As always, POST CREDITS airs on Bloomberg TV Tuesdays at 6pm ET & 10pm ET, and full episodes go live on our YouTube channel at 6pm ET on Wednesdays: youtube.com/@postcreditstv

This week's guest was Laura Correnti, founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, founder of the Business of Women's Sports Summit, co-founder of the iHeartWomen's Sports Network, and an owner of League One Volleyball's (LOVB) San Francisco Signal. Before any of that, she spent twenty years as a media buyer, and that turns out to be the most important line on the list.

Correnti said something before we taped that I opened the episode with: the moment is over. Read it cold and it sounds like a eulogy. She means the opposite. Women's sports no longer has to argue for attention. The argument now is about who collects the value that attention creates.

Her answer is that individuals have been beating institutions to it ever since social media cut out the middleman, and she has the numbers to back it up. Deep Blue runs a Women's Sports Index with Mondometrics, and its latest pull on the WNBA found players generating 8x the engagement of the league and 12x the engagement of their own teams. Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, between them, have roughly three times the league's Instagram following.

The signal she watches most closely comes from her own clients. Brands that used to open the conversation with league and team rights now open with a different question: what's my athlete strategy? She watched the same tip happen in the media business over the last two decades, and she knows what follows it.

If you're a CMO: if your women's sports plan starts with league and team rights and treats athletes as an add-on, reverse the order and see what the budget looks like.

A professional women's sports season gives an athlete fewer than 50 game nights a year. Correnti's question for every athlete she works with is what they're doing with the other 315.

The coverage math explains why the question matters. By the latest reports she cited, about 15% of sports coverage goes to women's sports, and only a sliver of that is the studio shows and talk programming that men's leagues take for granted. Regular pregame, halftime and postgame coverage around a women's league is still a recent addition. Two years ago there was no daily women's sports show in America at all, which is why she co-founded the iHeartWomen's Sports Network. Her description of the category back then was that women's sports were hard to find and hard to buy. Audio fixed the first problem because you can get a show in market overnight. iHeart's national radio syndication fixed the second because it delivered scale on day one.

The athletes filled the rest themselves, mostly out of necessity. On TikTok, female athletes are seeing two to three times the engagement of male athletes and posting about twice as much lifestyle content: tunnel fits, parenting, moving to a new city, food, get-ready-with-me videos. Correnti borrowed a line from Allyson Felix to explain it: women are great storytellers, which makes them great marketers. She added the part that's easy to forget. Plenty of these athletes held two or three jobs before the latest round of CBAs, so building a brand outside the league was never optional.

Correnti is careful to say she isn't an agent. Deep Blue works with athletes on commercial strategy, and one of them is Niamh Charles, the England defender who scored in the shootout that won the Lionesses a second straight Euro title and who just signed with Manchester City.

A UK brand came to the table with a renewal offer for Charles. Correnti didn't need to know the going rate for female athletes to know the number was low. She had something more useful: twenty years of knowing how brands value media. She pulled Charles's monthly views and set them against the WSL's publicly reported viewership, for the league's best game and for its average Sunday night broadcast. She also happened to know exactly what that brand pays for a 30-second spot in a WSL game.

The offer came in at a fraction of what the brand pays for a single spot. The answer was no deal.

The multiples she found are the best clip in the episode, and I'll let her give them to you. The point for everyone else is how she framed it. She describes her job as creating value, and she puts real math against it so the price stops being a matter of opinion.

If you're a CMO: the person across the table increasingly knows your rate card. Price your athlete deals against your own media buys before someone else does it for you.

Correnti got into team ownership because she treats a team as IP first: team X, which happens to play sport Y. She's openly competitive and wants a winning product on the court. She also wants a commercial strategy strong enough to feed money back into that product.

The San Francisco Signal let her start from scratch. The ownership group is led by Jes Wolfe, CEO of Rebel Girls, the Gen Z girls' media brand, so name, colors, uniforms, merch and community were treated as storytelling decisions from day one. The ownership group mixes former athletes, entrepreneurs, talent and executives, and she describes them as people who actually do the work behind the scenes. A league like LOVB has no legacy to protect, which means it can make different choices on purpose.

She sees the same thinking spreading across women's sports ownership: creators joining ownership groups, former athletes buying in, and new investment vehicles that make it easier for women to own a piece. The buy-in price is still far below men's sports. It's also going up quickly, and as she put it, yesterday's price isn't today's price.

Here's the original thought, and it comes from the thing Correnti told me keeps her up at night.

The rights deals are growing, and so is the fragmentation they cause. Picture a league whose championship peaks around a million viewers. Now spread that audience across five or six platforms: broadcast, cable, streaming, the league's own channels. Some leagues have helped by putting the same night on the same platform every week. Even so, fans who never built a viewing habit now have to search for the game. On the business side, it's worse. The league now has six rate cards, six production standards, and six different pregame, halftime and postgame packages, all chasing a buying market of maybe ten to twelve advertisers who have committed to the category.

Three weeks ago in this newsletter, with Shana Stephenson of the New York Liberty, I wrote that the WNBA has never been more distributed, with national rights through 2036 split across Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, USA Network and CBS. Correnti's point is what that costs.

Put it next to the engagement numbers above and the transfer of power becomes easy to see. The league is spreading its audience across more places. The athletes are concentrating theirs into one place. Caitlin Clark's audience lives on one handle and comes with one rate card and one person to call. A brand trying to reach women's sports fans can work through six media sellers, or it can call the athlete those fans already follow every day.

That's the pattern I keep coming back to on this show. When distribution spreads out, power collects wherever the audience is still in one place. In women's sports, that place is the athlete, so that's where prices are now being set.

It's also why Correnti said, without hesitating, that consolidation is coming. Her one word was “imminent.” The last 24 months brought leagues, athlete-owned media companies, and new brands into a market that wasn't built to absorb all of it. Her view of who survives is unglamorous and right: the companies with real back-end capability, meaning tech, data, sales, positioning and research. A niche community is valuable. Advertisers still have to buy reach and efficiency, and a property that can't deliver both becomes a nice-to-have, which is the first thing cut.

The next test arrives quickly. The Women's World Cup kicks off in Brazil on June 24, 2027, and brands are deciding next year's budgets right now. Correnti's frustration is that she hasn't seen a national campaign for the US women's national team yet, and she isn't waiting for one. She's building a World Cup plan for a prominent athlete right now, timed to the budget calendar instead of the tournament calendar, so her client is already a headline when she takes the field. She walked me through how the timing works, and it's the most practical part of the conversation. Go listen.

Web Summit Lisbon (November 9-12, Lisbon)