$200 million in fresh outside capital, sponsorship revenue up 35 percent, merchandise sales up 50 percent, and a league still priced well below its closest comps. Fifty years after I helped build professional hockey’s first fan development shop, the PWHL is proving the same bet works, just with better financing.
Andy Abramson
$200 million in fresh capital. Sponsorship revenue up 35 percent. Merchandise sales up 50 percent. Ticket prices up more than 70 percent while the schedule only grew 30 percent. And a league that, by its own president’s account, still isn’t where it wants to be on sponsorship, merchandise or media. Fifty years before any of that showed up in a press release, I ran the version of this play with a fraction of the money and none of the language for it. The PWHL didn’t invent the model. It’s the first women’s league to get paid properly for running it. (Ironically, I was the Commissioner of the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Hockey League from 1978 to 1980)
I was sixteen when I helped build it. Ed Snider owned the Philadelphia Flyers and, with his business partner Aaron Siegel, an ice rink outside the city. Snider had a choice most owners still don’t make: keep writing checks to the youth hockey programs chasing him for sponsorship money, or build the future fan base himself. He chose to build it. Together with my first mentor, Sy Roseman, two hockey volunteer named Ken Gesner and Jim Shute, and Aaron, we created the Flyers’ Hockey Central, professional sports’ first fan development organization. Nobody else in the league was treating fan development as a discipline. We were.
That’s the frame I can’t unsee when I look at what’s happening in women’s hockey right now.
Nobody Paid for Fan Development Then. Everyone’s Paying for It Now.
Hockey Central ran thirty programs a year at its peak: the Pepsi Shootout, the Flyers Cup, Mites on Ice, player clinics with the Flyers and their alumni, learn-to-play programs run through the city of Philadelphia itself. None of it showed up on a balance sheet as revenue. It showed up two decades later, when the kids who skated at those clinics became the season-ticket base and the arena employees and, in a few cases, the executives running the sport.
That’s the bet Ed Snider made in 1976: buy the future fan before anyone else knows there’s a fan to buy.
$200 million, three seasons in. The PWHL’s first outside capital, from Kilmer Sports Ventures and Ilitch Companies, landed before the league finished building its media rights, sponsorship inventory or merchandise infrastructure. The money came in ahead of the product being finished.
That’s exactly the position the Professional Women’s Hockey League is in right now. In June 2026 the league secured its first outside investment, more than $100 million from Kilmer Sports Ventures and Ilitch Companies, one of the largest disclosed financings of a North American women’s sports property. Three seasons old. Eight teams. And the capital arrived before the commercial infrastructure around it was finished, which is precisely the point. Nobody invests $100 million in a business that’s already been priced correctly.
The Number Matters. The System Matters More.
Over the 2025-26 season, the PWHL drew roughly 1,116,500 spectators across 120 games, an average of 9,300 fans per game. Regular-season ticket prices rose more than 70 percent from the prior season while the schedule itself grew only 30 percent. Demand is outrunning supply, which is the single healthiest signal a young league can produce, and the one number private equity actually underwrites.
But the attendance line isn’t even the fastest-growing part of the business.
The PWHL’s sponsorship portfolio grew 35 percent year over year. E-commerce merchandise sales rose more than 50 percent. The league generated over 682 million social media impressions this season.
Off-ice growth outrunning on-ice growth by that margin tells you where the smart money thinks the real business lives.
Merchandise growing two and a half times faster than attendance means fans who can’t get a ticket, or don’t live near a team yet, are buying in anyway. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a national audience forming ahead of the local infrastructure that’s supposed to serve it, which is the exact inversion of how most leagues get built.
Still Priced Below the Comps
Here’s where the arbitrage argument stops being a talking point and starts being math. Sportico now puts the average WNBA franchise at $427 million, up 59 percent from 2025. The average NWSL franchise sits at $184 million, up 77 percent in eighteen months. Against those comps, a $100 million valuation for a PWHL franchise is almost certainly low, and the league’s own president has acknowledged as much.
That gap is the trade. Buy the league everyone agrees is undervalued relative to its two closest comps, before the next funding round resets the number.
PWHL president and CEO Stan Kasten put it plainly: the league is on “the ground floor of what is going to be a skyscraper.” Ground floor is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s also, not coincidentally, the exact phrase every early investor in every undervalued asset has used since the first stock ticker.
Kasten has said that when the league’s current media rights deals expire after the 2026-27 season, broadcasting will be the priority for whatever comes next. That’s the next repricing event. Everything sold into the league between now and then is being sold at a discount to what it will cost in two years.
Why Kilmer and Ilitch, Specifically
The two names behind that $200 million round aren’t generic capital. They’re buying access, not just upside.
