What makes a great womenS sports city?
The easy, oft-cited answer comes down to a single word: “Vibes.”
It’s an overused word these days, but it suggests something intangible in addition to all the things that can be quantified: the number of pro teams in a city, the strength of NCAA programs, if a lower-division team has broken through in a big way. If there’s a women’s sports bar (or two, or even three!) in town; how available a team’s merch is, and how many folks you might spot on the morning commute of a game day wearing it.
It’s harder to quantify the game-day experience,no matter how many satisfaction surveys a team might run. It’s even more difficult to measure the cultural impact of women’s sports, the community they have built, beyond attendance numbers or social engagement percentages. Sometimes, you simply have to experience it first-hand, in the stands of the North End of Providence Park, or as the rafters nearly shake with the sold-out crowds at “Ballhalla.”
With so many of us here at The Athletic experiencing these environments and these cities on a regular basis, at home and on the road, as part of our coverage, we already knew how to begin answering that first question. A second one became more intriguing: in the time of such amazing growth and increasing attention, what is the best city for women’s sports?
We turned to our women’s sports writers to help turn a long list of over 30 cities into a short list of 15, then opened it up to our full staff to weigh in.We didn’t provide firm criteria on how folks should rank these cities one over the other, but we did provide some guidance, including a list of professional teams across the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, women’s rugby, women’s lacrosse, women’s volleyball and more. NCAA programs were noted as well, plus a few lower division teams that have broken through in a major way (we’re looking at you, Minnesota Aurora). And yes, we gave some wiggle room to a few metropolitan areas (or, in marketing speak, “markets”) by calling them cities during the voting process.
Our final top 10 – 11,technically,as two cities tied for the 10th spot (call it a best XI,if you’re a soccer fan) – ended up entirely American. Maybe that’s not a massive surprise considering the location of most of our staff, but that’s why we’ve turned to the likes of Hailey Salvian and caoimhe O’Neill to let us know what we missed about Toronto and London, respectively. Their columns will arrive later this week.
Meanwhile, we also want to know your top women’s sports cities. We have a poll running this week, with results on Friday. Our own staff was already pointing out cities that deserved further consideration, from Atlanta to Omaha to Denver to Vancouver to Cary, North Carolina. there is no shortage of candidates for this list.
We’re planning on making this list an annual event, and none of us will be surprised if there’s some significant movement heading into 2026, thanks to ongoing expansion across every single one of the pro leagues.But for now, the bay reigns supreme for 2025…
Table of Contents
(1) Bay Area
Don’t be surprised by the bay taking the top spot, despite the relatively recent additions of NWSL and WNBA franchises in the area.Sure, Bay FC have only been playing sence 2024 and the Golden State Valkyries just wrapped up their inaugural season, but the Bay has plenty of women’s sports history behind it.
Look back to the Bay Area CyberRays of the first women’s profes
(3) Seattle
The long-standing Cascadia rivalry between Seattle and Portland might get a new entry thanks to us, with Seattle juuuuust edging past Portland in our rankings to fill out the top three. Maybe it’s thanks to the addition of new PWHL expansion team Seattle Torrent,giving Seattle the first trifecta in our list of WNBA,NWSL and PWHL teams in town.
Seattle’s a town of women’s sports legends, with the Torrent bringing Hilary Knight in for the inaugural season, hoping to recreate the magic of legends like Sue Bird with the Storm and Rapinoe with the Reign.
Seattle also has not one, but two women’s sports bars in the area, with OG Rough & Tumble Pub now joined by Pitch the Baby. Fun fact: the owner of Rough & Tumble, along with a handful of Seattle Reign FC players, invested in USL W League team Salmon Bay FC, bringing pre-professional women’s soccer to the Seattle area.
It’s a virtuous cycle, and a sign that the people of Seattle are all in on investing in growing the women’s game in their own backyard.
(4) Portland
While voting, our staffers were clearly working through just how to define the “vibes” of what makes a women’s sports city so
(6) Los Angeles
On the opposite coast, Los Angeles started our next tier of results. While Bay was a clear front-runner, followed by the next four cities all closely grouped together, there was a pretty significant gap between New York and LA in our results.
Angel City FC games became an instant, star-studded hit when the team launched in 2022, and the Los Angeles Sparks have been a part of the WNBA since the very first year in 1997. LOVB is coming to LA, backed by original ACFC investor Alexis Ohanian. Add in historic NCAA programs like UCLA and USC, and there’s plenty of women’s sports to be found. Pulling up to an ACFC or Sparks game might have you running into celebrity super-fans like leslie Jones and investors like Natalie Portman or Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach.
Technically, it’s Pasadena, but if one city on this list can claim one of the most important historical sites, it’s LA and The Rose Bowl, where the U.S. women’s national team won the World Cup in 1999. The U.S. will have a chance to revisit that history in a couple of years, with the stadium hosting the final stages of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic soccer tournament.
(7) Boston
Boston is a city filled to the brim with history, and it’s no different when it comes to women’s sports.
Boston Legacy FC won’t start play until next season in the NWSL (with celebrity investors like NFL QB Caleb Williams and women’s college hoops
Kansas City
KC is another market with a single pro team, but anyone in the NWSL world knows all about CPKC Stadium, the first stadium solely dedicated to a NWSL team. The Current’s ownership have set the new standard when it comes to private investment, funding an $18 million training facility, then the majority of the $117 million to build CPKC Stadium. if you go to a Current game these days,you have at least a 50/50 chance of running into at least one cast member of “Ted Lasso,” as a bonus,perhaps at “The Dub,” the city’s first bar dedicated to women’s sports.
majority owners Angie and chris Long also had their sights set on WNBA expansion, though have missed out on recent rounds. They’ve used the stadium to host the USWNT,NCAA College Cup finals,women’s rugby and more,and KC’s T-Mobile Center will host the 2025 NCAA women’s volleyball championship.