Months before Oregonians learned that professional women’s basketball would be returning to Portland, seven-time WNBA All-Star Nneka Ogwumike made a prediction.

“I’m really very grateful for a city like Portland,” the Seattle Storm center told OPB in March 2024. “It deserves a team. I expect a team here.”

Ogwumike, sitting alongside six-time Olympic Gold Medalist Diana Tarausi, spoke to OPB during a watch party for the 2024 women’s NCAA tournament in Portland. The event was hosted in part by Portland’s famous women’s sports bar, The Sports Bra.

“I just feel like Portland, everyone in Portland, they are a ride or die,” Ogwumike, also a former MVP and Rookie of the Year, said. “I mean, they follow sports like there is a team here, and we need that in more places. We really, really do.”

Taurasi agreed.

“The one thing that I’ve noticed in the Northwest,” the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer said, “Basketball is in their blood.”

Ogwumike and Taurasi predicted that Portland’s grassroots support for women’s sports – including at the high school and college levels – would convince an investor to bring a WNBA team to the Rose City.

It would take less than a year for that prophecy to come true.

Enter the Bhathal siblings, Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal.

Through their investment firm, Raj Sports, the sister and brother have cemented their position as the lead investors in women’s sports in Portland. The pair bought Oregon’s NWSL team, the Portland Thorns, in January 2024.

Later that year, the Bhathals joined WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to announce that a WNBA expansion team would begin play in Portland in the 2026 season.

Oregon’s historic support for women athletes, paired with the growing cultural significance of the WNBA and NWSL, is colliding during a time when Portland leaders are desperate for an economic win.

The ongoing success of the Thorns and the excitement around the WNBA team, dubbed the Portland Fire, comes as the city struggles to define itself economically following the pandemic. The Bhathals are betting that women’s sports will continue to boom.

Women’s sports could become a crucial piece of the city’s reckoning with a post-pandemic economy. Still, both Portland and the women’s sports industry are experiencing very public growing pains.

Barriers to growing the game

Business activity around women’s sports is skyrocketing.

Professional leagues are expanding as attendance and viewership numbers hit new records.

In the last two years, revenue from women’s sports grew more than four times faster than revenue from men’s sports, according to research from consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The researchers predict that if barriers – such as access to viewing games on TV – continue to fall, women’s sports could create billions of dollars in value for rights holders.

But women’s sports still get a fraction of the investment and media attention as men’s sports overall.

On the college side, football and, to a lesser extent, men’s basketball help finance entire athletic departments. For example, at the University of Oregon in 2023, the athletic department brought in $150 million. Of that, nearly $80 million was from football.

Additionally, upcoming changes in how schools compensate college athletes could lead to cuts in women’s programs. Oregon’s big sports programs likely would preserve women’s teams, but the competition could dwindle.

In the professional leagues, men’s teams are often valued at more than $1 billion. The Portland Trail Blazers recently sold for around $4 billion. Women’s teams are still in the millions to $400 million range.

And most recently, revenue-sharing models in professional women’s leagues have led to contentious contract negotiations between players and team owners. That’s especially true in the WNBA, which is supposed to have a new contract in place before the season starts in May.

More than a ‘honeymoon’

The sun streamed down on Providence Park on Nov. 9th as more than 21,000 soccer fans flocked to the arena.

It was an unexpectedly warm fall day in Portland as the Thorns took on San Diego Wave FC in the NWSL quarterfinals.

The crowd erupted in cheers as the starting lineup took the field. The loudest ovation greeted Olivia Moultrie, who entered the league at age 15, making her the youngest player at the time to do so.

The Thorns would go on to defeat San Diego, but would end their season with a loss in the semifinals. The team would soon celebrate a different victory by signing the now 20-year-old Moultrie for at least the next few seasons.

“Looking towards the future, I feel like Portland gives me the opportunity to continue to grow into the player that I want to be long term,” Moultrie said in November when she announced her multi-year contract extension. “I feel like we are just set up in a place that, obviously, the city and the culture here it revolves around soccer.”

The Portland Thorns are often pointed to as an example of the state’s support of women athletes, according to Alexis Lee, president of business operations for the Thorns.

Yet, it hasn’t been a smooth path forward. In 2022, theformer owner of the Thorns relinquished the team under intense pressure following player allegations of abusive coaching throughout the league, including by a former coach of the Thorns.

Two Thorns executives were dismissed after an investigation found systemic misconduct in the NWSL.

The Thorns have since cleaned house, with new coaches and executives, including Lee, who arrived after the Bhathals took over. Lee says that throughout the ups and downs, Portlanders continue to support women athletes.

“They really show up for their sports, and then they really show up for women’s sports,” Lee, who was born and raised in Eugene and worked for the Trail Blazers for nearly a decade, said. “And if you look back at the history of the Thorns in particular, over the last 13 years, we’ve had record-breaking numbers.”