Kilmer Sports Ventures’ entry is directionally consistent with a bet on women’s sports assets at an early valuation point, and it comes with a structural advantage from Kilmer’s existing relationships inside the Toronto market. That’s the Canadian side of the trade: a Toronto-connected investor buying into the league’s flagship market at the ground floor.
Ilitch Companies’ stake is more strategic than financial. The company’s Little Caesars Arena is hosting the PWHL’s new Detroit franchise, which gives Ilitch a direct operational line into the league’s expansion and aligns the PWHL’s success in Detroit with Ilitch’s own venue economics. Ilitch isn’t just buying equity. It’s buying a tenant it already controls the building for.
That’s the incentive-analysis tell in every one of these deals. Nobody writes a nine-figure check to a three-year-old league out of goodwill. Kilmer bought market access. Ilitch bought a landlord’s upside on its own arena. The capital and the operating logic arrived in the same transaction, which is exactly how the smart money has always bought into sports.
The Andy Test, Applied
I built my evaluation framework at The Upper Deck Company, where we put the product at the center of the fan experience instead of bolting a logo onto someone else’s moment. I still use it on every sponsorship I look at. A sponsorship passes when the sponsor’s actual product is inside the fan’s experience. It fails when the brand is just decorating it.
The PWHL’s current sponsor roster is a clean before-and-after of that test.
Passing. Aveeno signed on as the league’s official body care partner for the 2025-26 season, and rather than settle for a patch, built a full-game takeover and three in-game kiosks across the country featuring an immersive locker-room experience tied to athlete skin care. That’s product inside the experience: the fan encounters the actual thing Aveeno sells, in the room where the athletes actually use it.
Global Industrial’s deal is built the same way. As the league’s first-ever industrial supplies sponsor, the company outfits and brands the ice crews who maintain the surface fans are watching the game on. The product is in the building doing the job it’s paid to do, not sitting on a dasher board hoping someone notices.
Decorating. Bread Financial’s deal, signed as an inaugural partner, puts its logo on PWHL New York’s helmets and runs a branded “Save of the Game” broadcast segment. That’s a media buy dressed as a partnership.
MR.SUB’s arrangement with the Toronto Sceptres is the same shape at the local level: broadcast, in-arena and digital presence as the team’s official sub sponsor.
Neither is a bad deal for either brand. Neither is going to move a single fan’s relationship with the sport, either.
The interesting middle. Ally is the presenting sponsor of the PWHL’s first-ever nationally televised game in the U.S., part of a company that has built its women’s sports strategy around a 50/50 media equity pledge. That’s not product-in-experience in the Upper Deck sense, but it’s not decoration either. It’s a bet on distribution itself, on making sure the game is findable in the first place. Distribution is arguably the harder problem for a three-year-old league than skin care kiosks, so I’d grade it closer to a pass than a fail.
Centralizing the Sale Is the Real Structural Move
In February 2026, the PWHL named Oak View Group’s Global Partnerships division its exclusive sponsorship sales agency, its first league-wide agreement, covering all national, regional, and local inventory across the league’s eight teams.
That’s the move that actually matters, more than any single logo deal. A league that lets each team sell its own sponsorships gets whatever local energy and local mediocrity comes with it. A league that centralizes the sale gets one playbook, one pricing floor, and one entity accountable for making sure the deals that get signed actually build the brand instead of just billing it.
That’s Hockey Central’s organizing logic, moved from grassroots hockey to a professional sponsorship desk. Build the system once. Let every deal that follows run through it.
Systems Win. Moments Expire.
I’ve spent the past year building the infrastructure to watch stories like this one unfold in real time instead of reading about them six months late.
ComunicanoSports.com exists because nobody was aggregating the business of sports as it happened. DevLocker.dev exists because the APIs and data feeds tracking leagues like the PWHL were scattered across a hundred places nobody could find.
That’s not a tangent. It’s the same instinct that built Hockey Central: if nobody else is going to build the system, build it yourself.
The PWHL is approaching two million all-time fans, with attendance up 20 percent year over year, and just came off an Olympic cycle where 61 PWHL players competed at Milano Cortina and brought home 41 medals between them, including a Team USA overtime gold over Canada. That’s a league whose product is already outperforming its infrastructure. Kilmer and Ilitch didn’t put $100 million into a marketing story. They put it into a supply problem: too much demand, not enough system to monetize it yet.
The sponsors making the Andy Test’s honor roll, Aveeno and Global Industrial, are the ones building for the version of the PWHL that exists in five years. The ones putting a patch on a jersey and calling it partnership are buying a moment in a league that’s actively becoming a system. Moments expire. Systems compound. Which kind of deal a brand signs today is the only forecast that actually matters.
Which of these sponsors will still be on the sheet when the PWHL signs its next media rights deal, and which ones will have quietly let the option lapse once the price catches up to the value?