In recent years, women’s soccer has emerged as a rapidly expanding segment of the global sports economy. Elite-level revenues are projected to exceed US$3Bn by 2026, representing more than a three-fold increase since 2022, with asset valuations of US$184M.

However, as capital and commercial attention concentrate at the top of the pyramid, grassroots girls’ soccer continues to rely heavily on fragmented, short-term philanthropic funding, despite the role it plays in developing human capital, supporting health and education outcomes, and strengthening community participation. It is also an area rich with economic possibilities, if you know how and where to see them.

This portfolio of insights was written to encourage different ways of seeing grassroots girls’ soccer from an investment perspective. It has been written with two audiences in mind:

1. community sports organizations running grassroots soccer clubs who want to understand how to appeal to various non-grant funding sources (eg. Investors); and
2. funders with the power and relationships to bring in new sources of capital and strengthen the wider ecosystem around grassroots sports. We have tried to explain financial terms throughout, and there is a glossary at the end of the document.

The portfolio treats finance as a system of power and organizes investment opportunities by six sources of capital: community and household wealth, local commercial capital, corporate and CSR (corporate social responsibility) capital, philanthropic and women’s funds, impact and diaspora capital, and public and institutional capital. It begins with a set of practical framing questions: where does the capital come from, how is it typically deployed and which structural constraints shape its use within grassroots girls’ soccer today?

Each idea was developed as a financial intervention rather than a program idea, with attention to where and under what conditions it is viable and what safeguarding considerations apply.

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