Five months after her final NWSL game — a send-off no one could have anticipated, with an Achilles’ tendon tear that robbed her of a “perfect ending” with the Seattle Reign — Megan Rapinoe is finally starting to stretch her legs again in the world of women’s sports.
“I was really intentional about having a little more space going into retirement, and then tearing my Achilles kind of blew that even more open. It was really easy to say no for a while, so I took advantage of that and had a pretty easy end of the year,” Rapinoe said earlier this week in New York.
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On Tuesday, I moderated a fireside chat with Megan Rapinoe at TN50, a summit on the business of women’s sports hosted by Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment and Axios in New York City. We talked a bit about her recovery – she stopped needing a walking boot a few months ago, but she’s still in the rehab process and going to physical therapy – but also about her future plans. Rapinoe joked that the stakes are not quite the same as when she was still a pro.
“Now I’m just a real fan girl. I love women’s sports so much,” she continued. She’s traveled to the Final Four — making another guest appearance on fiance Sue Bird’s telecast with Diana Taurasi — and the Reign’s home opener.
“Shed a couple of tears about not being out there (on the field),” she said, “but I’m also unwilling and unmotivated to do anything required to be out there. I’d like to show up on Sunday and be in my prime. I would love that, but that is not the case.”
Instead, Rapinoe has turned her post-retirement attention to embracing a new life as a fan, and her production company that she runs with Bird, A Touch More. “I’m just really excited that I’m going to use everything that I learned in my own career, and also the life skills and talents that I had off the field. I feel like it really bodes well for this next phase.”
The purpose of the panel in New York was to focus on her perspective on the business of women’s sports, and since she had just attended the NCAA Championship between Iowa and South Carolina, we started with her takeaways on the Caitlin Clark effect that has exploded interest in women’s basketball. Beyond Clark’s long-range shooting, and what Rapinoe called “an antidote to always talking about dunking,” was the big picture.
“Eighteen million people watched the final. That is more than just capturing a moment and more than just a flash in the pan,” she said. “It’s something different than everything I’ve been told about it for so long: ‘It’s not exciting.’ That’s obviously not the case.
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“Whether it’s the funding or VC money coming in, bigger valuations for NWSL clubs, seeing expansion in all the leagues, the PWHL just had the biggest attendance ever — not only the general public, but the business side of things, is all coming together. You need to get in now. This is not just an investment for a mission, or an investment because it’s the right thing. You can actually make a lot of money. And you should do it now, not tomorrow or the next day.”
But for Rapinoe, it didn’t start with the Caitlin Clark effect. She pointed to the larger foundation of how women’s sports captured a moment during the 2019 Women’s World Cup win, the 2020 WNBA season in the bubble, and this year’s NCAA finals.
“I thought a lot about the national team because it is such a solid foundation and a multi-generational, multi-decade foundation that our team was able to stand upon — and I was able to stand upon — in our fight for equal pay that made it possible to capture a moment,” she said. “Or Sue’s final, when she was in college, had 30,000 people at the game and had five million viewers. It’s been there! The WNBA has been around for 28 years, and really doesn’t get the credit as the legacy women’s sports league that all of us are really basing the other leagues off of.”
Rapinoe spoke about a 2021 article by Kate Fagan on the WNBA multiple times, which addressed the league’s resilience despite narratives on the quality of play. Fagan’s kicker is prescient: “Taurasi should have been the Jordan, but maybe, just like the league itself, she was ahead of her time. Maybe the Jordan is about to walk through the doors. And when that player does arrive, all the scales and models that say women’s basketball players get only this much—this much airtime, salary, marketing dollars, investment—will be blown to smithereens.”
Rapinoe stressed time and again on Tuesday that the history of what was built and how it was built, across the landscape of women’s sports, can’t be overlooked even as we celebrate the growth. Clark is standing on the shoulders of Bird and Taurasi and Maya Moore (Rapinoe joked she wasn’t only naming UConn players for the benefit of Bird), Lisa Leslie, and Sheryl Swoopes.
