New York is an Ell of a town and a real powerhouse for women’s sport, as Kate Mason discovers during a trip to the Big Apple. Published June 11, 2026, this report highlights the growing influence of female athletics in a city brimming with confidence.
The Unlikely Icon: Ellie the Elephant
One of the key players at Brooklyn-based WNBA team NY Liberty never speaks publicly and has little in the way of basketball ability, yet is followed by a quarter of a million people. She is a seven-foot elephant called Ellie and she is, in fact, an icon. Watching her stomp through her mid-game show – her elephant power making the cameras shake whenever she landed from a particularly elaborate move – I realised I’d been grinning for five minutes straight. That’s despite the fact that this show shouldn’t really have been for me.
We Brits have a puritanical attitude to sports fandom, most of us brought up to understand that football is religion, not choice. Why would we need a half-time sing-song or a twerking elephant? The show is the players on the pitch. But if anywhere could persuade me to watch sport differently, it’s New York City.
New York’s Sporting Renaissance
New York is full of confidence right now. The New York Knicks have made the NBA Finals for the first time this millennium, new Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s combination of charm and practical purpose has elevated the needs of New Yorkers at home and on a global stage, and in six weeks’ time the World Cup final will be held in the shared home of its Giants and Jets.
Four years ago, before the 2022 World Cup, I spoke with football-loving women in Qatar about whether the men’s World Cup would help women’s sport there. Their response was a weary no. Ahead of the North American World Cup, controversies abound but in this area, something positive is brewing.
Voices from the Pitch
Jess Carter is an England international who plays centre-back for Gotham FC. She’s aware of where soccer sits in the hierarchy of US sports (around fifth, after American football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey) but is excited about people finding her sport as a result of the World Cup: ‘Some people who haven’t watched a soccer game will find it’s on all the time, so they might find themselves watching and I think that’s really cool. This is a huge sporting country.’
More importantly, she thinks it will have a positive impact on enlarging the potential fanbase for women’s domestic league the NWSL. Gotham play three games during the World Cup period and are the defending champions, ‘so that might bring some new fans in who thought, well we enjoyed the World Cup, let’s see what this team is about – it’s just round the corner’.
But most of the time, Jess is not that clued in to what the men are doing in the States ‘unless Messi’s playing’. Bec Allen, forward-guard for the Liberty, had no idea the men’s football World Cup is about to start in the States, though she was aware the women’s World Cup happens next year.
Women’s Sport Takes Centre Stage
And perhaps they’re right to be unbothered, because women’s sport is big news and nowhere more so than in New York. Having so long been the unadored poor sister, the main character stage is here. Investors are alive to the opportunity of accessing growing, engaged communities in an unsaturated market.
Stateside, expansion NWSL franchise Denver Summit FC has been awarded an infrastructure grant for a purpose-built women’s football stadium, on the back of the record crowds in the country, and in the UK Brighton have announced their plan to build Europe’s first purpose-built women’s ground.
In an AI age, people are desperate for community. Sport’s long been the best place for it and women’s sports spaces are only growing. It’s a no-brainer. With money comes opportunity.
Local Impact
Across New York and New Jersey, women’s sport is feeling a new sense of power. Sports bar owner Trisha Rowan has noticed women’s sport now gets requested on her screens all the time – ‘and if someone’s asking, I’ll put it on’ – which led her to start hosting Liberty watch parties at her bar, Kitty Sullivian’s. ‘They are packed out,’ she told me and, even better, ‘I’ve never seen so much oestrogen in here!’
Those in the ecosystem now trust that the future will finally allow female athletes to get their dues and be paid them. One of the habits of American sport I’ve found annoying from afar is the mid-match introduction of famous crowd members on the jumbotron. More pointless distraction!, says my puritanical British brain. But at the Liberty I saw it differently: here’s validation that people you admire love this stuff too. I smiled again and ducked out to buy an Ellie.
Kate’s New York trip was supported by NYC Tourism & Conventions, Langham Hotels, where room rates start from $790USD per night in June, and Delta Air Lines – who have London-New York returns from £588.
