Canada's women's pro sports landscape transformed in 2024 with arrival of PWHL, NSL, WNBA

The Professional Women's Hockey League played a first season and started a second, the Northern Super League fired its engines for an all-Canadian women's soccer launch, and the WNBA announced its arrival in Canada.

Women's professional sports in Canada reached a critical mass in 2024.

"It was hard to believe in 2023 that we didn't have professional women's sports here," said PWHL senior vice-president of hockey operations and Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford.

The PWHL, with three Canadian and three U.S. teams, is a single entity and geographically centralized in central and eastern North America and backed by billionaire American sports magnate Mark Walter.

The Toronto Tempo joining the WNBA in 2026 — that league's 30th year — is backed by deep-pocketed Canadian sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum.

The six-team NSL starting in April, 2025, is a Canadian coast-to-coast venture of club owners buying into a league that is building its business from the ground up. Teams signed players and introduced club ownership and management in 2024.

It has sports heavyweights in its corner, including international soccer star Christine Sinclair and former CFL commissioner Mark Cohon.

"There's been probably a confluence of timing, and where we're at culturally is huge," said NSL co-founder Diana Matheson, a former Canadian women's soccer team player.

LISTEN l Looking back on a transformative year for women's sports: 

Women's pro sports finally being appreciated as a valuable brand and a growth market was at the core of its 2024 emergence.

Social justice influences post-pandemic, social media and streaming upending the traditional ways sport connects with fans, and data refuting the notion people don't watch women's games contributed to a new sports ecosystem in Canada.

"It's gone from concept and theory to reality," said Cheri Bradish, director of Future of Sport Lab and Sport Initiatives at Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Business Management.

Canadian Women and Sport conducted a poll and stated in a 2023 report that two out of three Canadians were fans of women's sport and, just as important for business, that fan base was diverse, educated, and affluent.

"It's been a popular sport to dunk on women's sports," said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves.