Women’s sport now generates more than US$2 billion annually, attracts younger and more engaged audiences, and consistently outperforms men’s properties in fan interaction. Yet most sponsorship capital still sidelines it. The Billie Jean King Cup by Gainbridge is rewriting that story, proving that parity isn’t philanthropy but strategy, and that the brands willing to move first aren’t just supporting equality; they’re bolstering the future of sport.

The silence inside the Shenzhen Bay Sports Center is not an absence but a presence. The kind of charged stillness that precedes anticipatory celebration. Close to 5,000 people hold their collective breath, and in that suspension, nationality dissolves. Chinese fans sit shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone from Italians to Ukrainians, Americans and Britons. The partisan boundaries that typically define events today blur into something more elemental, a shared investment in the outcome of something larger than a tennis match.

On the court below, Italy’s Jasmine Paolini crouches in ready position, her eyes fixed on USA’s Jessica Pegula across the net. The scoreboard reads 6–4, 5–2: match point for Italy, championship point for a team defending its title. Yet the numbers tell only part of the story. The two have met before—most recently on a Grand Slam stage—but here, under the watchful eyes of Shenzhen, the stakes are different. For six days, the city has been an unlikely crucible for women’s tennis. Yet in this moment, thousands of spectators from dozens of nations hold their breath, waiting to see what form that history will take.

The friction of rubber on hardcourt is the only sound. Then, contact. Paolini’s forehand catches the line with the kind of precision that collapses possibility into certainty. The ball skids past Pegula’s outstretched racquet. Match! Italy scores! Mission complete!

The roar that follows is not celebratory in the traditional sense, for it doesn’t belong to Italy alone or to tennis purists, or even to the players who have just made history. It’s a chorus of recognition, the sound of thousands of people simultaneously understanding that they have witnessed something that exists at the intersection of sport, commerce, and cultural evolution. From the nosebleeds to the courtside seats to the glass-walled brand suites suspended above the action, everyone is standing, everyone is screaming—united.

Along the inner walls of the court, a constellation of logos glows: Gainbridge, Mastercard, e.l.f. Beauty, Microsoft Copilot, and a Rolex clock that marks the hour. These sponsors are not ornamental, they’re the architecture that made this moment possible, and the economic scaffolding without which this arena would be dark, this tournament would not exist, and these thousands of people would be somewhere else entirely.

There’s nothing performative about the emotion in this arena. Rather, it reflects an inflection point in women’s sport—where cultural resonance exceeds commercial recognition, where audiences have arrived and investment is beginning to follow, just not yet at the depth or scale the sport deserves. That gap, as anyone who has studied asymmetries knows, is where real opportunities hide.

The Numbers Don’t Lie, But the Market Does

The evidence for the mispricing is overwhelming. Women’s sport is expected to surpass US$2.35 billion in revenue this year, a 25% rise from 2024. Yet men’s sport still attracts nearly 90% of global commercial spending. The disparity defies the data.

In 2024, American rugby player Ilona Maher drew 1.4 billion TikTok views, surpassing Taylor Swift’s 456 million. The Chelsea Women’s TikTok account logged 167 million views, outperforming more than half of Premier League clubs. The WNBA led both TikTok (361 million views) and Instagram (90 million engagements), while the WTA Tour earned 71 million views on YouTube. In the UK, 44.7 million people watched women’s sport last year, and 22.9 million watched at least two hours of coverage.

Tammy Parlour, Chief Executive of the Women’s Sport Trust, has called the sustained growth of women’s sport “a powerful indicator that the women’s sport ecosystem is thriving, even outside major football events.” The audience is no longer a niche, and the market is no longer emerging. According to SponsorUnited and SportsPro Media, sponsorship deals in women’s sport are growing roughly 50% faster than in comparable men’s leagues, while entry costs remain lower and engagement measurably higher. For brands seeking efficiency without the clutter saturating men’s properties, women’s sport represents one of the most undervalued assets in global sponsorship. Still, the bulk of investment continues to flow toward legacy men’s competitions, sustained by outdated valuation models and the assumption that female athletes sell virtue rather than visibility.

“People look at women’s sport through the lens of equality, not potential,” says Monica Biagiotti, Executive Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing and Sponsorships at Mastercard. “That means they measure impact in sentiment rather than in business outcomes.”

