Three models for the future of women’s pro leagues

Over the past few years, fans have seen an astronomical growth of women’s sports on every front: salaries, sponsorships, and overall representation. One particularly interesting area of growth in women’s sports is the rise of upstart leagues. These leagues are newly created sports organizations that attempt to establish themselves in markets with either preexisting leagues or traditional structures. They’re breaking through, so we’re breaking down three of them to understand their purposes, benefits and drawbacks and predict their sustainability and future.

What is Unrivaled?

Unrivaled is a 3v3 basketball league founded by WNBA stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart in 2025. It was designed to give players a domestic winter playing option and keep them from going overseas (which famously resulted in a very distressing situation for a WNBA star a few years ago).

Unrivaled’s structural model is a short, centralized offseason league for elite players. Its calendar is during the WNBA offseason and athletes play in a centralized hub (Miami) with a little bit of travel built in. The league is home to roughly 30-40 players across a handful of teams, and athletes receive equity stakes in the league, an extreme perk for players who are constantly battling for fair compensation in their primary league.

Unrivaled has continually filled arenas, giving WNBA players more leverage in their latest CBA negotiations

What is League One Volleyball?

League One Volleyball, known more familiarly as LOVB, is a professional volleyball league that launched in 2025 — sort of. Like Unrivaled, it aims to provide athletes with more opportunities to get paid to play their sport; everything else, however, is pretty different.

LOVB’s primary purpose is to create a full ecosystem of professional volleyball, from youth clubs all the way to pro teams. To do this, the league has activated over 24,000+ players nationally with integrated development, linking youth teams to pro teams. It technically began doing this in 2020 and is hoping to also solve the problem of athletes needing to go overseas to play professionally. The league is home to city based youth and pro teams, in places like Atlanta, Austin and Houston.

What is Athletes Unlimited?

Athletes Unlimited is an experimental, player-centric league that hosts basketball, volleyball and softball associations. Like the aforementioned leagues, Athletes Unlimited is hoping to give athletes more opportunities to play professionally. The big difference with this league, however, is that it’s organized around players rather than teams. The league is centralized but contains rotating teams that shuffle weekly, and players earn individual leaderboard points for performance, wins and MVP votes.

Historically, Athletes Unlimited has been tour-based or played at single sites for their seasons, which last about 4-5 weeks. But AU is now experimenting with a more traditional structure, and AU Softball is officially shifting to city-based teams.

Unrivaled — the pros and cons

Unrivaled’s success is unquestionable. It’s got a strong media footprint and high viewership numbers, and its touring events worked in its favor this season (they played regular season games in Philadelphia and the championships in New York). Unrivaled has demonstrated that a quick, easy and reliable pathway to success is by building off of preexisting pro leagues and their star athletes.

Where Unrivaled could suffer, however, is because of that exact same link to the WNBA. It’s forever the complementary league and will always be the WNBA’s sidekick. Additionally, its viewership numbers and general enthusiasm around the league could wane if star players get hurt or choose not to play. Because it’s based at a single site, fans don’t have geographical allegiances to any team, and are therefore watching for their favorite stars more than anything else.

League One has had enough early success to free their teams from centralized league control, and expand the league by four new teams

LOVB — the pros and cons

LOVB has also experienced undeniable success in its first few seasons, and has pretty much established itself as the top US league for professional volleyball. It’s found success in building off the deep volleyball infrastructure that already exists in the US, especially by activating youth networks and connecting them directly to professional opportunities.

This pipeline, however, also brings a slow growth to the league. Most professional sports leagues start at the professional level and build in youth leagues and academies afterwards. By moving in the opposite direction, LOVB is guaranteeing thorough talent in its athletes, but the process to turn them professional will take much longer.

Athletes Unlimited — the pros and cons

Athletes Unlimited benefits from being the most unique of these upstart leagues. Its player-based structure also allows athletes to prioritize their own development and compensation, and more storylines emerge around individual athletes in this league.

Athletes Unlimited Softball opened their inaugural season with Golden Draft Tickets to celebrate the acquisition of elite college talent.

The experimental nature of the league can, however, also sometimes lead to confusion and frequent rule-changing. It’s also harder for fans to follow because it’s based on the individual and not teams. Additionally, it is competing to be a main league, and while it can establish itself as such in softball, it is a few steps behind in basketball and volleyball.