Portland consulting firm EcoNorthwest studied economic activity generated by Providence Park, where the Thorns and the men’s professional soccer team, the Timbers, play. Researchers estimate that in the year spanning Oct. 2023 to Sept. 2024, events at Providence Park generated around $34 million in spending at businesses around the arena.

It’s a welcome, if muted, bump in economic activity in neighborhoods like the Pearl District and Goose Hollow. But it’s consistent – Thorns games averaged more than 18,000 attendees last season.

“We punch way above our weight, and we consistently do it,” Lee said. “It’s not a flash in the pan, and there’s not a honeymoon period. We’re here to stay, and the community supports it.”

On the basketball side, the Portland Fire are already seeing fans putting money behind their support for a professional women’s team returning to the Moda Center.

By late October, the team announced it had received more than 15,000 season ticket deposits, with the team’s inaugural season still several months away.

Turning grassroots support into economic success

In July, leaders from across the women’s sports industry – including University of South Carolina women’s basketball head coach Dawn Staley, who has led the Gamecocks to three national titles – gathered at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton. The event, hosted by Nike and Raj Sports, was called “The Epicenter: Women’s Sports Summit Leadership Conference.”

Karina LeBlanc, former Thorns player and current executive for Raj Sports, told the room they were branding Portland “the Global Epicenter of Women’s Sports.”

LeBlanc also launched a podcast with the same title.

“We just saw [the summit] as an opportunity to make sure the world knew what we were doing,” LeBlanc told OPB. “To make the stamp of it, so that people understood – because while you have that limelight, while you have the platform, you have to make sure the world is understanding how great the city is.”

LeBlanc said the support for women athletes already exists in Oregon, rooted in the tradition of supporting high school and college programs alongside the high attendance at professional events.

LeBlanc points to her time as a player, where she often recounts walking onto the field in 2013 as the crowd at Providence Park cheered wildly.

That’s the foundation, the grassroots excitement and support that LeBlanc is feeding off of in her new role. Her job is to use the platform of two professional teams to elevate that message and show the world that Portland shows up for women, she said.

She hopes it will create a cascading effect of sports positively influencing both the state’s culture and economy.

“I’m actually excited about our next generation, because our next generation is gonna be inclusive because of what we’re building in Portland,” LeBlanc said. “They’re not just gonna think that sports are just for women, they’re gonna think sports are for all. And when you have the opportunity to feel that energy and see these athletes do it, that next generation starts to replicate what they see.”

LeBlanc acknowledges that the challenges are real.

Professional women’s sports are still a relatively young industry, with the difficulty of growing revenue while supporting athletes.

Also, women’s sporting events may attract more fans from the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized communities that are looking for a safe and inclusive environment.

“For so long, it’s been like copy and repeat on the men’s side,” LeBlanc said. “But we’ve figured out that we have to do things differently – and it’s not that we always get it right, but we’re always trying to reinvent that wheel.”

The potential catalyst for a decade of economic growth

Some of Oregon’s most prominent political and business leaders see the success of women’s sports as a symbol with the power to encourage the state’s economic recovery.

“I think the potential for women’s sports in Oregon is huge,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, said earlier this month. “My sense is in the summer of ‘26, we’re going to see folks in Oregon walk down Broadway on Saturday, and they may go to a basketball game, and then do it again on Sunday and go to a soccer game.”

The senior senator said Oregon has already realized some of its opportunities within sports, pointing to athletic wear companies like Nike, Adidas and others that have a large presence in the state.

In early December, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson told a room full of business and political leaders at the Oregon Leadership Summit that sports will be part of elevating Portland’s livability.

Wilson also acknowledged that the city has steep challenges, namely a persistent and worsening homelessness crisis.

“Restoring livability by taking responsibility for our most vulnerable isn’t just compassion, it’s also the key to unlocking Portland’s stifled prosperity,” Wilson said. “However, we’re all aware that unsheltered homelessness isn’t the only issue that we’re facing. We have national economic headwinds, federal chaos, tariffs and high interest rates.”

Unemployment in the state is outpacing the national average.

Employers have shed 25,000 jobs over the last year. The price of rent, utilities and groceries is going up. Wyden, Wilson and other leaders consider it a crossroads where Oregon must look at both how it got here and how it wants to chart the path forward.

Wilson said that the slow post-pandemic recovery has damaged Portland’s reputation, economy and harmed “our hearts.”

But nearing the end of his first year in office, Wilson argued that Portland has the foundation to turn challenges into a decade of prosperity.

The growth of women’s sports may have a modest impact on the economy, but leaders say the popularity of the soccer and basketball clubs are symbolically winning on behalf of the city and state.

Raj Sports has chosen to invest in two professional teams and is building a state-of-the-art training facility, despite Portland’s challenges recovering from the pandemic.

“We’ve already sparked our renaissance,” Wilson said at the Oregon Leadership Summit.

And although he was speaking on economic revival, he inadvertently invoked the name of the city’s nascent basketball team and nodded to its possible future as a leader of women’s sports.

“Now, all we have to do is turn that spark into a fire.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/15/oregon-economy-struggling-but-womens-sports-could-be-lifeline/