It’s an observation shaped by two decades of market participation. Mastercard has been one of the world’s most consistent investors in women’s sport, spanning football, golf, and tennis, integrating its Priceless platform with what Biagiotti calls a “passion strategy” built on inclusion as a driver of growth. Yet even she acknowledges that much of the industry still treats investment in women’s sport as a moral stance rather than a commercial one.

A small but influential group of investors is beginning to cut through the inertia. Mark Walter, principal owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and co-founder of the Professional Women’s Hockey League and his company, TWG Global, has channelled both capital and credibility into women’s sport, from acquiring a 49% stake in Billie Jean King Cup Limited to pledging US$5.5 million to the Women’s Sports Foundation. Kara Nortman’s Monarch Collective, backed by Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, is building the world’s largest fund devoted exclusively to women’s sport, investing in teams such as Angel City FC and San Diego Wave to professionalise leagues and close the value gap. Meanwhile, Bex Smith’s Crux Sports is creating a multi-club European network designed to make women’s football financially independent and globally competitive.

Progress rarely begins with scale; it begins with the few willing to move first. They remain the exception, not the norm—but in a market still shaped by legacy bias, the exceptions are the ones that will win.

Tennis: The Exception That Proves Systems Can Change?

Billie Jean King, one of women’s tennis’ most enduring pioneers, is no stranger to this struggle. In 1970, she and eight other players—Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Julie Heldman, Kerry Melville Reid, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss, and Judy Dalton—defied the tennis establishment by signing symbolic one-dollar contracts with promoter Gladys Heldman to form the Virginia Slims Circuit, the first professional women’s tennis tour. Their rebellion laid the groundwork for the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) three years later and proved that women’s sport could be both principled and profitable.

Today, that mission lives on in the Billie Jean King Cup. Once the Fed Cup, long the counterpart to the men’s Davis Cup, it has evolved into a powerful equaliser, one that positions tennis at the vanguard of change in women’s sport. The Cup’s modern incarnation is distinguished not only by its female-led leadership team but also by its formidable cohort of forward-thinking sponsors, each recognising that equality is not a message but a model and an enterprise rooted in the past yet laser-focused on the future.

Since its inception more than half a century ago, the Billie Jean King Cup has evolved from a modest team competition into the largest annual women’s international sporting event, uniting over 130 nations. Its influence extends far beyond prize purses. By achieving full parity with the Davis Cup in 2022, the tournament reframed equality as infrastructure, not ideology, proof that equality can be engineered, not requested. Each edition now amplifies women not only as athletes but as decision-makers, with a predominantly female leadership team and an ecosystem that reinvests winnings into national development.

King’s mission has long been bolstered by her wife and collaborator, Ilana Kloss, herself a former world number one doubles player, US Open and Wimbledon champion, and CEO of BJK Enterprises, a consulting, marketing, and investment agency. For more than four decades, Kloss has served as both strategist and steward of King’s legacy, helping translate a movement for equality into a sustainable commercial model for women’s sport. Where King’s fight began on the court, Kloss extended it into boardrooms, sponsorships, and media rights, embedding equity not as sentiment but as structure.

“The reason I’m still doing this goes back to my beginnings,” Kloss tells Beyond the Boardroom. “When I was playing professional tennis, the infrastructure was fragile, and the opportunities were scarce. You had to understand how things worked if you wanted to survive.”

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That instinct, to learn the mechanics of the business, not just the game, would come to define Kloss’ career. In the years following her playing career, Kloss became one of the rare athletes to move from competition to ownership. She rose from player to commissioner to CEO and part-owner of World TeamTennis, the co-ed league co-founded by Billie Jean King in the 1970s to establish equal pay and mixed-gender play as standard practices. 

In many ways, she reflects, she was learning in real time what few women in sport were ever taught: how power, money, and influence actually circulate behind the scenes. It gave her a rare vantage point on how the sport was built, and who it was built for. “I knew what it felt like to generate money and to lose money. The prize money I earned was minimal in those days, perhaps US$1,800 for a tournament. If we weren’t doing well, I’d simply give my money back.”

That hard-won literacy is now what she tries to impart to players navigating an industry that often keeps them at arm’s length from its economics. “They attend a tournament, they receive their check, and they have no concept of how it transpired,” she says. “I tell them, ‘You realise it took an entire year of planning just for that one week.’”

