When Alexis Ohanian first announced his plans to invest in women’s sports, critics mocked his decision, with some telling him, “No one watches women’s sports. You’re gonna lose all your money.” But the Reddit co-founder saved screenshots of their comments and moved ahead with his investment in Angel City FC, a women’s football club in Los Angeles. He later invested in Chelsea Women and launched Athlos, a women’s track and field competition. Years after those early doubts, Ohanian is still building, and he has a message for those who once questioned his decision.

“Women’s sport is not charity…. The irony is [the women athletes] desperately want it treated like a business,” Alexis Ohanian shared in a post on X on October 11. Along with the statement, the Athlos founder also shared his recent interview with Charlie Stebbings on The Business of Sport podcast, where he discussed the future of women’s sports and why the industry needs to be treated as a business.

One of the biggest challenges for women’s sports, especially in football, is turning the excitement around major tournaments into lasting support for domestic leagues. Stebbings pointed out that men’s football has been built over generations, with supporters travelling long distances and turning up for league games even on cold, wet Tuesday nights. Women’s football, he argued, needs the right structures to build that same habit among supporters. But he also questioned whether copying the men’s game is the right way to get there.

“If men’s football was designed today, not 160 years ago, it would look different,” Stebbings said. Ohanian agreed, stressing the importance of what he called “first principles thinking”. Rather than treating men’s football as the blueprint for success, he believes clubs need to understand what makes the women’s game distinct and build around its own audience.

He pointed to the United States, where women’s football has developed a strong identity through the success of stars such as Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain. For many American fans, the women’s game has its own heroes and history, rather than being judged against men’s football. Ohanian said that mindset influenced his interest in the sport in 2019. He could look at a player such as Alex Morgan and appreciate her as a star in her own right, without automatically comparing her with a male footballer.

To explain the problem with such comparisons, he turned to Formula 1 and Formula E. “They’re just different vehicles,” Ohanian said. His point was simple: Formula E does not need to become Formula 1 to attract fans, and women’s football should not have to imitate the men’s game to prove its value. The difference, he argued, extends beyond the pitch to the matchday experience. Drawing on his time with Angel City FC in Los Angeles, Ohanian described crowds that included people from a range of backgrounds, with families forming a notable part of the audience.

“It’s just a different energy,” he said, explaining how women’s matches can offer families an opportunity to enjoy elite competition in a more relaxed atmosphere. He also pointed to experiences such as a bottomless brunch offering at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, designed to attract groups of young women who want to socialise while watching top-level football.

For Ohanian, understanding these audiences is part of building a successful business. Clubs need to give fans reasons to attend, create experiences they want to return to and find commercial opportunities that suit the product. 

“The last thing they want is charity,” Ohanian said during the interview. “If you’re not good enough, no matter how many followers you have, at some point you’re not playing anymore,” he said. Ohanian then contrasted that competitive reality with the way some people approach the business of women’s sports.

“And ironically, on the sort of business side of the house, folks were not playing these zero-sum types of games,” he said, arguing that decision-makers have not always applied the same competitive mindset to their own business decisions. Instead of examining what makes women’s sports attractive and how to build on it, some have tried to apply the men’s model to the women’s game. But there are still challenges.

Women’s sports need to grow their audiences, attract sponsors and build sustainable revenue. But Ohanian believes the answer is not to copy men’s sports or judge women’s competitions by the same history and expectations. His investments pretty much show he is putting that idea into practice with rising revenues offering signs of commercial growth.

Ohanian’s investments in Women’s Sports begin to show results

Ohanian helped establish Angel City FC in Los Angeles in 2020, with the team beginning play in 2022. In 2024, the club was valued at a reported $250 million during its takeover by Bob Iger and Willow Bay. The valuation marked a major rise in the club’s reported worth and suggested that Ohanian’s early bet on women’s football was gaining commercial traction. 

In 2025, Ohanian also bought a minority stake in Chelsea Women, reportedly around 8% to 10%. Reports placed the club’s valuation at approximately £245 million following the investment.

His track and field venture, Athlos, offers another example of his strategy. In October 2025, Ohanian said the competition was on track to generate millions of dollars in revenue, three to four times its revenue the previous year. However, he also acknowledged that the business had yet to become profitable, saying the goal was to build something sustainable for the long term.

Ohanian is looking to take Athlos beyond its original New York event and turn it into a global track and field league. In 2026, Athlos held its first international meet in London, marking its expansion beyond the United States. Ohanian has said he wants to build a circuit of races in major cities, with a target of at least six events by 2036.