Number of Women's Sports Podcasts Growing

Sports podcasts hosted by men and about men’s teams and leagues still rule the Apple Podcasts and Spotify charts, but there’s been a recent explosion of sports podcasts by, for, and about women, and interest from media companies, listeners, and advertisers only continues to push the category forward.

According to Marketing Brew, the roster of women’s sports podcasts on the market has been quietly growing for the past several years. The Athletic first introduced Full Time with Meg Linehan, a women’s soccer podcast hosted by the veteran reporter, in 2020, the same year Hyslop and the team at The Gist got The Gist of It up and running. A year later, start-up consultancy and media platform Goals started its podcast, The Business Case for Women’s Sports. And ahead of the Women’s World Cup last summer, soccer stars Christen Press and Tobin Heath debuted their women’s soccer podcast, The Re—Cap Show.

Gayle Troberman

Around the time of the Paris Olympics this summer, there were even more shows that came into the fold. iHeartMedia teamed up with agency Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment to create the Women’s Sports Audio Network audio platform. Vox Media signed Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird’s A Touch More podcast to its network. Dear Media inked a deal with woman-hosted sports podcast Sunday Sports Club. Betches Media, which has introduced a sports vertical, is currently developing a vodcast to further build out its sports coverage, and is in talks with potential advertisers, Chief Content Officer Kate Ward told us.

“For years, whenever I’ve turned on pre-game or halftime reports, I have always been disappointed to see almost exclusively all-male roundtables and chat shows on my screens,” Ward wrote in an email. “It’s the reason we are psyched to be amplifying women’s voices in the space even further.”

iHeartMedia CMO Gayle Troberman said the programming team noticed increased interest in women’s sports content from both audiences and advertisers, prompting a rapid move into the space earlier this year. The company debuted its women’s sports network at Cannes, which includes the daily women’s sports podcast Good Game with Sarah Spain and women’s sports broadcast dispatches across 500 iHeart radio stations.

Audiences seem to like what they hear. The Gist of It, which covers both men’s and women’s sports, has grown its audience about 20% year over year without any paid marketing support since it started, Hyslop said, and more than 90% of its mainly millennial and Gen Z listener base identify as female or non-binary, she said.