Football is finally starting to look like the industry I have always believed it could be. Not just a collection of leagues and fixtures, but a global attention machine that understands how to acquire fans, how to monetise them and where the next wave of growth is actually going to come from.

Two stories from this week capture that shift perfectly. One comes from North America, where MLS is about to make the biggest marketing bet in its history around the 2026 World Cup. The other comes from the Premier League, which has quietly locked in a huge uplift on its South American and Caribbean media rights. Threaded through both is a truth we cannot ignore. Women’s football is not a side project. It is part of the core economics of what comes next.

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MLS first. The league has approved its largest ever marketing campaign, built around the World Cup on home soil. Each of the 30 clubs is contributing roughly half a million to a million dollars into a central pot, pushing the combined spend into the mid eight figures before you even add local budgets teams will deploy in their own markets. This is not surface‑level hype. This is a league finally behaving like a subscription business. The strategy is clear in my mind. Millions of people will tune in for the World Cup who barely touch MLS today. The league wants to treat that spike in attention as a once‑in‑a‑generation acquisition window and it is prepared to invest accordingly.

They have brought in a top‑tier creative partner. Ogilvy has come in as creative agency of record, with work built social‑first and player‑led, designed to live where younger fans actually spend their time. The campaign platform, built around “The Call,” drops global and local faces into the same universe, Son Heung‑min, Diego Luna, Joseph Paintsil, LAFC co‑owner Magic Johnson, because MLS is trying to hard‑wire the link between “world‑class football” and “our local club down the road”. What I like most is that the clubs are not spectators in this. Some, like Chicago Fire and Houston Dynamo, are doubling their own marketing budgets on top of what they are paying into the central campaign. For once, everyone seems aligned on the idea that fandom is not a given. It is something you have to buy, nurture and keep.

On the other side of the equator, the Premier League is doing something very different but just as bold. It has extended its deal with ESPN in South America and the Caribbean through 2031 on a 25% uplift, taking the value of that package to circa £450 million. That single regional agreement feeds into a 2025–28 commercial and media cycle that now sits at about £12.25 billion in total, up 17% on the previous three‑year period. And most of that growth is not coming from Sky or TNT at home. The domestic UK deal has actually seen a drop of roughly 10% in per‑game value, even as the top‑line number grew because more matches were bundled into the packages.

What really makes my ears prick up is what sits alongside that number. The Premier League has begun formal conversations with the EFL about lifting the UK’s Saturday 3pm blackout rule from 2029. That rule is the only reason the league still withholds a chunk of its inventory from the domestic market. If it goes, every one of the 380 matches a season can be sold at home. The economics change overnight. You suddenly have more windows, more packages, more freedom to bring in new players without cannibalising your core partnerships. The ESPN deal in South America then looks less like a one‑off win and more like a rehearsal for how aggressively the league can price its next global cycle, including the renewal of its $450 million‑a‑year NBC partnership in the US.

This is what a mature global media business does when it knows its product is scarce. It locks in uplifts in football‑mad regions. It uses those deals to anchor its forward valuations. And it prepares the ground to finally uncap domestic value by challenging rules that belong to another era.

But the part of this moment that really hits me, sits in between those league‑level moves. It is what is happening in the media and investment layers around them, especially on the women’s side.

Footballco is my favourite example because it literally sits between the leagues and the fans. It owns Goal, Indivisa and a cluster of other football brands. After a reset year, it has bounced back to roughly £43–44 million of revenue in 2024 and is tracking into the £55–60 million range for 2025, with a stated ambition to comfortably surpass $100 million in annual revenue in the World Cup year. The detail that stops me in my tracks is where that growth is coming from in the US.

Juan Delgado has been very clear. In the US today, Footballco is generating more direct revenue from women’s soccer than from the men’s game. Their women’s platform, Indivisa, is expected to deliver close to $7 million on its own, driven by advertisers who used to sit safely in women’s lifestyle and fashion media. Cosmetics, skincare, apparel, they are following the audience into women’s football content because the engagement and purchase intent numbers are better than what they were getting elsewhere. Globally, Footballco is doubling down, expanding Indivisa into markets like Italy and positioning it as a central growth pillar rather than a CSR exercise.

That sits perfectly next to what MLS is trying to do. The league is spending eight figures to acquire fans in a market where the data already says those fans behave fluidly across men’s and women’s properties. They will watch the USWNT, NWSL, WSL, MLS and European men’s football on the same screens. If you ignore that, you are not just missing a social opportunity. You are leaving money on the table.

Ariel Investments Project Level fund, which hit a first close of $250 million this month, is dedicated solely to women’s sports. Mellody Hobson and her team are targeting significant stakes in women’s teams, leagues and infrastructure in the US and Europe. They are not packaging this as philanthropy. They are calling women’s sport “one of the most compelling, underappreciated growth opportunities in the global sports economy” and backing it with institutional money. They point to hard signals. NWSL club valuations more than doubling in a short window. New franchises trading at record levels. A commercial market where sponsors are fighting for limited inventory.

If I layer in the Deloitte women’s Football Money League, it only reinforces the point. Across the top 15 women’s clubs in Europe, combined revenue sits around €158 million, up roughly 35% year on year. Commercial partners account for about 72% of that total, with broadcast still structurally under‑monetised. Arsenal Women and Chelsea Women have both crossed the £20 million annual revenue mark for the first time, driven primarily by sponsors rather than TV money. That is not a side hustle. That is a growth curve.

So when I put the pieces together, this is the picture that emerges for me. At the top of the funnel, the 2026 World Cup will drop an unprecedented wave of attention into North American football. MLS is finally willing to spend real money to hold onto as much of that attention as possible. Around it, companies like Footballco are already monetising that same audience, and women’s football is at the front of their revenue story, not the fringe. On the other side of the world, the Premier League is pre‑selling the downstream demand, locking in uplifts in regions like South America and lining up a post‑blackout domestic model that will let it sell every minute of its product at home. And running through all of it is this quiet but undeniable shift. The women’s game is no longer just riding along. It is reshaping where brands spend, where publishers grow and where investors place their biggest new bets.

When I zoom out, this is the loop I see.