Courting Capital

If Kloss embodies the sport’s historical conscience, Kerstin Lutz, the Cup’s Chief Executive, represents its commercial future. Appointed in 2023 after more than two decades overseeing global partnerships for the UEFA Champions League—the apex of European football’s monetisation—Lutz brings with her the operational discipline required to scale legacy into industry. “I spent most of my career until now in football, that too, men’s football,” she tells BTB, recalling how she mastered “the down-and-dirty business of sport” previously on the agency side. Yet for all its commercial might, football was never her passion. “I grew up playing tennis. I had a scholarship in the United States, which without the passage of Title IX and Billie Jean King’s advocacy for women’s sport, I wouldn’t have had.”

Lutz’s arrival marked more than a leadership change, it symbolised the Cup’s evolution into a tournament run by women, for women. Under Lutz and a predominantly female-led leadership team, strategic, operational, and brand decisions are now shaped by executives who understand how both the cultural stakes and commercial realities of women’s sport. That perspective, Lutz believes, is not symbolic but structural, with representation at the core directly influencing how women’s sport is valued, positioned, and funded.

Now at the helm, her ambition is to close the gap between passion and profitability and to prove that emotion, heritage, and investment can coexist in the same business model. Having spent over a decade commercialising the world’s biggest men’s football property, she now sees her mandate as addressing the structural blind spots that have long kept women’s sport undervalued. “Without capital, you can’t instigate change. You can’t make an impact. You can’t grow the sport,” she asserts. 

The tournament’s business model rests on three core pillars: sponsorship, media rights, and hosting fees. While sponsorship carries the greatest financial weight, it’s the media that presents the toughest challenge and, paradoxically, the greatest opportunity. “Media is not straightforward,” Lutz explains. “If you’re not one of the must-have properties out there, like a FIFA World Cup, it’s a profound struggle. Broadcasters are selective; they want guaranteed audiences and familiar narratives. For women’s sport, that means we have to prove the value every single time, not just deliver it.”

It’s an unvarnished assessment, but one rooted in conviction, not cynicism. “After Covid, the landscape changed dramatically,” Lutz continues. “Budgets tightened, broadcast priorities shifted, and every property is fighting harder for the same share of attention and investment.” The paradox, she notes, is that the rise of women’s sport has intensified competition rather than eased it. “They’re all leveraging the same angle: a women-empowerment, purpose-led narrative,” she says. “But for us, that’s not positioning, it’s our very reason for being, it’s who we are.”

Despite these headwinds, Lutz remains bullish on the next wave of growth, particularly across Asia. China, she says, remains central to the Cup’s long-term ambitions. After years of uncertainty, the return of major tournaments to the mainland has reaffirmed its role as both a commercial anchor and a symbolic foothold for women’s tennis. “China is crucial,” she notes. “The appetite for women’s sport here is real, but it has to be cultivated through consistency, not just one-off events. It’s about rebuilding trust, presence, and audience over time.”

Beyond China, her focus is on deepening the sport’s reach across the region. “India is the next key market for me. Perhaps Thailand,” she adds. “India possesses a profound history in tennis, but there is definitely a latent market.” For Lutz, the opportunity lies in building regional ecosystems, connecting fans, federations, and sponsors under a shared vision of what women’s tennis can represent commercially and culturally.

The Economy of Belief

That very vision—regional expansion, media penetration, structural parity—requires more than conviction. It requires capital. And capital, in women’s sport, still flows primarily from those willing to invest before consensus arrives. The Billie Jean King Cup’s sponsor roster reflects precisely that calculus: brands that recognised strategic value while the market was still pricing it as goodwill.

When Gainbridge assumed title sponsorship in 2021, it did so not as an act of goodwill but as an exercise in strategic foresight. The fintech investment platform—part of the Group 1001 financial ecosystem—has built its brand on precision, longevity, and purpose-driven investment. Women’s sport, says Mike Nichols, the company’s Chief of Sponsorship Strategy and Activation, fits squarely within that logic. “We don’t enter partnerships for optics,” Nichols explains. “We enter because we see a chance to create structural change that has commercial meaning. The Billie Jean King Cup aligned perfectly with that; it was undervalued, under-capitalised, and ready for scale. We wanted to be the title partner that didn’t just write a check, but rewired the model for equality.”