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“So I look at Caitlin and what she did, it’s just so much more than that. There’s a huge storyline around Dawn Staley and South Carolina, this incredible, undefeated season, and the reason it got talked about so much was because Caitlin was going absolutely bonkers. Knowing the foundation that they’re all standing on, and I think particularly in the last five or six years, since the bubble season, the work that the W did in solidifying who women’s basketball is: it’s very much Black women, it’s very much gay women, it’s a very inclusive and open space.”
That’s not to say celebrations — or even a victory lap or two — aren’t welcome.
“Being at the Final Four was incredible because everyone was just like, ‘We’re winning!” Rapinoe said to applause from the crowd at the Chelsea Factory. “Everybody felt it was what the game deserved and what fans of women’s sports really deserve.”
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While the wins are stacking up and money flows in, Rapinoe said there are still plenty of opportunities to make all this momentum stick and convert into something greater than just sustainability — the long-standing mantra of every women’s sports league.
Asked how to balance the potential of women’s sports with the moment we’re in, Rapinoe answered, “Building the business and infrastructure around the sport because it doesn’t really matter how good a player is or a team is or a moment is or a league is if you don’t have all of the necessary mechanisms.” She said she saw it firsthand when the 2015 World Cup win wasn’t properly harnessed.
Regarding infrastructure, she pointed to strong collective bargaining agreements (and players investing their time and energy to make them as strong as possible) to media rights deals, fan experience, and exploring what sports betting might open up for women’s sports beyond just the financial windfall. (“I always compare sports betting to cannabis,” Rapinoe joked. “Sports betting just showed up one day, and everybody knew how to do it, like, we know that purple strain!”)
Sports betting led her to another one of her favorite topics: educating fans on women’s sports, and figuring out how to grow the interest beyond narrow storylines on a star player or the best team.
“Media is crucial,” she said. “It’s all part of the growth of the sport. Having nuanced narratives out there, having debates and having critiques, and having people know the stories and all of that — at the end of the day, sports is an entertainment property. That’s what it’s here for. Of course, there are periods around a court or a field or whatever it may be, but the rest of it is for entertainment. How do we know these players? How do we interact with these players, whether it’s on social media or turning on ESPN or any other network? It’s really important to fill that out.”
Some fans are just there for the sports and the stats, but Rapinoe said there are also fans out there looking for entertainment and wanting to be part of a larger movement. Not that she has an extra $500 million lying around, but if she did, she’d have a pretty clear plan for it: investing heavily on women’s sports, whether it was ownership stakes, media and content, maybe sports betting though she acknowledged she’s still not that familiar with the space.
“I would also go heavy into the community mission aspect,” she said. “Sport always and forever has the ability to change the world and make the world a better place. Women’s sports are on steroids for that. That is a really important part and big differentiator from men’s sports that we should really focus on and begin to use as a core principle and the core pillar of the business.”
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With the amount of money flowing into the space, holding onto that concept could prove crucial to protect the soul of women’s sports, the very thing that made it special when there were fewer eyeballs, fewer dollars, but perhaps also fewer barriers to genuine connection across the community.
“The athletes are always at the core of the business — without them, nothing can happen,” Rapinoe said. “Certainly, they need support in other ways. With women’s athletes, you always have this unbelievable level of care for what they’re doing, care for the community, care for other teammates. It’s a really, genuinely inclusive place,” she said. “Women’s sports have always been a place where we show up for each other.”
And for Rapinoe, that wasn’t the only thing making them special.
“Everything in life happens in women’s sports, at all times, whether that’s trans rights, racial rights, equal pay, gender identity, whatever it is, it’s always happening in women’s sports. It gives players but it also gives the general public an outlet to make a difference, to be a part of the conversation, and to be a part of ultimately making the world a better place.”
(Photo: Elsa/Getty Images)
