The Business Case of African Women’s Football

Ghizlane Chebbak was named CAF Women’s Player of the Year in 2025. Asisat Oshoala has won the award five times. Rasheedat Ajibade plays at one of Spain’s biggest clubs. Thembi Kgatlana has represented South Africa at two Olympics. The talent produced by African women’s football is globally recognised, individually celebrated, and increasingly visible on the world’s biggest stages. What has not followed that visibility is commercial investment at anything close to a proportionate scale, and the gap between what African women’s football has achieved sportingly and what it has built commercially is the central problem the game on this continent has not yet seriously confronted.

The 2024 WAFCON saw a 40 percent increase in partnerships and revenues compared to the previous edition, with over 100 television channels broadcasting the tournament globally. That is genuine progress. But progress from a very low base is still a very low base, and one tournament cycle of improved numbers does not constitute a commercial ecosystem.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Global women’s elite sports revenues reached US$1.88 billion in 2024, nearly double the previous year, with women’s football leading at a projected US$820 million for 2025 which is  a 300 percent increase since 2021. Commercial income through sponsorships, partnerships, and merchandising accounts for 54 percent of that total, meaning brands are the engine driving the growth, not federations or broadcasters. Arsenal Women grew revenue by 138 percent year on year. Barcelona Women generated €13.4 million in 2022/23. The Women’s Super League saw commercial revenue represent 35 percent of total league income.

None of this growth is being proportionally captured by African women’s football. The talent forms on the continent and the value compounds somewhere else. Clubs like Mamelodi Sundowns in South Africa and AS FAR in Morocco represent genuine exceptions with structured, privately supported organisations operating within functioning commercial ecosystems. But Hasaacas Ladies of Ghana, Vihiga Queens of Kenya, and Simba Queens of Tanzania have competed at the highest level of African women’s football on budgets that serious private capital has never meaningfully touched. The players who come through those clubs and go on to generate commercial value for European clubs, broadcasters, and sponsors do not send that value back. There is no infrastructure for it to return through.

The Invisibility Is Structural

The pattern across the continent is consistent even where the specifics differ. Most women’s football clubs in Africa are underfunded extensions of men’s clubs, state-supported without commercial independence, or community-based organisations running on minimal resources. There is no Women’s Champions League equivalent with the commercial weight of UEFA’s competition. There is no centralised structure that aggregates the audience, packages broadcast rights, and distributes revenue across clubs in a way that creates financial stability at the base of the game.

Nigeria’s NWFL Premiership is the oldest women’s football league in Africa, founded in 1990. For the 2024/25 season, the only formally approved sponsorship for the entire league was a ₦200,000 goalkeeper award from a private foundation. December 2025 brought the most significant private sector commitment to women’s football in Nigeria’s history which was a ₦20 billion, ten-year investment deal with Toptier Sports Management but one deal in one country is the beginning of a shift, not the shift itself.

The Player Pipeline Compounds the Problem

African women’s footballers who reach the highest levels of the game overwhelmingly do so by leaving the continent. The route from African academy to professional contract runs through Europe or the United States, not through domestic leagues, and when players arrive at elite clubs abroad the commercial value they generate in broadcast audiences, jersey sales, and sponsorship associations stays there. Their home federations, home leagues, and home countries see almost none of it because the mechanisms to capture and redistribute that value do not exist.

This dynamic is not unique to women’s football on the continent, but it is more damaging here because the domestic league infrastructure is weaker and the margin for absorbing that commercial drain is smaller. Every Oshoala, every Ajibade, every Kgatlana who builds commercial value abroad is also demonstrating exactly what African women’s football could be worth commercially if the structures existed to retain and build on that value at home.

What Actually Needs to Change

CAF needs to treat the Women’s Champions League as a genuine commercial product, investing in broadcast quality, marketing, and prize money at a level that makes the competition worth building around. The men’s CAF Champions League generates attention and revenue that the women’s equivalent does not, and that gap is a policy choice rather than an audience reality. African federations need to establish minimum commercial standards for women’s league operations , like broadcast agreements, sponsorship floors, and image rights frameworks that protect players, rather than leaving individual clubs to negotiate from chronic positions of weakness. And private capital needs a clearer entry point through governance frameworks that give investors the confidence and transparency that structured investment requires.

Conclusion

The audience for African women’s football is real, it is growing, and it is increasingly visible to global brands that are actively looking for where women’s sports audiences will be built next. The commercial invisibility of African women’s football is a reflection of structural choices that can be changed. The infrastructure to convert that talent into commercial value is what is missing, and building it is now both possible and overdue.