The move re-engineered the Cup’s economics. “Because of Gainbridge, we’ve been able to pay equitable prize money,” confirms Lutz. “They’ve been instrumental in realising one of our core missions of equality as infrastructure, not ideology.” Nichols frames the partnership as a test case for value creation through conviction. “Parity isn’t charity, it’s sound business,” he says. “When you close the gap in one area, you increase competitiveness, fan engagement, and brand resonance across the board. We’re seeing that play out in real time. The audiences for women’s sport are younger, more global, and more digitally fluent. That’s where the future of sponsorship lives.”

For Mastercard, which formalised its engagement in June 2025, the partnership represents an extension of its long-standing investment in cultural connection through sport. “Our sponsorship model is completely connected to Mastercard’s brand purpose of connecting everyone to Priceless possibilities,” says Monica Biagiotti, Executive Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing and Sponsorships. “Passion is one of those possibilities.” Tennis, she notes, fits seamlessly into Mastercard’s global sponsorship architecture. “We already sponsor the Australian Open and Roland Garros,” she explains. “Adding the Billie Jean King Cup completes our presence in tennis, one of the fastest-growing passions among women.” The logic extends beyond sport. “80% of purchase decisions are made by women,” Biagiotti continues. “They’re our core audience, yet marketing still defaults to men. That’s a market inefficiency we intend to correct.”

Asia, particularly China, occupies a central position in that calculus. “It’s one of our highest-growth regions,” Biagiotti adds. “And what’s compelling here is that gender balance is no longer aspirational, it’s operational. It’s happening in real time.”

Also in the mix of backers: cult favourite e.l.f. Beauty, who became the exclusive skin and cosmetics partner of the Billie Jean King Cup in August 2024, aligning one of beauty’s most disruptive brands with the world’s largest annual women’s team sporting event. The partnership is built on a shared conviction that equality isn’t optional and that access and excellence can thrive together. “For over two decades, we’ve shown up in unexpected places to make beauty and empowerment accessible to every eye, lip, and face,” says Patrick O’Keefe, Chief Integrated Marketing Officer at e.l.f. Beauty. “Partnering with Billie and the Cup felt personal and purposeful. Together, we’re opening doors and proving that access and excellence can live side by side.”

Through this collaboration, e.l.f. will co-host advocacy events, create storytelling experiences (including through iHeart’s Women’s Audio Network), and design fan activations that celebrate the leadership and self-belief sport instils. “We see beauty and sport as expressions of confidence and community,” O’Keefe adds. “Whether through the Billie Jean King Cup, NWSL, Women’s Wrestling, NASCAR, or the Indy 500, we champion women who redefine what’s possible and prove that confidence is the most powerful form of beauty.”

The alignment also reflects e.l.f.’s broader governance agenda, from its Change the Board Game initiative to one of the most inclusive boards in beauty, translating purpose into performance. As O’Keefe notes, “Inclusivity isn’t charity, it’s strategy, and Billie has proven that. Women’s sports are rewriting culture, and we’re proud to be part of that story.”

Beyond the above partnerships, the Cup’s commercial architecture also extends across a growing network of Finals-focused partners that reflect both breadth and intent. Rolex continues its legacy of time precision; Hilton anchors hospitality across host cities; and adidas brings design and performance innovation to the court. At the heart of the tournament’s digital transformation is Microsoft, whose partnership has redefined how tennis is played, analysed, and experienced. Through its AI-powered Match Insights platform—built on Microsoft Azure and powered with Microsoft Copilot—players and coaches gain real-time performance data, transforming strategy mid-match. The collaboration has also deepened the Cup’s engagement with fans and media through new data storytelling and broadcast applications. More than a technology provider, Microsoft functions as an innovation partner, advancing equity, access, and global visibility for women’s sport.

What’s most encouraging is the calibre of companies now stepping forward. The presence of such blue-chip partners signals a maturing ecosystem, one where women’s sport is no longer an afterthought but a strategic priority. Their collective investment is paving the way for others to follow, proving that when commercial leadership meets cultural conviction, the result is not just sponsorship but systemic change. It’s a reminder that progress accelerates when the biggest players decide to play differently.

And as Paolini’s final ball lands and the arena erupts, that thesis unfolds in real time. From the corporate suites to the upper stands, from executives to first-time fans, everyone feels the same equation balance itself, the proof of progress meeting the power of belief. As Billie Jean King once said, “We were athletes who wanted to compete, and along the way we made history—determined to win, not just for ourselves, but for women everywhere.”

Read more about the Billie Jean King Cup and its revolutionary origins in partnership with Beyond the Boardroom here.