities, but brand/investor ROI requires that target audiences can easily discover and consume games without navigating five or six different platforms. His own experience as a fan illustrated this.
When NWSL playoff games air while NFL games run simultaneously, the ability to easily find the women's soccer match on television determines whether he actually tunes in.
Kelly has seen a promising shift during NFL broadcasts: networks promoting upcoming women's college basketball games alongside men's games.
If women's sports content gets distributed to people who will like it if they see it, brands get the broad exposure their sponsorship investments require. His 22-year-old son independently choosing to "turn on the Liberty game" was plain sight proof that the discoverability success brands need to see before committing budget.
Phase Four: Match Portfolio Risk to Property Maturity
Kelly observed sophisticated investors taking wide-aperture approaches to sports investing, from established properties down to youth sports and challenger leagues.
David Blitzer's portfolio spanning Washington Commanders to challenger league investments reflected broader recognition that different properties serve different strategic objectives and operate on different value creation timelines. An investment in the Liberty or Angel City carries different risk-reward characteristics than early backing of League One Volleyball or the Women's Lacrosse League.
This requires accepting that different properties deliver different returns on different timelines.
The Olympics provide a useful timing example—lacrosse enters for the first time in LA 2028, and the PLL's Women's Lacrosse League feeds off a fast-growing youth infrastructure across the United States.
Properties at different maturity levels require distinct success metrics rather than uniform expectations across all women's sports investments.
Preparing for the Growth Plateau
By consistently emphasizing that continuous doubling is mathematically impossible and that even high-value franchises require sustained spending, Kelly gives sports market audiences a more disciplined lens for evaluating long-term value.
Women's sports has seen record-breaking growth multiple times, but you can't double every year—the pure math makes that completely unsustainable. Audiences need realistic expectations where the underlying numbers support whatever the valuations may be.
Smart investors understand women's sports requires patient capital deployed over decade-long timelines.
Kelly's consistent reporting and work on the Bloomberg Originals series The Deal has moved the needle on how investor audiences view women's sports, his coverage of the growing market becoming essential business intelligence for today’s investors.
